Wednesday with Pascal: Empathizing Ourselves to Death?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat wishes everyone a Happy Liberation Day! He has decided to return to the topic of America’s decline and fall, because investigating that topic is less dispiriting than following the news.} 

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” (Elon Musk)

They’re on to us.

Elon Musk and his Muskrats, while poking around in the innards of the US government, have identified our weakness, a bug that has been undermining Western civilization for centuries: we care what other people think and how other people feel. Overwhelmed by compassion, we are all “bleeding heart liberals” now; no matter how often we are reminded that facts don’t care about our feelings, we persist in taking our precious feelings, and the feelings of others, seriously. We have met the enemy, and it is Empathy.

You don’t have to take Elon Musk’s word for it. You could consult Dr. Gad Saad, who has explained that our culture has allowed “domains that should be reserved for the intellect [to be] hijacked by feelings.” ¹ You could be guided by Dr. Jordan Peterson’s insight that “Reflexive empathy is not a virtue. It's instinctual pity. That is by no means the same thing. Complex problems require vision, thought and strategy for their solution.” Or you could read an entire book, Against Empathy, by noted psychologist and cognitive scientist Paul Bloom, who makes his case while navigating a minefield of caveats and qualifications:

Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those with whom we do not or cannot empathize.  Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. It is shortsighted, motivating actions that might make things better in the short term but lead to tragic results in the future. It is innumerate, favoring the one over the many. It can spark violence; our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.

Stupid empathy! Even so, Bloom acknowledges:

Empathy can be an immense source of pleasure. Most obviously, we feel joy at the joy of others. Empathy amplifies the pleasures of friendship and community, of sports and games, and of sex and romance. And it’s not just empathy for positive feelings that engages us. There is a fascination we have with seeing the world through the eyes of another, even when the other is suffering. Most of us are intensely curious about the lives of other people and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be engaging and transformative.

In short, says Bloom, “The concern about empathy is not that its consequences are always bad. It’s that its negatives outweigh its positives—and that there are better alternatives. Our emotional nature has been oversold,” he asserts. “We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them, to think through issues, including moral issues, and to come to conclusions that can surprise us. This is what makes us distinctively human, and it gives us the potential to be better to one another, to create a world with less suffering and more flourishing and happiness.

The proper relationship of head and heart has long been a matter of controversy. Plato, like Bloom and Musk, thought that the heart (“passions”) ought to be ruled, steered, and reined in by the head (“reason”). David Hume, on the other hand, observed that passions were in control: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” More recently, Marsha Linehan, the creator of a therapeutic process known as “Dialectical Behavioral Therapy,” promotes a partnership of head and heart that emphasizes what she calls “Wise Mind,” “a state of balanced decision-making that integrates both emotional and rational thinking, leading to actions aligned with values and goals.”  ²

Before we damn the flood of empathy that, according to Elon Musk, threatens to drown us, perhaps we should consider the contrary viewpoint of Dr. Iain McGilchrist, an eminent neuroscientist who claims that western civilization is at risk not from empathy but from a surfeit of “left-brain thinking” which promotes logical, rational, analytical, systematic, calculating, impersonal, instrumental, and utilitarian approaches to the world. “Right-brain thinking,” by contrast, while not disdainful of logic, also incorporates intuition, creativity, imagination, paradox, improvisation, and emotion, all of which the modern West, says McGilchrist, has devalued:

The left hemisphere world is characterized by what is familiar and fully expressible in language; the right hemisphere is more open to and attentive towards whatever is ‘other’ and can be only indirectly expressed. The left hemisphere is less capable of Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’: it is thus relatively incapable of the tentative reaching out towards what lies beyond what we think we already know.

Where the left hemisphere sees things in isolation, the right hemisphere sees processes that are relational and in which both parties are inevitably changed. It is alert to the importance of context, exemplified by the nature of music in which the individual notes only become what they are by their being in relation to all the others. It sees that decontextualization and explicitness destroy the nature of whatever lies in a web of interconnectedness.

“Relationality,” of course, both requires and fosters empathy:

The right hemisphere sees that our understanding has to be participatory, and that the soul and body are not opposed but discernibly different aspects of one reality. It is better at holding together apparently conflicting positions, whereas, according to the left hemisphere, nothing can be separate and connected, precisely measurable and intrinsically imprecise, immanent and transcendent at the same time. Indeed, the right hemisphere is less likely to ignore or to simply not see whatever does not fit the paradigm it already holds.

Further, the right hemisphere’s understanding of knowledge and belief is experiential, not a simple matter of information in the abstract or acquiescing in dogma. It helps us see that ‘belief’ is a matter of dispositions, not propositions, and of unconcealing, not correctness. The right hemisphere understands metaphor, myth, narrative, drama, music and poetry, all of which are commonly hard to understand once there is right hemisphere damage. The richness of these implicit paths to knowledge, which also include ritual, is intrinsic to a spiritual understanding.

Finally, the right hemisphere is less ‘will-ful’ than the left hemisphere, and therefore more open to relinquishing control. It is the substrate of the mature self as opposed to the immature ego. It can understand that suffering can be generative. It can understand the valor in vulnerability, and the dark side of what we think is merely good. None of this makes sense to the reductive left-brain materialist.

There you have it: western civilization has been undermined both by left-wing reliance on left-brain instrumental reason with its urge to control, and by Liberalism’s pandering to the right brain’s disproportionate empathy and its yearning for connection. The one thing our civilization’s critics agree on is that Modernity has taken the wrong path, whether via the right brain or the left brain; we are, perhaps, narcissists hamstrung by our empathy.

Let’s hope we can locate our Wise Mind sometime soon.

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Elon Musk quotes are from a recent interview he did with Joe Rogan, who apparently passes for Socrates in our podcast culture. Paul Bloom quotes are from Against Empathy. Iain McGilchrist quotes are from Moving on - by Iain McGilchrist - The Matter with Things.

¹ Gad Saad - Wikipedia

² Marsha M. Linehan - Wikipedia

Comments

[Jack Shifflett]

Rev. Markle: I appreciate your response. I am sorry to have implied that either I or Paul Bloom agrees with Elon Musk. My original intent was to mercilessly mock Musk for his whole "empathy is ruining us" position, but then I remembered Paul Bloom and decided to write a more balanced piece. Bloom's book is thoughtful and interesting; the title ("Against Empathy") overstates his case. In any case, Musk is an idiot, albeit one with lots of money and influence, and a cretin; I did not mean to suggest otherwise.

[Ann Markle]

Well, I had to look up Paul Bloom, and he is, as you say, "noted." However, anyone who agrees with Elon Musk is questionable, at best, and I would posit that our "wise mind" lives in the same place in our brain that our "spiritual mind" lives. So I doubt that Bloom hasn't found his, and since he denies that part (spiritual), he has little chance of ever being truly wise.