Empathy Fatigue, or Why Your Way of Caring Isn't Working
Empathy is doing the wrong work in our moral arguments around COVID
With the more recent variant of COVID, there’s been what seems like a cascade of karmic-like instances, where vocal proponents against vaccines have become sick and died. As a Christian, it’s easy for a recognition of the irony of these stories to become an occasion for Schaedenfreude, that most delicious and nasty of emotions in which I not only recognize the downfall of another, but downright delight in it. This is, I take it, what’s so hazardous about hate-watching shows, but that’s for another time.
Over the weekend, the leader of an anti-mask movement in San Angelo, TX, about two and a half hours from me, died from COVID after an agonizing three weeks in the hospital. He left behind his wife and four children, the last one who will be born next month. As a father and a husband, this is a nightmare scenario for me, and as a Christian, an occasion for grief. Each life that this takes is more than a cartoon cut-out, and Caleb Wallace is no exception.
But Caleb’s story highlights an important dimension in the ongoing struggle around masking and vaccine advocacy: the role of empathy, or more specifically, what empathy does and doesn’t do.
Empathy, as described by moral philosophers, has to do with the capacity to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes”, the ability to not just aid someone, but to substitute one’s own life imaginatively and emotionally in their circumstance. The longer pandemic endures, the less empathy we have for those whose opinions and actions we find distasteful or dangerous, in part because our ability to enter into those shoes emotionally becomes worn down.
It’s possibly to simply bypass emotional identification altogether: one could adopt a purely rational perspective in which it makes sense to persuade the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, if not for their own good, then for the sake of ourselves and those I hold dear.
But while advocacy for myself is one motive that keeps us in the conversations, it is ultimately a mode which leads us each to consider only our own good, and most moral issues (pandemics as extreme examples) don’t really work that way: our good is usually always bound up with others, like it or not. And so, absent some kind of engagement in the shoes of another, moral debates become matters of brute rhetorical force.
But even if we rightly believe that public arguments have to be done through more than simply rational brute force, I think, we get exhausted trying to be emphathetic because we because we misunderstand what empathy is and how it guides us. In his contrarian title, Against Empathy, Paul Bloom contends (rightly) that there are two forms of empathy which we frequently assume happen together: emotional empathy and imaginative empathy. In the first, we feel as we think another would feel, caught up in their grief or anger, and in the second, we intellectually consider the situation of another.
What I want to suggest is something like this: when the latter (intellectual empathy) goes astray—when we stop trying to understand the particulars which might contribute to the reasoning of another—we still try to muscle on on sheer feeling (emotional empathy), and that is doomed to fail.
So, let’s return to Caleb Wallace again here. In a city council meeting, Wallace is reported to have put his position in this way:
“My health has nothing to do with you. As harsh as that sounds, but our constitutional, fundamental rights protect that. Nothing else.” Wallace said, according to the publication. “I’m sorry if that comes off as blunt and that I don’t care. I do care. I care more about freedom than I do for your personal health.
Wallace’s declaration of his reasoning around all things COVID is pretty blunt, but it’s also a good example of how intellectual empathy creates the frame for emotional empathy: we can care about something to the degree that we are invested in them and understand them. We care about our own children not just because we have feelings toward them, but because we know them, understand them, know their voices, and their well-being and lives are taken up into my ongoing navigation of the world.
But the opposite, I think, is true: when the intellectual framework for how I see my relation to another person is that of constitutional co-inhabitants, that creates a very dessicated way to relate to others, and thus creates a situation where I’m not interested in emphathizing emotionally in their state at all. It’s hard to feel anything about a person if all we have is a rule connecting us.
The “empathy burnout” that many of us (myself included) are feeling toward all things pandemic is due, I think, in part to having confused these two kinds of empathy: I’ve been asking emotional identification to do a lot of work long after I quit empathizing intellectually. The feeling of “running on fumes” is exactly right: emotions are best characterized as “construals of concern”, prompted by things which I care about, and expecting them run even after I no longer intellectually am concerned about something is asking a bit much.
In this case, if we are only able to see opponents in the COVID debates as co-sharers of a procedural political system, and don’t have any actual occasions in which we have overlapping lives with them, then we shouldn’t be surprised that our emotional empathy is running out, and that schaedenfreude is on the rise. It’s going to get really nasty on that front before it’s all done. Christians, however, have a different way to think about our pre-political ways of relation, but it’s not the well-trodden imago dei arguments, which I think still only do the formal kind of work that Wallace’s political imagination does: saying another person is created in the image of God is intellectually similar to saying someone is a citizen with me, and generates about as much emotional connection.
The key, I think, is beginning with the assumption that there is something other than draws humans together than political participation: that we already share our lives in real and ongoing ways. We shop at the same stores, send our kids to the same school system, walk the same broken sidewalks, stress about the same groceries, want sleep at night, want what is good for our children, want to be able to pay our bills and sleep in a bed unharmed.
By beginning our intellectual empathy here—not with how we feel about them, but by recognizing the ways in which we share lives—we have a better frame to begin listening, reasoning, and then, feeling. We are, as I’m arguing in a forthcoming book, embedded together in creation by God’s providence, because it is through these natural and intertwined connection that God wants to draw all things of the world into the community of the church.
In the case of Wallace, how much difference would it have made, in other words, to argue not on the basis of constitutionality, but on the basis of our kids being in the same school, or not on the basis of a political philosophy but on the basis of shared activities that we can all enjoy once COVID recedes? When we imagine our relation to another person in procedural ways, we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s nothing for emotional empathy to work with: it’s hard to care about a fellow cog in the machine.