Empathy on Empty: A Fourth of July Meditation

What Is the Fourth of July to Total Strangers?

Continuing engagements with what empathy means for our moral life.

Empathy Fatigue: Three Ways Forward

The very first edition that I did here was on empathy fatigue. It was about a year into COVID, and it was far enough into that brave new world that mistakes of novelty no longer cut it. By late 2020, the world was beginning to develop not only a clear enough idea of what this virus was, but also a clear enough idea of basic immunology to institute basic protections. Many would die.

I’d like to say that our compassion is endless, and that, in feeling compassion for a senseless death, it’s somehow related to being empathetic, to being able to get inside their shoes. But everyone has their limits, and this story was where I began to believe that if we’re waiting on empathy to happen, compassion never occurs. It’s impossible to make blanket judgments about the millions of deaths which issued forth from COVID: the virus was merciless, relentless, taking up the world in its maw. And suffering calls for our compassion—and we are poorer for not being compassionate on the suffering. But perhaps empathy is not part of that picture.

Check out the original story. The way that the story is framed invites us to consider two kinds of empathy, one to reject and one to embrace:

1: Empathy as Enemy

From San Angelo, just south of here, a visceral case of a world without empathy emerged: a husband, father, and leader of mask protests, died of COVID. The issue, as I saw it then, was that Caleb Wallace was a victim of his own actions. He was a father, a husband, a child of God: this much we can say as a matter of conviction and intellect, without needing to get inside his shoes and assess his actions. We can walk and chew gum, affirm what he was positively and disagree with his actions on purely reasonable grounds.

Wallace, I think, would have agreed with this assessment of his approach—that emotional kinship with one’s neighbors can be a sideshow. For Wallace, empathy was unnecessary, because the world is structured in a way that refuses connection. We live and die on our own choices:

“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.

For Wallace, we make a reasoned distinction about what our health consists of, and then act accordingly. It is a world devoid of empathy, of putting himself in the shoes of those afraid of the virus and taking reasonable preventative measures. For Wallace, we make value judgments according to those reasons, and empathy never enters the picture. For one doesn’t need to be told to care about one’s own health, or one’s own good, or one’s own capacity for action.

The upshot of this story is that I should reject Wallace’s notion wholesale, and embrace the standard story of:

2. Empathy as Connective Tissue

I won’t spend any time with this, because this was the subject of the last edition: feeling what another feels is pretty much a non-starter for me. We can feel sad for another person, but feeling what they feel seems implausible. The ironic payoff for this posture, though, is that it looks just like Wallace: since I can’t feel what you feel, I have to trust your feeling as involably true, and let you just go your own way in liberty, even if I judge it to reasonably harm others.

This led us to where we left off last time, with something like:

3. Empathy as Accent

Maybe there’s a different way forward here, one in which empathy doesn’t ground our actions, but which seasons our actions. In the previous installment, we came to the conclusion that, though empathy ultimately promises more than it can deliver, it’s not useless entirely: it just can’t be the basis upon which we make moral judgments.

When I first read the story about Wallace, I tried to imagine myself in his shoes, and failed miserably. I could put myself in his familial shoes, and feel the pain of losing one’s own family, but I couldn’t empathize with his actions, intellectually or emotionally. It was a world too separate from my own, on both counts. And so, after reading about his death, all that I could do was to have compassion for his death, for his family, across a great gulf.

Empathy here functions here as an invitation to compassion, to pray for his family. Empathy helps me to soften my judgment, but it doesn’t change it. There is no getting inside his shoes, intellectually or emotionally, regarding the decisions he made or the way he articulated his commitments regarding health. I thought then, and still do, find his reasons incoherent, and that divide of reason becomes a chasm only bridged by compassion for the situation he found himself in.

Photo by Maxime on Unsplash

What, To A Divided Country, Is the Fourth of July?

For some time now—perhaps as long as America has been America—empathy has played a pivotal role in how America has remained America. We have been encouraged to view each other as brothers, not intellectually, but as a matter of affection. We have been encouraged to draw upon our love for one another, not because we know one another, but because we try to imagine and feel our way across innumerable gulfs of time, culture, class.

And there came a time when no more empathy could be had: the empathy was exhausted, because the ability to empathize assumed that we could intellectually align ourselves, and that through that intellect, find our way to affection.

There was always another possibility to unite a diverse populace—having a common object of love. This, Augustine writes, is what truly makes for a people: having a common object which they mutually care about, and which mutually shapes and orders our common desire¹. If that object is God, then we are led out of ourselves toward that which we love but do not know in part; charity and humility ensure across the populace as we commonly pursue that object, even if we have little else in common.

But in America, there are no common objects: just common objectives. We bridge the distance not by a common object, but by the exaltation to have empathy for another’s plight, and to act accordingly. The problem is this: by virtue of how freedom is structured—how Wallace rightly names it—freedom aligns our interests and bridges differences so long as those interests align. Any number of things can perform this task in the short run: the wars we have in common², common enemies, common aspirations of freedom—but these are always tactical allegiances.

In the absence of a unifying war or common enemy, we thought that empathy could keep us together, but in a world built of silos—geographic, algorithmic, ideological— empathy cannot do whatever work it once did any longer. We can no longer easily intellectually identify with those outside our common frame, even if they share proximate space.

And so, the 4th now becomes a sign of judgment, a remembrance of empathy past, a sign of longing for what we want but struggle to find. So, on this 4th, let us embark not on a celebration, but on a mourning, a deep repentance in the hope that a common object—namely, God—might emerge where empathy ran out.

1. A rough paraphrase of City of God, filtered through Oliver O’Donovan’s Common Objects of Love, with a little Eugene Peterson-esque paraphrasing. All rights reserved.

2. It is not accidental that America has been engaged in overseas combat for nearly 94% of its existence.