On Empathy, Part Two: The Love of Money Corrupts All Things
First off, thanks for reading. Long ago, I ran a blog (don’t try to find it: it’s been locked up for years). But the age of blogs was relatively short lived: having a place to do public writing became eviscerated both by the rise of social media (in which public writing is mostly to generate dopamine hits) and by the proliferation of online media sources (which tend to balkanize discourse into a few pockets, with gates to pass through in order to publish). The blog, at its best, offered an interesting way to simultaneously foster sustained writing, and to do so in a way in which you could argue what you wanted to argue.
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In response to this week’s piece on empathy and moral argument, a friend and writer responded:
It seems like these problems are symptomatic of the divide between the professed equality of all people and the fact that in practice we are not equal due to wealth ownership and the opportunities it affords. Those are opportunities to avoid sending kids to school with poor kids, to avoid shopping at the same store as people you don't want to shop at and not having to worry about paying bills or sleeping in a bed unharmed. In fact, most people don't even actively make these kinds of decisions, they're just a part of having more money than others.
This response scratches a lot of itches for me: in identifying the ways in which class increasingly sorts the world, there’s much of ordinary social existence which doesn’t do the work of providing the basis for intellectual empathy. If your patterns of gathering, eating, sleeping, living, and schooling all circulate within a pretty circumspect group of people who share your socioeconomic status, you’ll only emotionally empathize with a pretty small range of folks: what you imagine will be what you see around you, leaving us all with a pretty diminished range of folks we can feel anything for.
This isn’t a problem just with broader society, but with churches as well: gone are the days (for the most part) of the local parishes, replaced increasingly with class-sorted congregations. Granted, these trends aren’t absolute, but they’re indicative of the problem above. Denominations have, in some ways, always operated this way, sustaining difference for a season, provided that the congregants actually had social contact with one another beyond church. But when those ordinary patterns of affiliation break down (i.e. when broader society becomes economically sorted in ways which undercut these kind of ordinary interactions across class), church division isn’t far behind. Put differently: two people could disagree with one another, and still remain in communion, provided that they had more opportunity to be in contact than simply the worship service on Sunday. Eliminate those, and empathy in both forms dries up.
So, what’s to be done? If, for the Christian, increased empathy—and indeed, increased social peace—is desirable, then one way is to intentionally change our patterns of living, and probably think about the ways in which economics sorts us on an ongoing basis. Work on racial reconciliation in churches, for example, has consistently emphasized that the way forward isn’t pulpit swaps, but literally joining a different congregation which doesn’t reflect you. There have to be intentional decisions made to not only see the ways in which we are being sorted, but to cut against those: in our housing choices, in our schooling, in our churchgoing. There’s more to it than that, but the point here is that determined change of practice precedes, and contributes to, being empathetic people.
It’s here I want to offer one qualification to the objection I quoted above, which rightly notes that these hidden patterns of wealth do become barriers to social cohesion, and thus, to us becoming people of empathy. I don’t deny that a bit. But this is where a Christian ethic comes into play: diverse connections aren’t necessarily desirable for their own sake, but insofar as homogenous connections perpetuate a world which becomes more entrenched in its resistance to being generous, it’s time to break the doors open. When our gatherings work opposite us becoming just and virtuous people, something must change.
Some of the sorting we do is just what humans do: affiliating with like-minded, like-living kinds of people, and I don’t think that’s to be negated. If you enjoy ski-ball, or cigar bars, or bro-country, I don’t want to stop you. I have a book club that I’ve been getting together with for the last three years, and deeply value that group of guys. But when the point of these aggregations is not one of virtue or of pleasure leading to virtue, but of the production of idols, it’s time for them to go. When our affiliations have become so deracinated that their primary reason for existing is the money (either with respect to the access that one has to wealth through these affiliations, or what affiliations do to property values, for example), I think we’re pretty clearly able to see where sorting because of affinity is really sorting because of money.
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When we decide to do differently—to change your patterns—you may be the only one. You may be the only one for a long while. You will feel out of sorts and out of place, and you’ll be right. But this out-of-placeness brings with it a renewed need to trust. When we are in new territory, finding our way, we have to rely on others. And it’s in that reliance that we relearn to trust, and with trust, we learn how to see, and with seeing, we learn to empathize.
Just this week, our school board made the decision to not mask, and in the days since, I have had exactly zero empathy for the board. The members of the board who voted against masking come from a part of the business community which I don’t interact with—not out of malice, but rather, we just don’t have any overlapping circles. I write this confession of my own lack of empathy to give hope, because in the days after, I have written the board multiple times, and had some good exchanges since. It’s a start. The alternative is to simply rant in my corner of social media: reaching out to opponents, with persistance and firmness strikes me as one way forward.
We are becoming increasingly sorted people, and with that, an incredibly non-empathic people. Doing otherwise requires seeing it, making intentional choices, and ultimately (when it comes to big policy things) being persistent, charitable, and annoying: we must not leave each other alone to perish in our divided circles. The stakes are too high.