The Right’s Strong Feelings About Empathy

Do unto Musk even what he would not do unto others

@revolvingstyle

Author and Professor Gad Saad warns of the spread of “suicidal empathy” towards the West’s alleged enemies. We readers of Saad’s interminable The Parasitic Mind will know that he lives doggedly by that credo, showing little empathy towards his readers—whom he insists on subjecting to page long ruminations on his “gargantuan courage” and Twitter beefs with Charlize Theron. In the least, he is to be commended for his consistency.

Similarly, Elon Musk has ruminated on the dangers of “civilizational, suicidal empathy.” According to Musk, an excess of empathy is the Achilles heel of Western civilization, leading many to embrace self-destructive policies in the name of compassion and pity. Sadly, in his haste to inoculate the West against the dangers of empathy, Musk seems to have forgotten how readily and recently he has asked it for himself.

These contemporary right-wing figures’ denigration of empathy has provoked a sharp, often lampooning reaction on the left. One leftist after another took it upon themselves to criticize the right’s lack of empathy as another demonstration that cruelty is their raison d’etre. Or they relished pointing out the irony that some of the most thin-skinned people in the world are suddenly lecturing everyone else on why we needn’t be nice to others, but ought to be nice to them. “Do unto Musk even what he would not do unto others” as a moral dictum.

But this trend deserves a more nuanced exploration of the relationship between empathy and rationalism.

The Right and Feeling

“I am afraid it is a practice much too common in inquiries of this nature, to attribute the cause of feelings which merely arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of our minds, to certain conclusions of the reasoning faculty on the objects presented to us; for I should imagine, that the influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.”

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin Of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

In recent years there has been an effort to present conservatives as more driven by reason and facticity than their overly sentimental opposition. Ben Shapiro’s famous quip that “facts don’t care about your feelings” is case in point. In one of the rare moments of The Parasitic Mind where Saad decides he himself should do some thinking, he juxtaposes “truth versus hurt feelings” and insists we need to ensure our emotions don’t get the best of us. Saad, Musk, and their ilk insist that—in order to preserve its legacy from total collapse—the West must curb the excess of this toxic emotion.

An older and wiser conservative tradition understood otherwise. The original thinkers of the modern right often chastised progressives, sometimes with cogency, for an excess of rationalism and a failure to esteem feelings and interpersonal connections. In his early Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke observed that the “influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as commonly believed.” In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke cashiered the sophisters, calculators, and economists who felt their time had come. He lamented that the age of chivalry and genteelness had been ousted by the age of reason. Among the French Revolutionaries, this rationalistic hardening had calcified into a notable lack of empathy for representatives of the Ancien Regime, who they attacked with ferocity. Burke observed that by hating vice too much, the Revolutionaries had come to love humanity too little.

Later conservatives like Fyodor Dostoevsky felt much the same. Doestoevsky himself was something of a Christian socialist in his youth. Even after his conservative turn, he retained an enormous sympathy for Russia’s poor and humble. This ensured Dostoevsky was emotionally well-equipped to criticize the burgeoning Russian left, with which he had an intimate familiarity. In The Brothers Karamazov, an elder recalls a wizened Doctor and reformer, filled with great humanitarian and modernizing aims. The Doctor mused that the more he loved humanity in general, the less he loved them as individuals.

This echoes Dostoevsky’s earlier lampooning of radical revolutionaries in The Possessed. Determined to scientifically remake society for the betterment of humankind, which doesn’t as yet know best how to run itself, the radical intellectual Shigalyov becomes convinced that his commitment to limitless freedom must conclude in implementing limitless despotism. Sadly, it is what impartial humanitarian reason demands, and traditionalist sentiment and religious spiritualism ought not to stand in its way.

The kind of abstract universalism endorsed by Shigalyov and his descendants, in which humanity is an undifferentiated and historyless mass to which scientific humanitarian principles are to be impartially applied, flatters itself to be both a kind of all inclusive humanitarianism and utterly rational. By stripping away the specificity of our moral obligations to individual people, progressives imagine themselves to be undoing prejudice. But in reality, they are simply letting themselves off the hook for the enormous moral burden required to be good to those closest to us. It is easy for one to flatter one’s self for holding an abstractly universal morality because it is an easy position to take; it requires minimal thought about how we must treat a real “other” and so lends itself to mechanical forms of altruism. Developing and agitating for an abstract system to redistribute wealth to the poor is far less demanding than being a loyal son, a generous neighbor, a virtuous Christian or a concerned citizen.¹

The deeper point is that one cannot morally disconnect feeling and reason without distorting both, and badly. By attempting to do so, progressive rationalists came to conceive humanity in an all too abstract way that was disconnected from the often flawed and small c conservative masses they purported to speak for.

Contemporary conservatives like JD Vance seem to be falling into the same trap as did the progressives of yesteryear—all the while championing themselves as defenders against progressive excess. Take Vance’s appeal to the theological concept of ordo amoris to morally defend the Trump administration’s recent call of mass deportations. The Thomistic teaching holds that we must demonstrate care in concentric circles. First to the family, then your neighbor, then the community in which your family and neighborhood is embedded, then the citizens of your nation, and then finally the rest of humanity—which is self-evidently a reasonable argument to be made.

Yet Vance’s application of this concept seems to be less a matter of worrying about ourselves first and then about others after, and more so of worrying about ourselves first and doing whatever we want to others to get what we want. In the advancement of “our” interests, there is no wrong we can commit against others. The strong should do as they will and the weak can suffer as they must.²

The Ethical Demands of Empathy

In Cosmic Connections, the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor notes how the competitive, individualistic culture of much of modernity can feel exceptionally nihilistic and alienating. Take the contemporary iterations of right-populism, which divide the world into winners and losers and insist that you must not fall onto the wrong side of the line.

But Taylor also insists that the progressive ethics of modernity is simply higher than the tribalistic, hierarchical ethic propagated by Musk, Saad, and others. This is because the demand that we treat all life as equally sacred and so worthy of respect and a chance at flourishing makes enormous demands of us individually and socially. Especially if we treat it concretely the way Christ or Martin Luther King did rather than abstractly ala Shigalyov.

Indeed such immense demands that we’ve yet to come close to approximating this ideal. But that is part of the point. When conservatives chastise the left for its utopian vision, the implicit admission is precisely that it demands too much. Understood this way, the kind of macho preening of the right looks like just that.

1. Here I think my fellow progressives and I do have something to learn. In Richard Rorty’s wise Achieving Our Country, he noted how leftists often tried to outdo each other in the “America sucks” sweepstakes—chastising the country and its people for not living up to their ideals. To be clear, America has done terrible things that it has avoided acknowledging for far too long, and the conservative attempt to elide this fact often ranges from very funny to pathological denial. But taken to excess, the America sucks sweepstakes can express itself in disappointment and resentment towards the very people American progressives want to help and share a country with. A good start in showing such solidarity is indeed by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

2. Responding to the anti-empathy crowd, Michael Burns notes how thinkers going back to Aristotle note the importance of cultivating a wider range of concern for others. This is of course also the impetus of the Thomistic concept Vance invoked. It is not simply that we do what we can for those close to us and only then turn to others. We have a responsibility to cultivate in ourselves both the emotional sensitivity and physical capacities to do more for others.