Empathy, Love and Wokeism

Bishop Barron and the polls

The 17th annual American Values Survey, released today by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution is now available. It reports:

The new survey also finds that an “empathy gap,” beliefs about the social importance of empathy, has become a major new political dividing line. While two-thirds of Americans —including 84% of Democrats and 70% of independents — agree that “empathy is a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society (68%), only 54% of Republicans and 48% of white evangelical Protestants agree. Notably, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54%) believe the opposite: that “empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”

Predictably, left-leaning PRRI President and Founder Robert P. Jones blames this development on Christian nationalism.

Interestingly, however, Bishop Robert Barron’s September 6th Sunday Sermon—Will the Good of the Other—focused on precisely the question of whether empathy is a Christian virtue.

In it, Bishop Barron discusses Gad Saad’s book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (AMAZON LINK), which Barron calls “along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution [AMAZON LINK] and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories [AMAZON LINK],” “the best exposure and take-down of the lunacy at the heart of much of the wokeist philosophy that dominates things today.”

Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, contends that empathy is an adaptive trait that has become badly miscalibrated. Empathy evolved to motivate care for kin and community. In the hands of progressive elites, however, it misfires, extending compassion to those who threaten a society while withholding it from those who sustain it. The result, Saad argues, is an inverted moral order in which the productive are demonized and the destructive are excused. The book’s eight chapters trace the pathology from its origins (“A Good Virtue Gone Bad”) through applications such as criminal justice (“Blank Slate Felons”) to a closing prescription (“Inoculation Against Suicidal Empathy”). Along the way, Saad catalogues lenient treatment of violent offenders, restrictions on self-defense, failed drug and homelessness policies, immigration, and the elevation of victimhood as a social status.

In my view, the book’s core insight is sound and, at least to my ear, quite familiar. Like Saad, I believe good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. Therefore, policy must be judged by its second-order effects as well as its first. Bastiat made the point about the seen and the unseen in 1850. Paul Bloom made a version of it in Against Empathy (AMAZON LINK), arguing for rational compassion over emotional identification. Indeed, Adam Smith understood that sympathy is a powerful but partial sentiment, strongest toward what is near and vivid and weakest toward the diffuse costs borne by others. Saad’s contribution is to give that old insight an evolutionary-psychology framing and a memorable label.

Riffing off of Saad’s book, Barron defines empathy as “feeling the feelings of somebody else, entering into the feelings of another person, and let's say a desire not to hurt or wound those feelings.” Usually, he argues, empathy is a good thing. But not always.

Worse yet, Barron opines, the rising social insistence on empathy threatens “truth, reality, justice, and love.”

Barron asserts that the insistence on empathy as the supreme social virtue lies at the center of wokeism:

Our supreme value is don’t hurt the feelings of other people. Well, but what if what we’re doing is unjust? What if it’s unfair? What if it’s not really good for people? Well, that takes second place to empathy.

Barron contends that Wokeism’s hold on society has allowed empathy to displace the supreme virtue of love. He argues that to love is not to validate the other; love is to will the good of the other. In doing so, of course, he is implicitly invoking Aquinas, who in turn invoked Aristotle. So Barron is standing on the shoulders of giants.

In turn, Barron contends, to will the good of the other sometimes requires hurting their feelings or wounding their self-esteem.

A Snarky Quip

At a faculty meeting back when I was teaching at UIUC College of Law, one of my colleagues held forth at great length about how we needed to build up our student’s self-esteem. One of my other colleagues leaned over to me and whispered sotto voce, “what have they ever done that was estimable?” I cracked up, which made everybody look, but could not bring myself to explain.

Barron gives three examples:

• A professor who has to give somebody a C-minus because their work was poor. (Not that this ever happens anymore given the grade inflation that has been correlated—if not caused—by the rise of Wokeism).

• A parent who must punish a child.

• A priest who must chastise a penitent.

Barron then returns to Wokeism with a preliminary disclaimer:

I know the game that everybody plays, which is, “Oh, no, no, wokeism, to be woke just means you’re alert to social injustice and you care about the suffering of the poor.” Look, just for the record, I’m for social justice, I’m for caring for the poor, but that’s not what wokeism means, everybody.

Just for the record, ditto.

Wokeism, and I’ve read the avatars of wokeism, is a popularization of critical theory, which is a postmodern theory coming up out of the French and German academies. The names like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, many others. What’s one of the marks now of this postmodern critical theory which has morphed into wokeism? One of the distinctive marks of it is that there are no objective epistemic and moral truths. In fact, claims to know the truth epistemically or morally is seen by critical theory as a power play. It’s what’s used by powerful people to keep marginalized people down.

The problem is that:

If you say there are no objective moral and epistemic values, just my truth, your truth, what I think is good, what you think is good, but there’s no objective truth or goodness. What’s left? Empathy. You see, what’s left is empathy. There’s no objective truth or good. And so, well, let’s just tolerate each other and let’s try not to hurt each other’s feelings.

Barron concludes by arguing that the culture needs to recenter on love rather than empathy. To recenter on faith rather than secular Wokeism.

In other words, Bishop Barron is aligning the sort of Catholicism that he and I practice with that “majority of white evangelical Protestants.”

Now go watch the video.