We are told repeatedly in the Torah and the Gospels that we have an obligation to care for the stranger, precisely because it is not our natural, human instinct to do so. And when we do care for a stranger, whether in our home city or on another continent, we are practicing Imatatio Dei.
I think there is something of a point to criticism of “empathy,” at least as it often manifests among liberals and the left, although I have somewhat different criticisms of it than the right.
Primarily, I believe we should not trust empathy as a tool around which to organize our politics, because it is fundamentally easier to empathize with people familiar to us—or who we imagine to be similar to us—than with those who have radically different values and experiences.
This has two failure modes, one in which we limit moral worth to those we can easily empathize with, which is what Vance seems to be arguing for, and one in which we deceive ourselves about how similar people are to us in order to make empathizing with them easier.
In the failure mode common on the right, political empathy easily supports a politics based on the Schmittian “friend-enemy distinction,” because it is easier to empathize with a friend than an enemy.
On the left, political empathy and moral universalism often combine in such a way as to sand off the rough edges of groups or individuals whose experiences can be framed as tragic, and therefore empathetic. Motivations which cannot be understood by the educated, oversocialized, socially liberal person doing the enpathizing are dismissed, explained away (often by pathologizing beliefs as “a product of [tragedy]”), or simply ignored.
This is less immediately dangerous than right-wing empathy-driven dehumanization, but it nonetheless provides an excuse for brutality and unnecessary violence. This is what the right calls “suicidal empathy,” and they have a point, although they use the term so broadly and carelessly that it is hard to take them seriously. Even when the stakes are lower, this selective empathy still distorts our view of reality, shrinking our perspective on the vast number of ways a human can experience reality.
Good examples of this failure mode include left wing support for terrorism around the world, tolerance of regressive social views held by Black nationalists, conservative Muslims and Islamists, or indigenous rights groups.
In the short term, these individuals and groups often do benefit from empathy from rich westerners which an honest appraisal of their values would have denied them. Some people surely lie about such peoples’ values on these grounds, and in an ideal world victims of injustice would not need to be easy to empathize themselves to receive aid. But insofar as you are motivated by a genuine desire to help some person or culture, are you really doing them a favor by misunderstanding their values?
A corollary of this failure is the tendency towards intracultural hatred, atrophying tolerance, and black-and-white thinking. If every sympathetic culture you encounter is conceived of as morally perfect, then your own culture ceases to have distinct strengths you can praise. If your understanding of the diversity of human values is artificially constrained, when you do finally encounter people whose values differ sharply from yours, you are less likely to be tolerant—especially if they are not particularly sympathetic. Finally, if the people you empathize with are perfect victims, then those who have wronged them must be maximally villainous.
To summarize:
The empathetic nativist correctly perceives that some peoples are different, and denies the common humanity of those people as a result. The empathetic universalist zealot correctly perceives our common humanity, but as a result denies the moral responsibility or moral evils of the most pitiable people—people with whom they wish to empathize, but whose strangeness or moral repulsiveness makes true empathy hard.
The real difficulty of empathy is learning how to empathize with people who you think are deeply wrong, who are utterly alien to you, or who you believe to be evil. I am not a Christian, and so I have no issues with saying that I do not think this is possible for all people in all cases. Loving one another is an acceptable religious commandment, but liberal politics should be based around the achievable, not the aspirational.
It is sufficient, that in some circumstances, I accept that some people’s minds present an insurmountable barrier to my understanding—but I will tolerate them nonetheless.
Tolerance, and an ideological commitment to rule of law and individual equality within the law, are achievable where universal empathy is not.
Isn't there a contradiction between two of your points? First you say:
[ Primarily, I believe we should not trust empathy as a tool around which to organize our politics, because it is fundamentally easier to empathize with people familiar to us—or who we imagine to be similar to us—than with those who have radically different values and experiences.]
Then you say:
[Good examples of this failure mode include left wing support for terrorism around the world, tolerance of regressive social views held by Black nationalists, conservative Muslims and Islamists, or indigenous rights groups.]
Should leftists decide whose side they are on based on who they think is right in any given situation or based on who has the most similar social/ethical views?
Is it okay to do terrorism if your cause is just? Is it acceptable for a group to have regressive social views as long as they were only being regressive to each other before a more liberal but imperialist group moved in and started pushing them around?
I think there's a coherent worldview to say, "I'm going to support the people who are most like me, even when they are hurting people who are not like me."
There's also a coherent worldview to say, "I'm going to support whomever was not the aggressor in any given situation, whomever I think has less power and is suffering more harm from a conflict, even if they're nothing like me and I hate their views."
>I'm going to support the people who are most like me, even when they are hurting people who are not like me.
Is the essential organizing doctrine of fascism, and the source of an enormous amount of human suffering, past and present.
So in answer to your question about whether leftists should support who they think is right or who has the most similar social/ethical views, I firmly support the former.
However, my criticism of typically left-wing applications of empathy in politics is that I believe it often supplants a principled application of universal rules. Instead, what happens is that a people who in one moment or another may be “not the aggressor,” have “less power,” or are “suffering more harm” are caricatured into ideal victims who lack any nasty traits that might make empathy harder. The principle becomes subordinated to a tribal allegiance based upon a (largely false) belief in shared values.
This is a problem, because these definitions are fluid and grey. Aggressor and defender are contextual and debatable, even in the current regime of international law (cyberattacks, monetary support for dissidents or protesters, sanctions evasion, preemptive strikes, spying, data/IP theft, and just some examples). Yesterday’s victims are often tomorrow’s oppressors, and oftentimes groups, people, and institutions occupy both positions at once in relation to different groups. There may be some groups whose oppression is necessary to secure the rights of other groups. And what constitutes “harm” is so endlessly debated on the left that I doubt I need to articulate examples.
The point is that generating empathy is a cheap way to get support for a cause that avoids these sticky questions—but it quite often does so by relying upon false representations that make empathizing with members of that cause easier.
Better to throw out empathy altogether, and stick to principles we can actually discuss.
I think part of the reason no one seems interested in the Tigray War is that it's a civil war with no obviously "right side". So the attitude is, "Well if you guys don't want to resume a war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people, just don't do that."
That observation breaks down when we look at the Israel/Palestine conflict, which is also a very regional conflict with no good side but which attracts intense international attention. I hate to say it, but I think it’s true that white Americans care less about the Ethiopian civil war that about I/P or Ukraine because it involves Black people fighting in a place we didn’t learn about in school. (Ethiopia should be a bigger part of World History classes than it is, btw.)
Some Ethiopian activists/protestors fully stopped traffic on highway 5 in Seattle a few years ago to bring attention to this war. They said they were genuinely sorry for the trouble it caused, but they didn't regret it because they felt people needed to know about it and they didn't know what else to do to help their families there. It's the only reason I know about the war at all.
I'd love to hear more about Jerusalem's Protestantism. I know that there is an Ethiopian Orthodox Church that is very old. ChatGPT tells me that the vast majority of Tigray people belong to that denomination. Around 95%?
I was in Addis last year. Didn’t spend a ton of time in Ethiopia but here’s what I observed:
1. People there really don’t like to hear about Hailie Selassie and hate the rastas that show up. Here’s the reactions I got:
a) “fuck Haile Selassie, he starved us, what kind of sicko worships him?” (My guide)
b) “who? Are we due for an attack from the Shene or the Fano this week? Injera costs too much. Goddamn Abiy. Also how do I get a green card?”
c) “haha yea, I sell shirts of him at a 500% markup to dumb Rastas while claiming they were woven in his birthplace, and tell them they’re idiots in Amharic while they think I’m blessing them. Extra markup for my Lion of Judah tattooing service, my sister braids their locks and my cousin gives them Rasta tours” (I bought a shirt of Selassie smoking a blunt from him after getting him from 300 to 90 birr because I can bargain. He called me a donkey (shintu besh) in Amharic and I called him a maderchod. Turned down the tattoo - AIDS/Hepatitis is rampant - and the “good time” with some ladies he knew. This man should be the PM of Ethiopia or at least the tourism minister). I’m sure the Rasta tour solely consists of pointing at a church and saying “HIM took a steaming shit there, very sacred, $50 tip now, jah bless” while the priest asks god to smite everyone. He’s the coolest guy I met in Ethiopia so I got a beer and tej with him later where I tried to teach him to say “Chak de fatte” (mixed success there).
d) “Goddamn foreigners have crazy ideas/this is blasphemy”
e) “Astafigarullah, those kuffar are jahil Inshallah, their dreadlocks are infested with lice and the police find their weed. Now buy my teff or fuck off”.
Regarding Tigray, people genuinely didn’t want to talk about it, other than to say “what a tragedy/mess”, along with one or two saying “the TPLF had it coming because they lorded it over us after Mengistu left”. Whether this is because I’m a) not Ethiopian b) not Amharic speaker or c) mistaken as a snitch is unclear. I did get an earful about how Afwerki was a snake (my guide declined to translate further).
Vance is only stating the obvious that we all follow (generally unspoken) hierarchies for how much we care about other people, though he of course has his own biases and agenda in the specific order he demands other people follow. If my mother collapses, I will rush her to a hospital, because she's immediate family. If a random person in the street collapses, I will call 911, but I'm not going to stop to render aid if I'm busy taking my mother to the emergency room. If I am told that someone in Argentina collapsed, I will do nothing; I will not think I owe them anything, because we have nothing in common beyond our shared humanity as part of the same species. But, if I then learn the person in Argentina is a Jew, I will at least feel a little bad, because now we have a connection as members of the same tribe.
This topic is also adjacent to imperialism and related issues, which some on the left are selectively sensitive to. I have more knowledge than most of the various conflicts in Ethiopia due to my work, though I'm hardly an expert. I am a non-Ethiopian American who has never set foot in the country however, and would not presume to be able to neatly sort the various belligerents into categories of victim or perpetrator, aggressor or defender, nor dictate solutions from the comfort of my home. There are obviously many people who have suffered, and others who have committed terrible crimes, but I cannot make the wholesale judgment that "these are certainly the good guys; and here are obviously the bad, and we must intervene on behalf of the former to defeat the latter". It is probably not difficult to see the rhetorical allusion I'm making to liberals having strongly held opinions regarding other distant conflicts they are broadly ignorant about.
We are told repeatedly in the Torah and the Gospels that we have an obligation to care for the stranger, precisely because it is not our natural, human instinct to do so. And when we do care for a stranger, whether in our home city or on another continent, we are practicing Imatatio Dei.
Thanks for this reminder, Jerusalem.
I think there is something of a point to criticism of “empathy,” at least as it often manifests among liberals and the left, although I have somewhat different criticisms of it than the right.
Primarily, I believe we should not trust empathy as a tool around which to organize our politics, because it is fundamentally easier to empathize with people familiar to us—or who we imagine to be similar to us—than with those who have radically different values and experiences.
This has two failure modes, one in which we limit moral worth to those we can easily empathize with, which is what Vance seems to be arguing for, and one in which we deceive ourselves about how similar people are to us in order to make empathizing with them easier.
In the failure mode common on the right, political empathy easily supports a politics based on the Schmittian “friend-enemy distinction,” because it is easier to empathize with a friend than an enemy.
On the left, political empathy and moral universalism often combine in such a way as to sand off the rough edges of groups or individuals whose experiences can be framed as tragic, and therefore empathetic. Motivations which cannot be understood by the educated, oversocialized, socially liberal person doing the enpathizing are dismissed, explained away (often by pathologizing beliefs as “a product of [tragedy]”), or simply ignored.
This is less immediately dangerous than right-wing empathy-driven dehumanization, but it nonetheless provides an excuse for brutality and unnecessary violence. This is what the right calls “suicidal empathy,” and they have a point, although they use the term so broadly and carelessly that it is hard to take them seriously. Even when the stakes are lower, this selective empathy still distorts our view of reality, shrinking our perspective on the vast number of ways a human can experience reality.
Good examples of this failure mode include left wing support for terrorism around the world, tolerance of regressive social views held by Black nationalists, conservative Muslims and Islamists, or indigenous rights groups.
In the short term, these individuals and groups often do benefit from empathy from rich westerners which an honest appraisal of their values would have denied them. Some people surely lie about such peoples’ values on these grounds, and in an ideal world victims of injustice would not need to be easy to empathize themselves to receive aid. But insofar as you are motivated by a genuine desire to help some person or culture, are you really doing them a favor by misunderstanding their values?
A corollary of this failure is the tendency towards intracultural hatred, atrophying tolerance, and black-and-white thinking. If every sympathetic culture you encounter is conceived of as morally perfect, then your own culture ceases to have distinct strengths you can praise. If your understanding of the diversity of human values is artificially constrained, when you do finally encounter people whose values differ sharply from yours, you are less likely to be tolerant—especially if they are not particularly sympathetic. Finally, if the people you empathize with are perfect victims, then those who have wronged them must be maximally villainous.
To summarize:
The empathetic nativist correctly perceives that some peoples are different, and denies the common humanity of those people as a result. The empathetic universalist zealot correctly perceives our common humanity, but as a result denies the moral responsibility or moral evils of the most pitiable people—people with whom they wish to empathize, but whose strangeness or moral repulsiveness makes true empathy hard.
The real difficulty of empathy is learning how to empathize with people who you think are deeply wrong, who are utterly alien to you, or who you believe to be evil. I am not a Christian, and so I have no issues with saying that I do not think this is possible for all people in all cases. Loving one another is an acceptable religious commandment, but liberal politics should be based around the achievable, not the aspirational.
It is sufficient, that in some circumstances, I accept that some people’s minds present an insurmountable barrier to my understanding—but I will tolerate them nonetheless.
Tolerance, and an ideological commitment to rule of law and individual equality within the law, are achievable where universal empathy is not.
This was really interesting and I’m glad I read it despite its length.
Isn't there a contradiction between two of your points? First you say:
[ Primarily, I believe we should not trust empathy as a tool around which to organize our politics, because it is fundamentally easier to empathize with people familiar to us—or who we imagine to be similar to us—than with those who have radically different values and experiences.]
Then you say:
[Good examples of this failure mode include left wing support for terrorism around the world, tolerance of regressive social views held by Black nationalists, conservative Muslims and Islamists, or indigenous rights groups.]
Should leftists decide whose side they are on based on who they think is right in any given situation or based on who has the most similar social/ethical views?
Is it okay to do terrorism if your cause is just? Is it acceptable for a group to have regressive social views as long as they were only being regressive to each other before a more liberal but imperialist group moved in and started pushing them around?
I think there's a coherent worldview to say, "I'm going to support the people who are most like me, even when they are hurting people who are not like me."
There's also a coherent worldview to say, "I'm going to support whomever was not the aggressor in any given situation, whomever I think has less power and is suffering more harm from a conflict, even if they're nothing like me and I hate their views."
I fundamentally believe that this statement:
>I'm going to support the people who are most like me, even when they are hurting people who are not like me.
Is the essential organizing doctrine of fascism, and the source of an enormous amount of human suffering, past and present.
So in answer to your question about whether leftists should support who they think is right or who has the most similar social/ethical views, I firmly support the former.
However, my criticism of typically left-wing applications of empathy in politics is that I believe it often supplants a principled application of universal rules. Instead, what happens is that a people who in one moment or another may be “not the aggressor,” have “less power,” or are “suffering more harm” are caricatured into ideal victims who lack any nasty traits that might make empathy harder. The principle becomes subordinated to a tribal allegiance based upon a (largely false) belief in shared values.
This is a problem, because these definitions are fluid and grey. Aggressor and defender are contextual and debatable, even in the current regime of international law (cyberattacks, monetary support for dissidents or protesters, sanctions evasion, preemptive strikes, spying, data/IP theft, and just some examples). Yesterday’s victims are often tomorrow’s oppressors, and oftentimes groups, people, and institutions occupy both positions at once in relation to different groups. There may be some groups whose oppression is necessary to secure the rights of other groups. And what constitutes “harm” is so endlessly debated on the left that I doubt I need to articulate examples.
The point is that generating empathy is a cheap way to get support for a cause that avoids these sticky questions—but it quite often does so by relying upon false representations that make empathizing with members of that cause easier.
Better to throw out empathy altogether, and stick to principles we can actually discuss.
I think part of the reason no one seems interested in the Tigray War is that it's a civil war with no obviously "right side". So the attitude is, "Well if you guys don't want to resume a war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people, just don't do that."
That observation breaks down when we look at the Israel/Palestine conflict, which is also a very regional conflict with no good side but which attracts intense international attention. I hate to say it, but I think it’s true that white Americans care less about the Ethiopian civil war that about I/P or Ukraine because it involves Black people fighting in a place we didn’t learn about in school. (Ethiopia should be a bigger part of World History classes than it is, btw.)
Great read
Some Ethiopian activists/protestors fully stopped traffic on highway 5 in Seattle a few years ago to bring attention to this war. They said they were genuinely sorry for the trouble it caused, but they didn't regret it because they felt people needed to know about it and they didn't know what else to do to help their families there. It's the only reason I know about the war at all.
I'd love to hear more about Jerusalem's Protestantism. I know that there is an Ethiopian Orthodox Church that is very old. ChatGPT tells me that the vast majority of Tigray people belong to that denomination. Around 95%?
I was in Addis last year. Didn’t spend a ton of time in Ethiopia but here’s what I observed:
1. People there really don’t like to hear about Hailie Selassie and hate the rastas that show up. Here’s the reactions I got:
a) “fuck Haile Selassie, he starved us, what kind of sicko worships him?” (My guide)
b) “who? Are we due for an attack from the Shene or the Fano this week? Injera costs too much. Goddamn Abiy. Also how do I get a green card?”
c) “haha yea, I sell shirts of him at a 500% markup to dumb Rastas while claiming they were woven in his birthplace, and tell them they’re idiots in Amharic while they think I’m blessing them. Extra markup for my Lion of Judah tattooing service, my sister braids their locks and my cousin gives them Rasta tours” (I bought a shirt of Selassie smoking a blunt from him after getting him from 300 to 90 birr because I can bargain. He called me a donkey (shintu besh) in Amharic and I called him a maderchod. Turned down the tattoo - AIDS/Hepatitis is rampant - and the “good time” with some ladies he knew. This man should be the PM of Ethiopia or at least the tourism minister). I’m sure the Rasta tour solely consists of pointing at a church and saying “HIM took a steaming shit there, very sacred, $50 tip now, jah bless” while the priest asks god to smite everyone. He’s the coolest guy I met in Ethiopia so I got a beer and tej with him later where I tried to teach him to say “Chak de fatte” (mixed success there).
d) “Goddamn foreigners have crazy ideas/this is blasphemy”
e) “Astafigarullah, those kuffar are jahil Inshallah, their dreadlocks are infested with lice and the police find their weed. Now buy my teff or fuck off”.
Regarding Tigray, people genuinely didn’t want to talk about it, other than to say “what a tragedy/mess”, along with one or two saying “the TPLF had it coming because they lorded it over us after Mengistu left”. Whether this is because I’m a) not Ethiopian b) not Amharic speaker or c) mistaken as a snitch is unclear. I did get an earful about how Afwerki was a snake (my guide declined to translate further).
"Our personal connections can help us notice things that deserve everyone’s attention."
This is the most succinct rebuttal to the whole "actually it is morally imperative to be parochial" stack of opinions that I can recall reading.
We are all a product of a bunch of path dependencies, but those paths all proceed forward into a world of equal moral worth.
That’s an excellent articulation of something I thought instinctively but struggled to put into words.
Vance is only stating the obvious that we all follow (generally unspoken) hierarchies for how much we care about other people, though he of course has his own biases and agenda in the specific order he demands other people follow. If my mother collapses, I will rush her to a hospital, because she's immediate family. If a random person in the street collapses, I will call 911, but I'm not going to stop to render aid if I'm busy taking my mother to the emergency room. If I am told that someone in Argentina collapsed, I will do nothing; I will not think I owe them anything, because we have nothing in common beyond our shared humanity as part of the same species. But, if I then learn the person in Argentina is a Jew, I will at least feel a little bad, because now we have a connection as members of the same tribe.
This topic is also adjacent to imperialism and related issues, which some on the left are selectively sensitive to. I have more knowledge than most of the various conflicts in Ethiopia due to my work, though I'm hardly an expert. I am a non-Ethiopian American who has never set foot in the country however, and would not presume to be able to neatly sort the various belligerents into categories of victim or perpetrator, aggressor or defender, nor dictate solutions from the comfort of my home. There are obviously many people who have suffered, and others who have committed terrible crimes, but I cannot make the wholesale judgment that "these are certainly the good guys; and here are obviously the bad, and we must intervene on behalf of the former to defeat the latter". It is probably not difficult to see the rhetorical allusion I'm making to liberals having strongly held opinions regarding other distant conflicts they are broadly ignorant about.