In Favor of Primordial Compassion

the more I define empathy, the less I know it

a drawing from inside my brain

I live in a society that suggests I should have more empathy in the same breath as warmongering nations sell me narcissism-gadgets and mass slaughter houses sell me “ethical meat.” As far as the current economic model is concerned, I’m encouraged to be generous and empathetic towards the disenfranchised within a system that explicitly encourages predatory business practices and awards power-hungry and greedy behavior.  

Forgive me as I try to make sense of the question:

Q: what does empathy mean to you?

Despite my unexamined conviction that empathy, as a concept, is something to strive for, I find myself living through an Age of Indifference, which brings me to the closest single sentence answer I can come up with:

A: empathy is an innate human quality that has become confused and commodified in the current epoch.

Empathy need not be moral.

Way back in 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality that in a state of nature, human beings are not driven by the intellect (let alone “morality”) but rather by two primordial instincts: 1) l’amour de soi (self-love, because humans are interested in self- preservation) and 2) pity (repugnance towards seeing others suffering, which acts as a check and balance on narcissism).

Rousseau’s definition of “pity” is akin to what empathy means to me, but not in the pejorative sense: here, “pity” is not so much an intellectual choice as it is a primordial instinct:

“Compassion must, in fact, be the stronger, the more the animal beholding any kind of distress identifies himself with the animal that suffers. Now, it is plain that such identification must have been much more perfect in a state of nature than it is in a state of reason.”

In other words, in Rousseau’s imagined state of nature (which is a hypothetical, obviously), human beings used to be more compassionate because there was nothing preventing them from living by their natural instincts.

For the record, I don’t believe humans would be better off living in a state of nature, but I do agree with Rousseau’s contention that empathy is innate, and that the more I try to define it, the less attuned I am to its meaning.

Is there a difference between having empathy & being empathetic?

I can pretend to know what being empathetic means—to be able to understand and perhaps even feel another person’s creature’s emotions—but herein lies the problem with the word as a moralistic construct, as if being able to understand someone else’s feelings is fundamentally possible, let alone a good thing.

Consider the age-old cliché at the typical American dinner table: “You should finish your dinner. Think of the starving children in [insert name of impoverished nation].” In this example, having empathy for a starving child in [insert name of impoverished nation] does little aside from assuaging my own personal guilt that I’m not doing much of anything for the hundreds of millions of children starving throughout the world.

Not only is this kind of empathy-commodification self-serving (“which brands do you buy? Are they ethical? Why or why not? Did you hear about what happened in Turkey? You should have more empathy”), but worse still, being primarily concerned with whether or not I “have enough empathy” takes me further and further away from my natural state as an empathetic being.   

The dinner table example is simplistic, but this is a short essay, and this kind of superficial preoccupation with having more empathy does almost nothing for the people that need my empathy most. Instead, it simply reassures me that I, too, can have empathy by the simple words I choose to use or the ideas I impart, wiping my plate clean lest the dog get any of the leftovers because I should really be conscious of my privilege in recognition of the starving children in [insert name of impoverished nation once again].

Sociopathic Consumption

I’m being facetious. But only slightly. And if my tone sounds indifferent, it’s because it is.

It is yet another truism of this particular society in which I live that those without empathy are considered sociopaths … never mind that me and most of my friends tacitly support the idea of wicked characters by binge-watching television shows about serial killers and greedy millionaires and megalomaniacs (not to mention we vote these types of people into positions of power all the time; I myself spent many years studying just how easy it is for a seemingly empathic society to slip:

Karens, Nazis & the Morality of Evil

There’s a connection between this era’s rampant apathy and what seems to be an alienation from my primordial self … and yet I uphold the warm fuzzy feelings that make me seem moral and ignore the other side of the coin. When it comes to all of the ways in which I individually lack empathy, I am loath to admit how unwilling incapable I am of confronting my demons (I’m reminded of a Tom Waits lyric: If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too).

It’s much easier to remind myself to be more empathetic, both to others and to myself. This is what I have been taught: to champion the cultivation of empathy as a method to combat indifference, instead of perhaps recognizing apathy, just like empathy, as something intrinsic that can neither be created nor destroyed, only repositioned.

Consumerism has made me a master of sublimation.

Contemporary consumer capitalism tells me 1) the primary way to self-actualize is through consumption 2) the more money I make, the more I can self-actualize 3) once I’ve achieved comfort within my consumptive identity, I can become a more conscious consumer by solidifying my identity via the type of toothpaste I buy, the types of food I do or do not eat, the online publishing streaming services I use, and which television shows I choose to watch about the inhumanity of killers, rapists, megalomaniacs and sociopaths, forever reassuring myself that I am nothing like them.

But what if my interest in the macabre were proof of my primordial empathy? Even if I don’t dare admit it in public, I don’t watch murder mysteries primarily because I empathize with the victims so much as I want to empathize with better understand the killers.  

Even especially when it comes to the most morally reprehensible humans, I am fascinated because I understand, intrinsically, that cruelty, just like empathy, is a part of the human condition. But am I just a product of this era’s fascination with violence—specifically serial killers, school shooters, serial rapists and terrorists—or is this evidence that empathy isn’t proprietary, but rather a part of my very being?

In conclusion, I fear the phrase “have some empathy” has become more about virtue signalling than human nature. The word is tantamount to ideology, as if to have empathy is proof of my innate human goodness and not my selective bias. Furthermore, the politicization of almost all aspects of cultural life has resulted in my tendency to direct my empathy towards various interest groups at various times, depending on the current cultural climate and whichever disenfranchised group I feel guilty for not caring more about.

Even as I write this, I know these words will seem offensive. Dare I suggest that I should (and you should, too, dear reader) have empathy for somebody who shoots up a dance club synagogue mosque church elementary school? Twenty-four years ago, Marilyn Manson was lambasted for suggesting exactly this after the Columbine shootings, and how far have we come, exactly, if we’re still using the language of “monsters” and “evil” and “inhuman” to refer to fellow human beings who go on killing sprees, often because they feel extremely alienated?

In my mind, empathy is an innate human quality that has been trammeled by capitalistic greed, narcissistic technologies, and identitarian individualism in the last decades. In order to understand empathy, I need to first rediscover its value within myself. As Rousseau suggested, empathy need not be theorized to exist.

But I digress. The more I talk about empathy, the less I seem to know it. Reducing it to an idea or definition demeans its inherent value, somehow, resulting in extremely subjective ideas about hierarchical forms of empathy that amount to virtue signalling, moralistic conviction, political posturing and self-righteous noise.

PS. Thanks to The Bullet for the edits—That's Why They Call Him The Bullet