A certain nameless billionaire was quoted as saying that empathy is the weakness of Western Civilization. The backlash was obvious, inevitable, but ultimately impotent, because a stark absence of empathy has driven the politics of the American Empire ever since its founding, and continues to this day.
What do we call the absence of empathy? Not apathy, which connotes a sort of neutrality as opposed to callous indifference, or worse a targeted animosity we might call antipathy. Maybe pathos exists on a spectrum, with compassion on one end, gradiating through sympathy, acknowledgement, consideration, obliviousness, apathy, disregard, neglect, antipathy?
I think empathy – call it the ability and willingness to understand other people’s needs, joy, suffering, being, and how we might contribute to those things through our actions or lack thereof — is the thread coursing through it all.
The absence of empathy is not nothing, but rather a void with its own mass, gravity, force. An inversion which manifests as a positive feeling — vindication, justification, satisfaction, even pleasure — derived from cruelty toward others, their suffering, their destruction.
But here’s the thing. The billionaire was right. At least I hope so. Because so-called Western Civilization, as he meant it, is just code for the doctrine and politics of white supremacy, and indeed this “civilization” could not have come about without a deep void of empathy for the indigenous peoples stolen from lands in Africa to be enslaved, and murdered en masse in the various places Europeans settled.
While it may seem reductive, I have come to believe that from the micro to the macro scale, a lack of empathy can be implicated in nearly every problem humanity is simultaneously creating and facing. Consider relatively trivial problems like neighbors having loud gatherings outside late at night when others are trying to sleep, to drivers being reckless on the road as if their urgency is more important than everyone else’s safety.
Scale up to the austerity politics of my city’s mayor, and her willingness to make billionaires richer while denying local workers what they need for a better quality of life, the same attitude behind every corporate union busting effort.
From there to the systematic cruelty enshrined in government policy, whether towards immigrants, trans people, indigenous peoples, longtime EJ communities or victims of environmental disasters, or the environment itself we continue destroying. None of these things are possible without suppressing empathy.
The strange intersection of millenial dispensationalism and so-called longtermism — what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call end times fascism — which would see the worthy be either raptured or digitized, also comes at the expense of everyone else. Unworthiness, here, might as well be defined as “those for whom there is no empathy”, usually coupled with some form of dehumanization.
At the extreme end of the pathos spectrum, opposite compassion, we would plot the genocide and displacement of the Palestinian people, in Gaza and the West Bank, perhaps the most egregious display of antipathy and brutality in my lifetime. The mass murder of a people, including tens of thousands of children, the annihilation of their lands, culture, and futures, livestreamed for daily global consumption for nearly two years, should have long since stopped the entire world on its axis. The only way such a thing is possible is if the Palestinian people are deemed “unworthy” of empathy.
The global churn of extraction, exploitation, ecocide, and downright evil that sustains the imperial project is at its core, an absence of empathy.
So if empathy is the weakness of such a franchise — that which might see Western Civilization fall — then I would see us cultivate so very much more of it. Indeed, as writer/activist Kelly Hayes regularly impresses upon her readers, empathy, and from it, solidarity and mutual care, may be our most important defense against the escalating violence of empire.