Empathy. Excuse me. Please remove your shoes. This is holy ground. Thank you. Now let’s try this again.
Empathy. There, now that’s better.
My friend Joe Rigney has been taking his sledge hammer to this golden calf for the last few years, and there have been no shortage of Israelites in their skivvies protesting Joe’s so-called harsh treatment of their brazen fetish. Many of us started noticing the dangers of empathy perhaps in the aftermath of the #metoo rash, but it turns out that empathy has been doing quite a bit of pagan heavy lifting in the background of our cultural demise for longer than many of us have perhaps realized.
Untethered Empathy
Of course Joe has been quick to make all kinds of clarifications. The word has been weaponized, and as happens with words that are weaponized, there are often virtuous versions of the word. So this is not a blanket condemnation of all empathy in every form everywhere, forever and ever, amen. And to make that clarification as clear as possible, he has even taken to modifying what he is talking about. The golden calf proper is “untethered empathy.” You know, empathy that is determined to leap off the cliff with the loved one because otherwise, how will you truly understand what they are going through unless you are also hurtling to the ground with them?
Tethered empathy, on the other hand, would allow you to leap off the cliff and actually save your friend because, having tethered yourself to an anchored point above the cliff, you would be in a position to catch and rescue your friend. Tethered empathy truly loves those who are hurting because it has a plan for restraining the ultimate end of all untethered empathy: death and Hell. This is the necessary end of untethered empathy because the deification of feelings is an idol, and all idols are black holes of inconsolable pain. And of course that is part of their deification. All idols must have a veneer of the infinite. And therefore, you must empathize with that pain forever. The ultimate, consistent end of thinking/feeling pain forever is death (and Hell).
This reminds me of the time (back in 2018) we had the Reformed Historian Dr. Sean Lucas on CrossPolitic to talk about the little-known legacy of black presbyterians in America and some of the appalling ways we treated our black brothers and sisters – which really was appalling. But when it came time to discuss moving forward one of us asked him: “At what point do we say, OK, repentance has occurred, forgiveness has been extended: when can we all move on?” And Dr. Lucas’s answer still haunts me. He said we should keep asking forgiveness until *they* (whoever they may be) say it’s enough.
Notice that: The standard is not God’s Word, God’s justice, or any other objective standard outside of anyone’s feelings. The standard is the hurt feelings of the aggrieved (presumably). But where empathy is metastasizing, the aggrieved feelings are multiplying. Not only do you have the original aggrieved, but in an untethered empathetic culture, you have all the other virtually aggrieved, those who have bound their emotional identities and well-being to the emotional state of others. Again, this creates a living Hell on earth where repentance and forgiveness are impossible. Because when can you ever be sure, you’ve suffered enough?
The Abolition of Truth
In Peter Hitchen’s work The Abolition of Britain, he chronicles the precipitous decline of English culture from 1965 to 1997. Riffing generally off of C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man, Hitchens points out in an early chapter that it was an intentional revolution in the English education system that led the way, moving away from the traditional classical tradition that focused on achievements and heroism and mastering a body of knowledge of truth and facts and instead began to focus on suffering and inequality and experience. Specifically, Hitchens notes that one of the key goals of the modern education movement in Britain was, you guessed it, empathy. For example, Hitchens cites the testimony of one history teacher who recounts how he noticed the history curriculum in particular began changing in the early 1970s from an emphasis on knowledge to an emphasis on skills: “They also felt that one of the key skills was the ability to empathise. They wanted to assess the child’s ability to empathize. But there was a problem. They had to find the material which would allow these things to be taught. They decided it didn’t matter what content you taught. What you were emphasizing were skills and themes.”
And why this change? Hitchens summarizes: “many teachers supported the new history because they thought they were aiding the creation of a multicultural society.” Less emphasis on receiving established truths, and more emphasis on “inquiry into the evidence” says Denis Shemilt in his 1984 book (notice the title!) Empathy and History in the Classroom – there’s that word again. Hitchens again summarizes the overall trends in English history curriculae as “focused upon suffering and deprivation rather than upon achievement or herorism.” Apparently suffering is a more universal experience? A more multicultural uniter of peoples?
The idea seems to be one that was broadly shared by many, what Rusty Reno calls in his book The Return of the Strong Gods – the “postwar consensus,” a broad consensus among many in the western nations that the causes of the World Wars had been too much emphasis on tribe and race, strength and power, military might and nationalistic patriotism. And in place of these emphases, the consensus determined to focus on more so-called universal human values. Enter the focus on multiculturalism, diversity, and our sacred cow, empathy. The “gospel” of this postwar consensus appears to have been that if we can just get everyone to see and feel how similar we all are – that we are all different in our own ways, and perhaps most importantly – all hurting and suffering in our own ways – then we will all empathize with one another and not fight each other as rivals. We will feel bad for one another, understanding that all people tend to act out when they have been hurt, and perhaps then we will not invade one another’s countries, refrain from holocausts and genocides, and avoid world-wide wars in the future.
This postwar consensus and empathetic commitment has reached religious levels of devotion in our day as can be seen by how far this faith has been allowed into the public square and public policy decisions. What was perhaps initially meant to extend to various nationalities and cultures – and this, I take it, is the most charitable read on the apparently superstitious determination of many on the left to continue an almost mind-numbingly insane open borders policy – has now been extended to Drag Queen strip shows and story hours in public libraries and liberal churches and the necessity of offering children the option of permanent sex-change operations and life-altering hormone therapies. If you connect all of those dots, you can squint and barely make out why there’s such intensity of fervor for those things: If you do not empathize with the feelings of the Drag Queens and confused sexual identities of young children, you are basically asking for World War 3 and another holocaust, you racist, antisemitic bigot. But thankfully, it is at this point that a bunch of normal Americans who just want to grill their burgers and watch football on the weekends said, “wut.”
In Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis famously closed his opening salvo on these first stirrings of the empathy movement with this: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” In other words, true and biblical empathy is a byproduct of truth and virtue, but if you jettison the truth and virtue, all you get is the kind of empathy that leaps off of cliffs. Virtue is the chain that tethers all faithful empathy to the rock of Truth.
I doubt that Lewis could have quite imagined the literal fulfillment of his warnings – although That Hideous Strength indicates that his prescience saw an awful lot. We have indeed begun to breed geldings (I mean literally, castrating our children and confused adults) and we are apparently expecting oodles and oodles of multicultural empathetic harmony to be breaking out in our streets. And instead, for some reason, we keep getting riots and school shootings. Apparently, we are not empathizing hard enough. Maybe more therapy and drugs will do the trick. It’s probably Joe Rigney’s fault.
Conclusion
But the thing that Lewis pointed out is that you cannot get the function (virtue) without the organ of reason grasping hold of objective truth (virtue chained to truth). Untethered empathy means the deification of feelings and rejection of objective truth. The deification of feelings is not only ultimately suicidal, it is ultimately selfishly militant. Everyone else’s feelings become competition for your feelings. Everyone else’s hurt, suffering, and oppression becomes an attempt to steal attention and empathy from you or your best friend or your pet cause. Turns out “intersectionality” and “DEI” and “affirmative action” are plenty of fodder for the envious human heart. And now it’s a race to the bottom of the barrel, competing for empathy, competing for most pain and suffering.
The postwar consensus rightly recognized that human beings are naturally sinful, naturally competitive, and naturally envious, and just like St. James said, envy ultimately leads to conflict and war if left unchecked. But what the overly humanistic postwar consensus missed was that these natural sinful tendencies cannot be eradicated merely by taking away strength, power, heroes, historical facts, and truth. Turns out sinful human beings will do this with pain, suffering, and oppression too. The sinful human heart can turn anything into an envious war. And while we’ve been programmed to think that the rich and influential are the most greedy and pugilistic, sometimes the most envious and hateful are those with the least. Children will fight over the shoddiest toy because it is the prized toy. Even beggars will kill for crumbs.
If the unchecked strong gods created wars over which race and nation and military were more mighty, the weak gods have slain their ten thousands by gutting nuclear families in the sexual revolution, butchering 65 million babies by abortion, and now maiming thousands of children in the name of empathizing with confusion, pain, and every sense of abandonment. And we seem to have plenty of conflict and war brewing, all while we’ve had decades of empathy.
The answer is a High Priest who can actually sympathize with us in our weakness, all while refusing to enter in to our sin. He who knew no sin became sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. The Cross of Christ is where all envy and covetousness goes to die. And therefore, it is where all the enmity and wars and conflict go to die.
The demand for untethered empathy is a species of envy packaged up in a satanic gift wrap of compassion. It demands attention, sympathy, dedication without limits because it is based on rejecting the organ that God has given us that teaches us where the limits are, that there are limits. The organ of reason, governed by the Holy Spirit, teaches us to receive the truth, through historical facts, beginning with this glorious gospel. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem almost 2000 years ago, and three days later, having paid the just wages due for sins we committed and sins committed against us and all against a holy God, He was exonerated and rose from the dead. Notice there we have true suffering, true empathy, and a true Hellish agony for sin, and yet it does not go on and on forever. It is finished, it is enough, and Christ is risen. This is the fundamental truth that must anchor all our empathy. And this really is holy ground.
Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash
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