Article“Pyjamas? Poor people don’t wear pyjamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pyjamas an unnecessary elite indulgence.”
It might be surprising that these words are from J.D. Vance’s award-winning memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Chronicling Vance’s troubled childhood, disadvantaged beginnings and escape from poverty, an early review called it the most important book written in the Trump era.
At its core, Hillbilly Elegy is about what happens when empathy is absent. Ironically, however, its author – as US Vice President and the man anointed by Donald Trump to assume the MAGA mantle — now attacks empathy as weak, irresponsible and wrong-headed.
Vance is not alone. In recent months, Elon Musk referred to empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation”. Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad coined the term “suicidal empathy”, claiming that ignoring self-interest leads to self-destruction. Such thinking may be newly emboldened, but not new. In the middle of the twentieth century, Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy resisted the obligation of empathy.
Empathy has always had its detractors, but its efficacy is difficult to ignore. “Our elegy is a sociological one”, writes Vance in his book. It is an elegy that Zohran Mamdani — the recent winner of the Democratic party’s primary race for mayor of New York City — used to great success. The 33-year-old Muslim socialist defeatedestablishment candidate and former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, on an openly “Robin Hood” policy platform. Mamdani ran on rent freezes, more affordable housing and higher taxes for the rich. His policies and his rhetoric were drenched in empathy, articulating and anchoring his platform by means of the struggles of his voting base.
On the other end of the political spectrum, Donald Trump’s two presidential election victories were built on his capacity to speak to the nation’s failure to empathise with its heartland. Ironically, some of Trump’s allies who now raise concerns about empathy owe much of their success to it.
Why is empathy so hard?
Our struggle with empathy may partly be explained by its scale of difficulty. Empathy demands something of us. It requires imagination and perspective — that we put ourselves in another’s position — to better understand how they feel and why they feel it. It runs counter to our instincts. As a result, empathy tends to run with the grain of our opinions.
For example, a study headed Dan Kahan from Yale University at one point showed participants a photo of a protest. When told it was an anti-abortion rally at a health clinic, conservatives considered it peaceful while progressives saw it as violent and threatening. These views were flipped when people were told it was an LGBTQI+ rights rally in the context of military recruitment, with progressives now seeing the same photo as peaceful and conservatives seeing it as threatening.
To some degree, such tribalism will always be with us. Wherever there are people, there will always be disagreement. But where there is an absence of empathy disagreement will be propelled into vitriol.
Perhaps defenders of empathy — like me — have missed something. Ironically, our problem may be that we have failed to adequately empathise. We label those we consider unempathetic as callous or cruel without seeking out the reasons for their views. Perhaps we need to do better at empathising with people who share suspicions about empathy.
I wonder how many of Donald Trump’s critics have taken a moment to genuinely consider why 77 million Americans voted for him last year. Not many, I’d wager. It’s easier to brand them, judge them and move on. Such selective regard can quickly deteriorate into a smug, middle-class “elite empathy” — the kind that easily extends to compassion for the poverty-stricken in far-off lands but fails to engage with the plight of those unlike us a few suburbs over.
Vance’s old calls to empathy in Hillbilly Elegy are well-founded. His more recent attacks on empathy are not. Decoding and responding to such attacks may require us to look deeper and to look up.
Empathy and the order of loves
In his Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche attacked empathy as an enemy of self-interest — he condemned it as a weak, otherworldly, altogether Christian idea. Ironically, recent critics of empathy do so in the name of defending biblical Christianity, not condemning it. In his book The Sin of Empathy, American theologian Joe Rigney argues that untethered empathy is antithetical to moral truth and adherence to biblical principles.
Similar critiques have also been made under the banner of Christian nationalism, which labels empathy as dangerous, toxic and therefore worthy of being struck from the Christian vocabulary. In her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez ties this trend to a particular brand of Christian hyper-masculinity that rejects empathy as weak, capitulating and unbiblical.
The critique of empathy tends to draw on the Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity”, which grew out of Augustine’s conception of the ordo amoris (ordered loves) — namely, the principle that we must direct our love to the right objects and in the right order. For those suspicious of empathy, the “sin of empathy” can violate a commitment to God, to family, to nation. Such prioritised reasoning has been used to justify everything from reduced social spending to economic isolationism to military proliferation.
But Augustine would be unlikely to join the chorus. For him, the proper order for our love is: God, then neighbour, then self and finally material goods. Peace and justice are disturbed when this order is disrupted: when we put ourselves before our neighbours or before God, say. The right ordering seems entirely compatible with, if not contingent on, empathy.
Empathy, people and ideas
Why is empathy taking damage from Christians? It could come down to a toxic combination of economic exclusion and existential dissatisfaction: free markets have failed many people materially while secularism has agitated them spiritually. According to Martin Wolf, in his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, a lack of inclusive economic growth is modern liberalism’s greatest failure. This accompanies what Justin Brierley and others have observed as the resurgence of faith and the decline of New Atheism.
The heady notion that the collapse of communism and the toppling of the Berlin Wall would be followed by the steady march of secularism and laissez-faire economics ended up failing, or excluding, too many people. We are always looking for answers, anchors, protection and economic inclusion. In this context, unanchored empathy — catalysed and propelled by identity politics — is perhaps understandably seen by some as posing a threat.
Must we, then, choose between empathy and principles? Between civility and conviction? Between respect and truth? The answer may lie in the frequently overlooked difference between empathising with people and empathising with ideas.
According to biblical teaching all people are created equal, but all ideas are not. Accepting all ideas as equally worthy leads to unlimited contingency — a world in which all opinions are given equal regard, regardless of their truth-value. But this need not be the case. Empathy need not entail agreement. The Christian idea of unconditional love for people does not equate to an unconditional affirmation of ideas. Likewise, contingency in the realm of ideas does not equate to contingency in the value and dignity of people.
Assertions that all truth claims are relative and moral ideas are merely pragmatic preferences — if widely accepted — would throw modern liberal society into a tailspin. What becomes of universal human rights, human dignity, the rule of law, democracy and the nuclear family? Such concerns understandably lead to suspicions about empathy. As C.S. Lewis put it, “you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.”
The latest campaign against empathy is — at least, in part — a fear of such creeping relativism. It should not be ignored. But convictions and empathy can co-exist. The freedoms of speech, thought, religion and conscience must be protected. But we can disagree with people objectively while better understanding their subjective experiences. Robust empathy is not about changing our minds, but engaging with those with whom we disagree. It is a recognition that in plural societies, cohesion — not consensus — is our objective. And to live peaceably with one another, it helps to understand why they are the way they are.
Even the most trivial traces of empathy can have sub-conscious effect. In his book Mindstuck: Mastering the Art of Changing Minds, Michael McQueen unpacks a study in which white participants who sipped from a cup of water, while watching a black actor doing the same, had lower levels of implicit racial prejudice. I remember once being cut off in traffic by a careless driver. My blood pressure surged. I muttered some judgemental declarations to myself. I contemplated punching the horn in a frenzy of self-righteousness. Then I overtook the car and saw the driver was a mother with crying screaming kids. She was crying too. I’m a parent. I know that feeling. It didn’t excuse her driving, but it helped me deal with the moment.
Empathy does not demand an open mind, but it does require an open heart. It is not an act of persuasion, but of humanisation. Perhaps that’s why the Bible rejects the choice between conviction and empathy as false. Instead, it calls people to hold fast to that which is true while bearing each other’s burdens, mourning with those who mourn, and clothing ourselves with concern for others.
“Do not forget your humanity”
In his book The Master and His Emissary, neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist argues that modern society is what it is, not because of our inventions, industry or markets, but because of our “inter-subjectivity” — that is, our capacity to empathise. It’s not merely the left-brain pursuit of utility that got us here, but right-brain empathy. Empathy makes the modern world tick and makes modern debate more gracious. Its objective is not agreement, but civility.
Whether it’s antisemitism, tax reform or infidelity uncovered at a Coldplay concert, our algorithmically crafted echo-chambers tend to spark opinions that run hot. In the fog of perpetual war — cultural, economic, military and otherwise — the right kind of empathy is a key ingredient for a cohesive society. Not the blind acceptance of all ideas as equal. Not the silencing of voices or the erosion of freedoms. Not a right not to be offended. But a collective commitment to better understanding each other’s views and experiences.
As the vice president and his family holiday in the Cotswolds, perhaps he should avail himself of the opportunity to re-read his old book. It’s time for more empathy, not less. Empathy works best when it is principled, discerning and indiscriminate. As comedian Dave Chappelle put it, quite movingly, at the start of US President Donald Trump’s second term:
The presidency is no place for petty people … [M]an, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you. Whether they like you or not, they’re all counting on you. The whole world is counting on you. And I mean this when I say this: good luck. Please do better next time. Please all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity and please have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.
Empathy is not a path to consensus, but an instrument to glaze our prejudices and temper our vitriol. As we navigate perhaps the most polarised era in human history, the words of Henry David Thoreau remain a timeless challenge and invitation: “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
Max Jeganathan is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He is undertaking a PhD on the ethical foundations of liberalism. This article was first published in ABC Religion & Ethics.