Toxic Empathy?

Mark Standish reflects on how empathy’s real danger isn’t that it makes us vulnerable to others, but that it can quietly protect us from them.

Mark Standish is an ICS-VUA PhD candidate, as well as ICS’s Communications Coordinator.

Photo by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash

The Force of Empathy

I have to admit that when I first heard the phrase “toxic empathy,” I was caught off guard. For much of my life, especially my evangelical life, I had taken for granted that empathy was pretty much equivalent to love. So, when I started hearing evangelicals decrying “empathy” as the root of our contemporary moral crises, it gave me pause.

Of course, I’m not particularly surprised that Doug Wilson and his ilk believe that empathy is “sinful.” I am, however, surprised that so many evangelicals find it a palatable claim. In other words, what unsettles me is less the argument than the appetite for it.

But perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising. The timing of the phrase’s popularity is telling, coming on the heels of the popularization of the phrase “toxic masculinity.” It’s also telling that many of the evangelicals who use it—or make arguments to its effect—are obsessed with the contemporary character and position of men in America. Obsessed. Consider Wilson’s appropriately titled blog post “Empathy, Effeminacy, and the Fall of Man,” in which he writes that “over against [God’s] plain command, given in large print, what did Adam have? A feeling in his heart. Empathy with Eve. He had a case of the feels, and it was forcible.” It forced him to sin.

Setting aside that he derives this conclusion from Paradise Lost, and not Genesis, Wilson’s point is clear: the problem with empathy is that it is a force that competes with God’s; it pulls people away from God. For Wilson, then, to be empathetic is to be affected by people, and, consequently, not affected by God.

I think it’s important to pause here and reflect, not on empathy, but on what Wilson believes is its untainted counterpart, masculinity. In Wilson’s blog post, the “Fall of Man” refers to both original sin and his diagnosis of the current state of masculinity. Near the end of his post, he writes:

In countless homes, in a multitude of therapy sessions, in the dictatorship of how pretty much anything “makes somebody feel,” a central driving problem is men following their wives instead of taking godly responsibility.

Here, Wilson positions what he might term “godly masculinity” in direct opposition to empathy. To be a godly man, according to Wilson, is to be affected only by God. Listening to your wife? That’s weakness. Sinful, even. Godly masculinity, then, is the ability to control who or what affects you. And, of course, when it comes to marriage, the greatest affect is love. This suggests that when Wilson argues that empathy is sinful because you (or God) are not in control of this force, he also means that you are not in control of your love and that godly masculinity entails the cultivation of properly controlled love (I can almost hear ICS professor emeritus Jim Olthuis protesting as I write this).

Controlling Empathy

While I find the palatability of Wilson’s position genuine cause for mourning, I think the extremity of his view can reveal how many Christians conceive of empathy and love. My hunch is that Wilson’s position is more continuous with many mainstream understandings of empathy than we would like to admit.

Even so, there is one very basic point on which I find myself agreeing with him, at least if we realize that Wilson is really talking about love. Love is a force.

I’m not convinced, however, that empathy pulls like a force. At least, not all forms of empathy. From a young age, I was taught what empathy is in relation to compassion. Compassion, I was taught, is the state of feeling-with. Empathy, for its part, is something of a step up from compassion: instead of simply feeling-with, empathy is the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes—to see-as another.

Here’s where things start to get confusing to me. While it’s clear that we can feel-with, it’s not at all clear that we can see-as. Not fully, anyway. The difference comes down to what each act asks of us. To feel-with is to be affected by someone else. To see-as is to know what someone else is going through. But if we can’t fully know someone else’s experience, when we’re being empathetic, what is it that we think we know? Likely, it’s our own experience and perspective. We just trick ourselves into thinking it’s our counterpart’s perspective. And what does this accomplish for me? Insofar as those imagined thoughts affect my thinking and action, I get to control their thoughts and their perspective and do not have to be affected.

There’s another reason why I find the conflation of empathy and compassion confusing. When I wish to see something, I can do so from a distance or from behind a pane of glass or through the screen on my phone. To a large degree, sight can be one-way; I can often put myself in a position to see and not be seen. Feeling is different. When I feel someone touch me, for example, they feel me touch them. In this way, feeling operates more as a dialogue than a monologue. Put simply, in feeling, I cannot escape being affected, whereas in sight, I can sustain the illusion that I am unaffected.

All told, my problem with empathy, and why I think empathy can be toxic, is not that it makes us vulnerable to the influence of others, nor is it because it’s toxic to imagine what another person is going through. My problem with empathy is that, under the guise of loving another person, we can use it as a tool for controlling another’s perspective and its potential to affect us, rendering that perspective inert. Compounding this danger is that empathy escapes scrutiny through its close association with love. Instead of dancing in the wild spaces of love, empathy can be the implement through which I find myself dancing in a room of my own making, with another version of myself, without having to stop and reflect.

You can probably imagine how this approach might have real consequences. On a personal level, empathy can allow us to nod along to someone sharing their plight, while having decided in advance the cause of, and the remedy for, their situation. Culturally, it can buttress simplistic beliefs about the motivations of people in societies that we perceive as in need, because that’s how we would feel in their situation. Stepping back, should it surprise us that empathy scaled up to the level of international politics and foreign aid can lead to wasted resources, stoked resentment, and, at its worst, calamity? As usual, Jesus shows us an alternative way of encountering/being-encountered-by another.

The Wild in Love

25 Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years. 26 She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better but rather grew worse. 27 She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 for she said, “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.” 29 Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30 Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my cloak?” 31 And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” 32 He looked all around to see who had done it. 33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

(Mark 5:25–34, NRSVue)

I don’t think it’s incidental that the Gospels often portray Jesus as being touched by people. The philosopher Richard Kearney picks up on this in his book Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense. Exploring Mark 5, Kearney zeroes in on the dynamic between Jesus and the woman. The woman touches Jesus; in the same instant, Jesus touches the woman. Here, the woman is healed because she compels Jesus—it is, after all, her faith that makes her well. She compels him, not because Jesus is able to put himself in her shoes and know her thoughts—it’s unclear whether he ever learns of her situation—but because she touches him. As Kearney puts it in his characteristically alliterative turn of phrase, “The contact is carnal before it is cognitive.”

Although there’s no mention of the words “love,” “compassion,” or even “pity” in this passage, I think it represents the quintessential image of love. The woman isn’t healed by virtue of Jesus’s capacity to understand her situation. He doesn’t even choose to heal the woman, nor does he choose to feel her touch. He isn’t in control of his love. In fact, Jesus’s parting remarks give the impression that she has more control over the situation than he does. Talk about having a “case of the feels”! While this might exemplify the kind of empathy that Wilson deems sinful, it isn’t the kind of toxic empathy that I’ve been describing. Instead of an implement for control, Jesus’s compassion is found in the dance of affecting and being affected, which, by definition, is out of our control. ◆

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