Acrimony about Empathy

One of this year's most shocking developments has been a political fight over empathy -- yes, that empathy -- with serious people disagreeing on whether empathy is a positive or negative force in the course of human affairs. Early in 2025, Vice President Vance invoked a Catholic doctrine called the ordo amoris ("order of love") to argue that our moral duty extends more directly to our immediate friends and family than to people who are more distant in terms of race, religion, geography, or nationality. This drew a direct rebuke from then-Pope Francis I, who argued that the Vice President had misunderstood St. Augustine's writings on the topic. The Pope wrote a defense of unlimited empathy based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, discovered "by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." The Pope's message specifically took issue with new U.S. policies using increased force to target immigrants as criminals and then either imprison them in inhumane conditions or send them back to unsafe parts of the world. An Episcopalian bishop similarly called out President Trump over his immigration policies in a service to bless his inauguration, asking him to "have mercy" on vulnerable people seeking refuge in the U.S. In response, some conservative American churches have come out explicitly against empathy, arguing that too much fellow-feeling for one's human beings is a sign of weakness, a temptation away from God, and a cause of civilizational decline. The new Pope Leo XIV has similarly called for treating all people with "humanity and dignity," and has specifically criticized the United States for our treatment of immigrants.

To unpack the role of empathy in Western civilization, let's start with some fundamentals. People have a system in their brains described as mirror neurons, which help us to match the emotional tone of other people with whom we interact. That's an important Intuitive-mind tool that may partially explain the beneficial effects of psychotherapy. The innate human capacity to develop and maintain relationships is, for example, one of the two major theories that have been proposed to explain the effects of motivational interviewing. Besides these Intuitive-mind benefits, social perception also creates orienting response that leads our Narrative minds to focus on the potential social consequences of our actions. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt in fact argues that the evolutionary purpose of the Narrative mind is to keep us in good relationships with other humans by talking about shared values -- it is the "rider" that sits on top of the "elephant" of our emotions and habits, negotiating with other elephant-riders so that we don't all crash into one another. Social connection also has a demonstrable role in helping us to detect liars and cheats, a skill that's essential for keeping civilization up and running by preventing bad actors from gaining the benefits of group activity without also contributing to the group. 

Given all of these benefits, what's behind the recent condemnation of empathy from powerful groups in our society? If we look at Steven Pinker's analysis of Western civilization, we can see not only steady progress in population indicators like income, health, safety, and freedom, but also that each of these changes has been connected to a broad societal trend toward considering more people as deserving of basic consideration as human beings -- in a word, empathy. The newly emerging conservative perspectives outlined at the top of this blog are not necessary against fellow-feeling in all cases; instead, they encourage people to have that feeling only for a close-knit group of friends and similar acquaintances. In other words, they want to put a fence between "us" and "them," and exclude the people outside the fence from our sense of empathy. I will leave aside for now the basis for setting up the fence -- race, class, gender, religion, political party, or many other factors are possible -- but the tendency to differentiate between in-groups and out-groups can be seen throughout human history. Here in the Western U.S. it was used by Spanish conquistadors, for example, to define native Puebloan people as less-than-human, not deserving of life or property, unless they swore allegiance to the Spanish God and king. That action would bring them at least nominally "inside" the fence, although as fairly low-status members of the "inside" group. Shocking failures of empathy by nominally Christian Spanish soldiers were thus the norm.

Pinker suggests that the historical trend toward society including more and more people on the inside of our mental fences is connected to more reliance on reason, science, and humanism. The emphasis here on "humanism," as opposed to religious understanding, might explain some of the antipathy of some contemporary religious groups toward empathy. But Pinker's critique of religion is specifically about God as a foundation for moral rules, not for empathy; in Christian terms, he is talking about an Old-Testament rather than a New-Testament God. The teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, are largely about empathy, broadening the kingdom of God to include people seen as "outside the fence" in first-century Palestine -- for example, tax collectors, women, foreigners, and lepers. There is a consistent call in the New Testament to broaden the in-group fence or to remove it entirely. This can explain the official opposition of other contemporary religious groups -- such as the 1.2 billion-member Catholic church! -- to policies that call on people to have less empathy instead of more. 

It is somewhere between ironic and reprehensible that people who specifically claim to be the defenders of Western civilization should dissuade others from having empathy, a human tendency that helped us over centuries to build the many benefits of Western civilization. And it's even worse that people who claim to be Christian ignore the teachings of Christ about empathy. Having empathy is nether a weakness nor a sign of secular creep into the realm of religious values. It is instead one of the most important psychological capabilities that have helped humans to achieve unparalleled levels of wellness through centuries of progress in civilization.