Towards the end of the summer, the Tory-Reform defector Robert Jenrick authored an op-ed piece for the Daily Telegraph about the seemingly impossible economics of rising benefits bills because of mental ill-health. In his capacity as Reform’s Treasury spokesman, his task was to big up its plans to cut 25% of so-called welfare spending by 2030, and thereby tackle what he called the state’s “suicidal empathy”. Straight away, I wondered where this most opportunistic politician had borrowed that phrase from, and instantly found out: a book with the same title, published this year by the Canadian academic Gad Saad, whom the dust jacket describes as having particular expertise in “the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour”.
It comes with an endorsement from Elon Musk. It is, in fact, a baggy mess, glueing together absurd straw men (“suicidal empathy can cause people to care more about rapists and other felons than their victims”) to familiar arguments about immigration, Covid lockdowns and whether the word “imbecile” is offensive. One of its most head-turning claims is that the west’s supposed embrace of degenerate woke-ism is largely traceable to the fact that “women are much more likely to succumb to such emotional and ideological capture”.
At a push, its most useful function is as a meandering guide to the soup of ideas simmering in the minds of hardcore Maga voters as they prepared for this week’s midterms. There is a huge amount of this stuff around, crystallising the philosophical core of Trumpism and its adherent movements across the world – roughly, the idea that might is right and compassion is for wimps. We are now well beyond the culture wars and the US right’s long history of (to put it politely) Christian revisionism, and into the very serious prospect of a decisive western moral counter-revolution that may already be under way.
That’s certainly the intention of the slew of voices responsible for podcasts, social media posts and other Maga potboilers – witness 2024’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, by the Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, or last year’s The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits, by the rightwing pastor Joe Rigney. But here’s the crucial thing: the same moral push is also supported by alarming numbers of regular people. According to polling by the Public Religion Research Institute, while 84% of registered US Democrats support the proposition that empathy helps build a healthy society, only 54% of Republicans agree.
Perhaps most strikingly, to quote from the survey’s accompanying blurb: “White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group in which a majority does not agree that empathy is a foundational moral value (42%). Instead, a majority (54%) say empathy can be dangerous.” Much the same seems to be true of that possible Trump successor, JD Vance – a Catholic convert who now has the rare distinction of having locked horns with two popes. In April, Leo XIV plainly decried the US’s attacks on Iran, insisting: “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Vance’s response?
Then and only then, he said, could you “focus [sic] and prioritize the rest of the world”. Soon after, our era’s most pre-eminent moral philosopher was interviewed by the podcaster Joe Rogan. At that point, I went straight back to one of my favourite modern books: the classicist and historian Tom Holland’s bestseller Dominion, that brilliant history of Christianity and its global impact that illuminates how an emphasis on what we now call empathy (the word was only created in 1908, as the English translation of the German “Einfühlung”, or “in-feeling”) was one of that religion’s philosophical revolutions.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
