Redtree Times

Outlaw’s Vigil (2006)

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, (Volume VI: The Reformation)

There was an article on the Religion News Service about a poll released this past Tuesday from the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute that really hit me hard. While the poll asked questions on a couple of issues of concern for would-be voters in the upcoming election it focused on the place of empathy in our society.

According to the article:

According to a PRRI report released Tuesday (Oct. 20), Democrats (84%) and Independents (70%) are more likely than Republicans (53%) to see empathy as a benefit to society. Forty-three percent of Republicans see empathy as a danger if it leads society away from God.

43% of Republicans see empathy as a danger if it leads society from God?

That blew my mind as I was under the belief that empathy was one of the most basic tenets of all religions. In fact, the poll asked just that question: Is empathy a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society?

In the poll, which consisted of 5200 respondents, only 43% of White Evangelical Protestants agreed with that statement.

In recent years the idea of Toxic Empathy has taken hold in some corners of the evangelical community. Their reasoning is that empathy can be manipulated to induce people with emotional appeals into supporting destructive policies, which is something that that the far-right Evangelicals would never do.

That’s sarcasm, for those of you who need to have it pointed out. Weaponizing empathy and morality is their go-to move. As the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov wrote in his 1920 book, All Things are Possible:

Moral people are the most revengeful of mankind, they employ their morality as the best and most subtle weapon of vengeance.

To demean the place of empathy in a society seems to me to be both cynical and dangerous. What kind of world would it be without empathy? Certainly, a much colder and less humane one. As Gustav M. Gilbert, the prison psychologist at Spandau prison, here Nazi war crimes defendants were held, wrote in 1945:

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

This empathy gap doesn’t surprise me. Rather it was an affirmation of something that I have noted here several times over the 18 years this blog has been online. In a 2011 post I first wrote about it here, citing a University of Michigan study that began in 1979 and is still ongoing that aims to measure empathy among college students. They found that there was steep decline in empathy among student over the first thirty years of the study.  I don’t know what the results show for the fifteen years since then but would be surprised if there was a sudden increase in empathy among the newer sets of students.

But I have a certain amount of faith in the younger generation that they have the ability to recognize empathy for all that it brings to our society. I don’t think I want to live in a world where empathy has little meaning or effect on its citizens. I think that would mean that Will Durant‘s words at the top were coming to fruition, that we would be on the fast track to barbarism.

Maybe that is where we are at the moment– on the brink of barbarism. Unless we are vigilant and fight with whatever means are at hand, it will be here in the blink of an eye. Right now, the most valuable tool we possess is our vote. I hope you all are voting early or have a plan to for voting. Do not think your vote or voice does not count. Your vote and voice mean more at this time than perhaps at any other time in our history.

Here’s a song that I shared here about six years back. It’s Joe South and his 1970 hit, Walk a Mile in My Shoes. It’s great and catchy callout for our need for empathy. I had the single when I was a kid and it may well have informed the worldview I still possess. The power of art, folks.

By the way, the painting at the top is from my Outlaws series from 20 years ago– man, time flies! It hangs in my studio and is in my sightline when I turn to the right from my seat at the desk. Though some see the character in it as a predator, I see him as someone filled with an unrelenting sense of terror. I used it today because that is what I envision our life might be like if we descend into barbarism– always fearful, forever on guard and untrusting. I, myself, see this painting as a warning, a symbol of the loss of society.

Vote.