Empathy & Humanity – Charting A Course Together Into The Future

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Jennifer Rubin, in a post on The Contrarian about Passover, refers to the deportation flights being conducted by the current US administration, during which detainees are shackled and manacled during the entire journey. According to ProPublica, the flight attendants on those deportation flights are being told, “Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact.” In addition, they are told that, in the event of an emergency, evacuating detainees is not a priority or even their responsibility. It is hard not to make a connection between this lack of empathy and what the guards at Nazi death camps were told by their superior officers as they herded their captives into the showers to be asphyxiated by Zylon B gas.

Rubin was writing about Pesach, the traditional name for the Jewish holiday of Passover. “Pesach means many things to Jews around the world: remembering the story of Jews’ flight from Egypt, the struggle against slavery, [and] the quest for freedom.” she wrote. She then quoted from the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a former chief rabbi of the UK, who summarized the message of Pesach as empathy. “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger. You were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9).“

“Empathy is strongest in groups where people identify with each other — family, friends, clubs, gangs, religions or races,” Rubin writes. She adds, “The corollary to this is that the stronger the bond within the group, the sharper the suspicion and fear of those outside the group. It is easy to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ It is very hard indeed to love, or even feel empathy for, a stranger.” And yet is not the love for strangers a central tenet of the teachings of Jesus? Why else would the Son of God visit the Earth if not to teach us to love all God’s children?

The obligation to care for strangers is critical, Rubin says, particularly because they are not part of the community. This Passover season, we should all “not only keep strangers front and center; we should commit to action on their behalf. Merely thinking about others is hardly sufficient.” In the words of Rabbi Sacks, “[A]ctive empathy is life-changing, not only for you but for the people with whom you interact.” We all have the obligation to tend to the stranger, to alleviate his or her suffering, and to oppose abuse of power, Rubin suggests.

But that is not how many Americans view the world, particularly Christian fundamentalists, who — of all people — should embrace the teachings of Jesus most fiercely. There is a long and eloquent article published by The Guardian on April 8, 2025 by Julia Carrie Wong entitled “Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy,” in which she says, “Trump’s actions are irreconcilable with Christian compassion. But an unholy alliance seeks to cast empathy as a parasitic plague.” Please read it in its entirety if you have an opportunity to do so.

Civilizational Suicidal Empathy

During his latest appearance with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk said, “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Lately, Musk has been raving about a “woke mind virus.” Many thought that was just a phrase he dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor. But in fact, it is the creation of Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor, who claims western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries. The similarity to another extremist idea — the great replacement theory, for instance — is readily apparent.

Saad uses examples of parasites to argue that certain “pathogenic” ideas — such as postmodernism, social constructivism, and radical feminism — can take over a person’s brain and force them to act counter to their own survival. He frequently cites the wood cricket, which can be infected by a hair worm that hijacks its brain and forces it to jump into water. Once in water, the hair worm completes its reproductive cycle while the host cricket drowns.

“When this guy who hates water is parasitized, it merrily and happily jumps to its suicide in the service of this hair worm,” he said in a recent lecture. Then comes his real message. “Queers for Palestine are wood crickets.” Saad claims to support empathy “at the right place, to the right people, at the right amount.” just so long as he gets to choose and not some queer, gay, brown, Muslim person or — Heaven Forfend! — some woman!

A Plea For Mercy

On January 21, 2025, the Right Rev Mariann Budde spoke to the newly inaugurated president of the United States at the Washington National Cathedral. Immigrants and LGBTQ+ children were living in fear, she told him. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” Her words touched off a firestorm among some evangelicals, who saw in them three outrages — the ordination of women, tolerance of LGBTQ+ people, and support for immigrants. All three share a toxic, rotten core — empathy.

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” tweeted the Christian podcaster Ben Garrett. Next to a photo of Budde in her religious garb he wrote, “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too.” Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted, “This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.” Pastor Joe Rigney wrote in the evangelical publication World, “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness. Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy.”

Wow! Such outright hatred and loathing for women. According to these people, a woman’s place is in the the kitchen, chained to the stove with just enough slack to reach the bedroom! Perhaps it is time to revisit the words of Harry Belafonte in an article I wrote three months ago entitled The Empowerment Of Women. Belafonte told me that the future of America was contingent upon the empowerment of women, but today we have a woman — Allie Beth Stuckey — using words like “satanic” to describe people of her own gender. Rush Limbaugh, who rode the term “feminazi” to fame and fortune, would be so proud.

Empathy Vilified

Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, told Julia Wong that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had “never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources. The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community. To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanization of others to open discrimination and maltreatment.”

The right wing critique of empathy is not an attempt to find a better way to achieve altruistic ends, Wong says. Rather it is an excuse to turn away from altruism entirely. “We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale. While the religious right attends to a moral justification, the secular right is hard at work on a pseudo-scientific one. Meanwhile, the MAGA movement has created an online culture that is steeped in an aesthetic of anti-empathy, from dismissing fellow human beings as “NPCs” — non-player characters — to joking about relaxing to the sounds of human bondage,” she wrote.

“For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat. It can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to ‘save’ America — whether they be cutting off millions of people from live saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests.

“The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees, and feminists.”

X

The unifying theme is a deep, abiding fear and loathing of empathy. As the Earth hurtles toward an ever hotter future, one in which millions if not billions of people will die as the direct result of human actions, a lack of empathy seems to be the key to avoiding any significant action to reduce the consequences of human activity. Call it a “fossil fuel mind virus” if you like. An online world makes anti-empathetic thinking more prevalent while enormous increases in data centers and artificial intelligence will aggravate any already untenable situation. The virus we should be focused on is not what infects the brains of wood crickets, but the sewer of thought that infects anti-social media. How fitting that the name of one of the most powerful of those online cesspools is “X.”