Get Your Smart On
The dirty logic underwriting the right-wing war on empathy.
This piece examines how Paul Bloom, in his book Against Empathy, uses a rhetorical strategy called dissociation to cut a distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy, to disparage emotional empathy as leading to irrational or immoral outcomes, associating it with women. He implies that the female empath is the opposite of a male sociopath and makes emapths psychologically and physically ill. This framing of empathy is an attack on moral autonomy meant to increase his followers’ reliance on external authority figures from the religious right. If you want to learn how the cultural war on our multicultural democracy is being waged, empathy is a key case study. It is part of a series that includes the pieces below:
In The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (1968), Chaim Perelman identifies a rhetorical strategy he names “dissociation.” Dissociation involves breaking apart a concept into two or more parts to elevate one while discrediting the other. It is a rhetorical move often used in cults, and other manipulative or authoritarian groups, to control beliefs and behaviors. It can be used to separate and isolate an in-group from an out-group, in order to control thought more easily. This rhetorical strategy is one part of a larger “thought reform” or “brainwashing” toolkit that cults and high-control groups use to keep members aligned and compliant.
This is a strategy employed by Paul Bloom in his book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2006). He prepares for his war on empathy by cutting a distinction between “cognitive empathy” and “emotional empathy.” In emotional empathy, you feel along with another, experience what they experience. In the more restrained cognitive empathy, you understand (intellectually) what the other is going through, but without feeling the feelings. But cognitive empathy already has a name: sympathy, or feeling for another. Sympathy is often contrasted with empathy, feeling with. While sympathy has a long history as a legitimate part of Christian compassion, according to Bloom, empathy is a newfangled invention that is not to be trusted.1
Having cut his distinction between the acceptable cognitive empathy (sympathy, really) and emotional empathy, Bloom sets out to denigrate emotional empathy. His argument rests on deeply ingrained dichotomies between cognitive/mind/reason versus emotional/body/irrational. Empathy is an excessive emotion that leads us to make irrational and sometimes immoral choices. When we empathize with another, empathy can lead us to favor them over someone who is further from us. This may be appropriate in the realm of intimate relationships — Bloom mentions a father’s attitude towards his child — but it is not appropriate where it comes to matters of justice, policymaking, or morality writ large.2
Getting caught up in the suffering of others, which he calls “empathetic distress,'“ makes us act in ways that are not based in the rational calculation of the greatest good. The well being of thousands of others can be trumped by emphatic feelings for a single concrete other. Then there is the idea that achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain (like in parenting), which is enabled by intelligent love, but can be impeded by dumb empathy.3 Finally, there is the counter-intuitive claim that empathy leads to cruelty. Here, there is slippage in his distinction, as Bloom leans on Adam Smith's discussion of how sympathy with a victim against an offender can animate a desire to act with cruelty. (Bloom wants to attribute this negative outcome to empathy, but Smith speaks of sympathy. This shows how difficult it is to keep sympathy separate from empathy.) Although Smith acknowledges that sympathy can lead to strong reactions like resentment and the desire for a cruel form of justice, nonetheless he emphasizes that emotions are an integral part of moral judgement.
These are all basic problems of ethics4, which Bloom is laying at empathy’s feet. For example, Aristotle spent quite a bit of time on the role of the emotions in virtuous action, his account being focused on weakness of the will; ergo, the tension between reason and emotion in ethics is neither new nor special to empathy, but balancing these is part of the work of being a good human. And the problem of the concrete versus abstract other, of caring for those near more than those far away, goes back to before the birth of Socrates and Western Philosophy, to Confucian Philosophy.5 All these problems sound legitimate because they are legitimate problems, but they are not problems specific to feeling with others, or empathy.
To attack this position at the level of its assumptions, we could turn the tables and argue in favor of emotions and feelings, or work to trouble any easy distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy. Others have already done this work, and I don't feel that I need to rehearse it here — I do some of this in “Empathy and Its Discontents.” Right now, my goal is not necessarily to mount a counter argument or a defence of empathy, but to show how the war on empathy can serve as an example of cultural warfare, in this case waged by evangelical Christian conservatism against our multicultural democracy.
Another true and tried tactic Bloom uses to denigrate empathy is to associate empathy with women; he feminizes and sexualizes empathy as a way to further discredit it. To begin, Bloom makes an appeal to a common idea that men do not have enough empathy, and yet, it is women's high levels of empathy that prove problematic. Bloom references Simon Baron-Cohen's work in The Science of Evil (2011) to back his claim that women, on average, are higher on “empathizing” when compared to men, who are higher on "systematizing" (analyzing and constructing systems). Does this sound familiar? It is akin to Lawrence Kohlberg’s claim that boys and men make moral choices based on principle, ranking higher on his scale of moral agency.6
I quote Bloom’s account of Baron-Cohen at length:
“Plausibly enough, he assumes that people differ in how empathic they are, and he posits an empathy bell curve. It starts at Level 0, where a person feels no empathy at all, as with some psychopaths and narcissists. And it runs all the way to Level 6, the point at which an individual is ‘continuously focused on other people’s feelings ... in a constant state of hyperarousal, so that other people are never off their radar.’
We don’t have a name for such Level 6 people, and there’s not as much research into them as for Level 0 people, so, absent the research, Baron-Cohen provides a sketch of one such Level 6 individual:
Hannah is a psychotherapist who has a natural gift for tuning into how others are feeling. As soon as you walk into her living room, she is already reading your face, your gait, your posture. The first thing she asks you is ‘How are you?’ but this is no perfunctory platitude. Her intonation — even before you have taken off your coat — suggests an invitation to confide, to disclose, to share. Even if you just answer with a short phrase, your tone of voice reveals to her your inner emotional state, and she quickly follows up your answer with ‘You sound a bit sad. What’s happened to upset you?’
Before you know it, you are opening up to this wonderful listener, who interjects only to offer sounds of comfort and concern, to mirror how you feel, occasionally offering soothing words to boost you and make you feel valued. Hannah is not doing this because it is her job to do so. She is like this with her clients, her friends, and even people she has only just met. Hannah’s friends feel cared for by her, and her friendships are built around sharing confidences and offering mutual support. She has an unstoppable drive to empathize.
It is easy to see what Baron-Cohen finds so impressive here. There is something moving about this portrayal. There are times when I would very much wish to have a Hannah in my life."
We’ll discuss the theory of mirroring in an upcoming piece, but note here how Blooms description lines up with the mirroring a sociopath does mimicking human emotion. Is it moving… or rather, slightly threatening? Here is a person who can penetrate your feelings and get inside your head without your consent. There is fear here, but also desire — how he wishes for a Hannah in his life! Someone to do the emotional labor and anticipate his needs. But of course, this woman does not exist. She is a made up avatar.7
Continuing the quote:
“But thinking about Hannah leads us to raise some concerns with empathy. And to be fair, Baron-Cohen raises them too; in a footnote he mentions that there are studies on the risks of high empathy—but then he says that he doesn’t think these risks would apply to someone like Hannah.
Well, let’s see. Consider first what it must be like to be Hannah. Baron-Cohen is clear that her concern for other people isn’t because she likes them or respects them. And it’s not because she endorses some guiding principle of compassion and kindness. Rather, Hannah is compelled by her hyperarousal — her drive is unstoppable. Just as a selfish person might go through life concerned with his own pleasure and pain and indifferent to the pleasure and pain of others —99 for him and 1 for everyone else — Hannah is set up so that the experiences of others are always in her head — 99 for everyone else and 1 for her.
*This has a cost. It’s no accident, in this regard, that Baron-Cohen chose a woman as his example….” *(My bolding.)
To his credit, Bloom is focused on a footnote (we return to this footnote below) and tells us that Baron-Cohen would not agree with his interpretation (he wouldn’t). Let’s take a closer look: He straight-up asserts that the female avatar Hannah doesn’t like or respect her clients. How would he know this? For those of you who have experienced empathy, is it possible to feel empathy for someone who you don’t like, or respect? (To be clear, I am implying that only a person lacking in empathy would make such a claim, further implying that Bloom is lacking in empathy. Seeing as he is male, this squares with his own account.) Next, he explicitly precludes her from feeling compassion or kindness, which he identifies as “principles” and not feelings, thus reinforcing a difference between these and empathy itself. Her state is one of “hyperarousal,” whereby he sexualizes the feeling of empathy — avatar-Hannah is getting off on the feeling of empathy. Her drive is unstoppable, he says. 😳 And for this, she is selfish — just as a man who is only concerned with his own pleasure and pain is indifferent to other’s feelings. It is no coincidence that this pathologically indifferent person is imagined as a man — her excessive feeling is just the exact opposite. But then Bloom messes up a little bit, saying that her feelings of empathy are all in her head, by which he means she is crazy in the head, but this contradicts the idea that empathy is not a cognitive thing.
It becomes clearer why he begins his gender-powered denigration with the idea of the male deficiency in empathy. It is clear that he wants to paint the feminized empath as the flip-side of the male sociopath. This all feels very common-sense because gender is already understood to be a binary difference (for his audience specifically), so he mounts his distinction onto gender difference. Reason/emotion is also mounted on gender (reason:masculine::emotion:feminine), so he further entrenches his distinction in major faults of Western thought. By feminizing and sexualizing empathy, he simultaneously denigrates women, and tells men that to feel or show empathy is to behave like a woman, and those who behave like women are treated like women, which is to say not good.
Bloom takes it one step further, arguing that what is a psychological ailment in women manifests in physical illness. Picking back up where we left off, he brings in the work of Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz:
“This has a cost. It’s no accident, in this regard, that Baron-Cohen chose a woman as his example. In a series of empirical and theoretical articles, Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz explore sex differences in the propensity for what they call “unmitigated communion,” defined as 'an excessive concern with others and placing others’ needs before one’s own.' To measure an individual’s unmitigated communion, they developed a simple nine-item scale, where people rank themselves from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” on statements like
“For me to be happy, I need others to be happy.”
“I can’t say no when someone asks me for help.”
“I often worry about others’ problems.”
Women typically score higher than men on this scale—and Hannah would, I bet, score high indeed.”
Let’s take a look at this “unmitigated communion.” In psychology and the social sciences, “communion” describes the tendency to be oriented toward relationships and to be concerned with others. It comes from personality and gender studies in psychology, based in the work of David Bakan (1966), who contrasted “communion” (connectedness, relationships) with “agency” (self-assertion, independence). The adjective “unmitigated” is a way to say “complete” and “total” but in a negative sense, as in an unmitigated disaster. Saying that someone faced a situation with unmitigated confidence means that their confidence was unwarranted.
“Unmitigated communion” is a phrase used in psychology, especially in the context of personality and interpersonal relationships, to refer to an excessive or extreme focus on others to the detriment of oneself. The term was coined by Bakan, and later elaborated on by Helgeson and Fritz’s “A Theory of Unmitigated Communion” (1998). Helgeson and Fritz’s work focuses on health psychology, gender, and interpersonal processes, particularly in the context of unmitigated communion and its effects on health outcomes. Their work is broadly feminist, showing how self-sacrificing tendencies can negatively impact health and well-being, but in this case Bloom uses it to pathologize empathy via women. But to do this, he needs to bring in yet another author, Barbara Oakley.
Drawing on Oakley’s concept of “pathological altruism,” Bloom quotes her to say: “It’s surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women’s generally stronger empathy for and focus on others” (Oakley, page 69). He uses her work to assert that empathy can be harmful to the empathizer. More specifically, Bloom uses Oakley's observation and the concept of "pathological altruism" to bolster his argument that empathy, specifically the drive fuelled by receptivity to suffering (as in his example of "Hannah"), can be harmful in the long run:
“Rather, Hannah’s problem is that her caring is driven by her receptivity to suffering. She appears to be high in unmitigated communion. The research that I just reviewed suggests that this is harmful in the long run.
This concern takes us in a new direction. My argument in previous chapters has been that empathy, because of its spotlight nature, is a poor moral guide. It is biased, it is innumerate, and so on. But here I am suggesting that empathy can also have negative consequences for those who experience it.”
Simon Barren-Cohen mentions Oakley’s “pathological altruism” in that footnote Bloom references (above) at the beginning of this part of his account. Barren-Cohen describes “pathological altruism” as a state where people are “so moved by other’s emotions that they are overwhelmed by them,” but he explicitly differentiates this from his concept of "Level 6" or "super-empathy" while noting a potential overlap. However, Bloom directly integrates Oakley’s “pathological altruism” and Helgeson and Fritz’s research on women, empathy, and health outcomes into his main argument against empathy. In what is becoming established as a pattern, Bloom uses the work of others in a way that they themselves would not have agreed to, poisoning the well of knowledge about empathy.
This work is not necessarily going to convince those of us who do value empathy to turn against it. Rather, to return to the beginning of this piece, he is speaking to his followers and strengthening their in-group-ness against those who would fall prey to excess emotions. The real effect is to teach his followers to be suspicious of their feelings of empathy towards others, creating inner conflict, guilt, and shame around feelings of sympathy for (especially oppressed) others. It leads both women and men to doubt their moral compass, to doubt their social bonds especially to those of other groups, emotionally numb them, and (this is the point) to increase dependence on authority figures to know what is good and right. This makes followers more susceptible to manipulation and corrodes independent thinking. In short, devaluing empathy undermines a person’s moral sense and makes them more reliant on external authority, ultimately weakening their own agency. Nothing short of causing real moral harm.
Bloom lays the groundwork for Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (2020) and Joe Rigney's *The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits *(2023). We’ll take a look at that in the next piece.
To be continued…
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