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New York Times
18-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How Empathy Became a Threat
There's an arresting quotation that resurfaces online now and again, usually accompanied by a photograph of a dark-haired woman with an intense gaze: 'The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs that a culture is about to fall into barbarism.' It's followed by the name of the woman in the picture: the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled the barbarism of Nazi Germany. Only there's no record of Arendt ever saying that, or anything like it. The bogus quotation is the kind of artifact that flourishes on the internet in bewildering times — plausible-sounding and politically ominous. It happens to dovetail with a liberal argument that has flourished in the age of Trump: That the MAGA movement is actively promoting callousness and cruelty. Trump's critics say supporting examples aren't hard to come by: the gutting of lifesaving aid to the poor and the sick, the violent crackdown on immigrants, the gleefully sadistic memes. The implication is that one side is committed to empathy while the other side is not. This would sound like a bit of self-serving liberal propaganda if it weren't for the fact that a number of prominent figures on the right seem to agree. In February, when Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan's podcast, Musk derided Democrats for succumbing to 'suicidal empathy.' Caring about others, the men agreed, had gotten so out of control that it was becoming self-destructive. 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,' Musk said. 'They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.' Musk likes to refer to other humans as 'NPCs,' or 'non-player characters.' Such contempt for fellow feeling seems to be gaining ground. The Times Opinion columnist David French has noted how empathy for others — seemingly inextricable from loving thy neighbor as thyself — has come under direct attack by some right-wing Christians. Last year, the Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey published 'Toxic Empathy,' which hit the best-seller list; more recently, the pastor Joe Rigney published 'The Sin of Empathy.' Both books depict calls for empathy as the work of manipulative progressives trying to inveigle Christians into supporting progressive policies. But progressives, it turns out, have had their own critiques of empathy over the years. After the 2016 election, Democrats debated how much empathy they should extend to the new president's supporters. A steady stream of media stories parsed feelings of 'economic anxiety' among the white working class. Journalists listening intently to Trump voters in small-town diners became part of what the literary critic Jennifer Wilson called the Empathy Industrial Complex. (McSweeney's parodied the genre with the headline 'I Traveled to a Diner in Trump Country to Write Another Article on Whether the President's Supporters Still Want to, Quote, 'Smash My Libtard Face In.'') Some critics on the left argued that empathy was perfectly suited to a bland centrist complacency: a fixation on feelings with little action to show for it. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Irish Times
03-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
In Netanyahu's grotesque world view, even Gaza's four year-olds are barbarians
There are two words that, when used together, tell at once a big lie and a terrible truth. Those words are 'barbarism' and 'civilisation'. The lie they tell is that They are not really the same species as Us. And the truth they convey is that the slaughter that is to be justified by this distinction will be both indiscriminate and unlimited. Binyamin Netanyahu has been playing this B/C two-card trick throughout his public career. As far back as 1986, in a book he edited called Terrorism: How the West Can Win, he declared 'the war on terror' (a phrase he was using long before it gained international currency after the 9/11 attacks of 2001) to be 'part of a much larger struggle, one between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism'. Right from the start of his assault on the population of Gaza , this has been Netanyahu's mantra. He has used it both to absolve himself and his regime from all moral and legal obligation and to lure the western democracies into collusion with his crimes. In Tel Aviv on October 18th, 2023, less than a fortnight after the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, Netanyahu told then-US president Joe Biden : 'You've rightly drawn a clear line between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism.' For anyone who doubted that Israel's response was going to be unchecked by any norms of decency or restraint, this utterance should have been a chilling moment of clarity. Netanyahu was intoning the dark spell that summons terror. READ MORE The binary opposition of civilisation and barbarism creates a 'clear line' that divides two moral universes. Instead of all the multiple limits so painfully put in place as responses to the horrors of the 20th century – all those laws for the conduct of war and the prevention of genocide and ethnic cleansing – there is only one line of demarcation, the great B/C boundary that rules them all. Everything – and everyone – that exists on the B side is barbarian. Precisely because the line is so 'clear', there can be no innocents there. There are barbarian four year-olds playing with their barbarian dolls, barbarian women giving birth, barbarian doctors and teachers and aid workers and ambulance drivers and reporters. They shriek barbarian screams and cry barbarian tears – cries and sobs that must never be mistaken for those of civilised people like us. But just as everyone on their side is by definition barbarian, everyone on ours is by the same definition civilised. No act committed by 'the forces of civilisation', however atrocious, can be barbaric. When you are on the C side of the great divide, slaughter is life-giving, anarchy is law, cruelty is kindness, famine is nourishment, obliteration is opportunity, collective punishment is justice. Thus, addressing a joint session of the US Congress in July 2024, Netanyahu declared that 'this is not a clash of civilisations. It's a clash between barbarism and civilisation. It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life'. The logic is as remorseless as it is absurd: even when we are engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians we are sanctifying life. The right way to deal with those who glorify death is to gloriously kill them, and their families, their neighbours, their communities, their societies, their histories and their futures. [ Netanyahu's claim that Israel is fighting 'barbarians' is a ploy to legitimise genocidal murder Opens in new window ] The annihilation of meaning implicit in this disfigurement of language prepares for and accompanies the annihilation of people. Those life-sanctifying 2000lb bombs (supplied initially by Biden) are armed, not only with explosives, but also with what George Orwell called 'language ... designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable'. Given such an obviously grotesque descent into lethal gibberish, why have the western democracies been so reluctant to call this binary what it is: a warrant for genocide? How could they have convinced themselves that Netanyahu, who has been repeating it over and over for 40 years, would not follow through on its exterminationist logic? On the face of it, it seems impossible to understand how democracies could manage to bury their knowledge that the B/C dichotomy leads only in one direction: the wiping out of the barbarians. [ Seeing Israel use hunger as a weapon of war is monstrous to me as someone with a Holocaust legacy Opens in new window ] Yet it is all too explicable. Most democracies have a lot of practice in burying this precise knowledge. Their modernity is founded on it. The exceptional aspect of Israel's current campaign of eradication is not the where but the when. It is happening now, rather than in the 18th and 19th centuries when the United States, Canada and Australia were founded on the genocides of indigenous populations or when European empires were bringing civilisation to the barbarians by murdering, exploiting and expropriating them by the million. This history is the great fault line beneath the surface of western liberalism. There is a deeply disturbing sense in which Netanyahu can claim truthfully to be merely carrying on the work of the West, for much of that work was based on the same contradiction he deploys: in the task of spreading 'our' values, we must not imagine that the barbarians deserve the benefits that they bestow on our own kind. 'To suppose,' wrote the great English liberal John Stuart Mill in 1859, 'that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilised nation and another, and between civilised nations and barbarians is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into.' Law and morality are for people like us – they cannot be applied to people like them. Writing of Britain but in terms that could apply equally to any of the imperial powers, Caroline Elkins says in Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire , that it 'constructed an alternative moral universe for populations it perceived to be off civilisation's scale of humanity, in an otherworldly order distinctly their own'. The slaughter in Gaza cannot be confronted because it reminds the West of a history it prefers to forget. It is easier for its alternative moral universe to remain otherworldly.
