As long as there has been mutual human socialization, there has been empathy: the ability to see and feel things from others’ perspectives. Without empathy, there would be no reason to take care of the youth and ensure their survival by providing, tending and especially now, advocating. Critical thinking ties into empathetic approaches to processing the world, but both have been under attack by people who hate and fear positive change in society. Opponents of empathy as a general practice for other human beings fearmonger about and attack those who don’t comply with their standards instead of accepting people how they are and working with them. As the right wing gets more and more polarized, they fall into the errors of bigoted unempathetic mindsets in even more overt ways than they previously did. We can’t let them take away our humanity.
Empathy is in natural opposition to concepts such as fascism. It’s a given, understanding fascism as an exclusionary ideology, that it offers no place for true universal empathy nor open-mindedness. Fascism narrows your perspective to only your own country as supreme over all the others.
Furthermore, the practices of capitalism and imperialism incentivize an individual approach to life. At their core, these practices punish you for not being efficient and reward you for letting yourself get absorbed into the status quo. Empathy transcends everything, including socioeconomic structure, but the value of money serves to distract people from practicing something as “purposeless” and “inefficient” as empathy.
But what would the world look like if no one practiced universal empathy anymore?
Empathetic actions manifest themselves in so many ways both big and small. Holding the door open for someone is empathetic. Telling someone “bless you” is empathetic. Making someone dinner to feel more comfortable, welcomed and validated is empathetic.
Empathy can also support marginalized and oppressed communities, offering understanding for people who may not have the same experiences as they do. Without empathy, people would be targeted for simply being themselves. “Tolerance” and “acceptance” would become myths.
A world without empathy would be one of chaos, vitriol and misery for absolutely everyone. It would be devoid of cooperation and progressive development. It would create a society full of apathetic bystanders and selfish gain in a dog-eat-dog world. Crime would run rampant, as it boils down to the dystopian concept of natural selection where only the strong will survive. For an ideology tough on crime, the right doesn’t realize they’re enabling more crime to happen by dogmatically attacking empathy as the new monster of the week. No one truly wins in a world without empathy, and if there are those who think they would, they’re sadly misguided.
Everything is inherently political in nature, whether you want to swallow that pill or not. Empathy is, at its core, a radical and progressive force that aims to help people and relieve them of stress, burden and pain. It’s an important teaching tool for youth and has been shown to promote learning.
Education, especially concerning the humanities, points out injustices in history and culture that the right wing calls “woke” as a way to dismiss the facts. They would rather sugarcoat and lie to their base about reality while fraudulently and malevolently rewriting history.
Education is necessary to prevent such falsehoods from taking hold. If you have a functioning brain, you know how to think and feel. You cannot reject your existence as a lifeform with thoughts and feelings.
When the right wing rejects the concept of empathy, they reject the actual messaging of Jesus Christ, of whom many within that political identity claim to be devout followers. Jesus believed in altruistic empathy and died on the cross to absolve humanity of their sins. No one opposing empathy would do such a thing for someone else.
True learning should radicalize the learner on the side of justice, critical thinking and empathy. To eliminate empathy would be to eliminate all forms of social progress. The right wing may forget that they’re talking about real people with the rhetoric they push, but those with empathy have not forgotten how important it is for everyone.
You write: “Jesus believed in altruistic empathy and died on the cross to absolve humanity of their sins.”
I’m one of billions of people whose beliefs contradict what you’re saying. Perhaps Jesus died for your sins; he did not die for mine, and to suggest that he did shows, guess what, a lack of empathy for people of other faiths.
I’m not a Christian but I could have been clearer that I was talking about what Christians personally believe in. I was just saying what they say about how they interpret Jesus dying. I apologize for offending you and that was not my intention in writing this article; I just wanted to point out a hypocrisy right-wing Christians could possibly fall into.
Thanks for writing back and engaging, and I hope that you accept my comments as constructive. I really wish that DC writers wouldn’t tell people of other faiths how they are supposed to be good at their religions. Here you’re saying, as a non-Christian, how Christians must behave in order to be good Christians. Tomas Hinckley, a self-described Marxist Christian, writes about how being a good Jew means being an anti-Zionist. TBH, if you genuinely want altruistic empathy, it starts with mutual respect.