empathy's fantasies

Politics after subject/object

Christopher Levitt uses colored pencil to create a scene of life in prison. His work is titled, "The Painter."

Empathy is back in the news thanks to a spate of rightwing evangelical claims that it is a sin to imagine ourselves in the suffering of another. These evangelical writers accuse liberals of utilizing psychological manipulation to shift Christians towards policies they would otherwise find abhorrent. They caution against emotions leading our politics and blurring the difference between right and wrong.

They understand the power of channeling empathy. On the positive side, champions of empathy claim this affective response will revolutionize our politics. By placing ourselves in the shoes of another person and imagining what it must be like to live as they do, we will begin to see our political lives differently. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Jesus announces in the gospel of Matthew. Empathy makes the case for action concrete because, while we may not be able to muster up feelings for another, we don’t want bad things to happen to us.

I have not read the evangelical books, nor am I planning to. But according to reviews, the authors are attempting to stymie any intervention into the death-dealing politics of their GOP bedfellows. They recognize affectual power and want to stop it. This isn’t a great argument. The writers end up swapping out one form of emotional manipulation for another. God’s wrath and eternal judgment become the grounds by which to cut ties with policies that are good for “sinners” (immigrants, queer folks, Black people, recipients of USAID).

Yet I sense discomfort as progressive Christians respond to these claims by encouraging us to more expansive empathy. Curious about my hesitancy, I reread Saidiya Hartman’s chapter on empathy in Scene of Subjection. In it, she discusses the writing of a white abolitionist named John Rankin who utilized a “fantasy” of empathy to rouse white people to rise up and act to end slavery. Rankin wanted to “bring slavery close” to white people by closing the gap between enslaved and slaver. To do so, he invites his white reader to imagine if they were enslaved. Rankin imagines if his children were whipped, his wife sold. What if he watched on in humiliation and despair?

Despite his attempt to describe the terror of slavery as a call to action, Hartman describes how Rankin’s imaginative enslavement, “unleashes a Pandora’s box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore the difficulty and slipperiness of empathy.” Rankin’s attempt to project himself into the experience of a slave turned the feeling away from the actual experiences of enslaved people and towards himself. The suffering of enslaved people becomes another site of exploitation; the Black body in pain can only be acknowledged to the degree it can be imagined by a white person. “Can the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself?” Hartman wonders.

Empathy relies on making the other an object to such an extreme degree of voyeurism that it becomes possession. In order to be moved to action we must be able to imagine our own suffering, displacing the unknowable and personal terror of the one who suffers. Reliance on empathy for political action turns suffering into spectacle, the other to object. It doesn’t take long before suffering is made to compete in a macabre attention economy (trauma porn). Whose suffering is most horrific, most visible, most inhabitable?

Empathy is made slipperier by the limits of our imagination. What to do when multiple social forces are calling for our empathy? In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell recalls a speech given by author Karl Ove Knausgaard, imploring authors to utilize empathy in their writing to nuance lazy generalized historical accounts. He gives an example: “If we allowed that remoteness to dissolve, what we would see would no longer be the very image of evil, but a boy growing up in Austria with a violent, authoritarian father and a mother whom he loved. We would see a sixteen-year-old so shy he hadn’t the courage to speak to a girl with whom he was in love…”

He is, of course, talking about Hitler.

Serpell writes that in his autobiography Knausgaard offers us a window into the complexity of empathy, who receives it and how. “Many readers feel that his last book is at its worst when he eschews empathizing with his ex-wife, clearly under severe mental duress, because he’s too busy writing about… Hitler.” Serpell asks: “Who gets to have our empathy? Hitler or one’s wife? The living or the dead? Those near to us or far? Those who resemble and agree with us, or those who don’t? The one or the many?”

Last week I learned that Elon Musk, the Trumpian visage of the angel of death, survived a horrific childhood. The podcast Know Your Enemy featured two episodes on Musk and how we arrived at the terrible misfortune of Musk’s misanthropy unleashed upon the world. Like the podcast hosts, it wasn’t difficult for me to draw the lines between the battered child Musk and the narcissist starving children to death in the Sudan and giving a Nazi salute to a cheering GOP crowd.

The point of the podcast was not empathy, but historical context, perhaps to give us some ledge to grasp as we watch one unelected billionaire kill decades of medical advancements, damning generations of people to deaths by what could be preventable and curable diseases. Yet here I was, imagining the child Musk before his abusive father who once, when young Elon was beaten so badly by bullies that he required hospitalization and years of surgeries, sided with the child who beat his son.

What does empathy offer us in this collision of realities – an abused child who becomes an adult who terrorizes on an epic scale? How does imagining myself being raised by Errol Musk shape my politics? The answer is it does nothing. (I know people deeply damaged in childhood who do not go on to be responsible for mass deaths due to cancelled vaccine programs.)

Tempering my feelings towards Musk (disgust, rage, indignation, loathing) is, in a way, an exercise in self-reflection and personal betterment. It would be better of me (supposedly) to feel otherwise on behalf of the child Musk was. Ironically, I have utilized Musk’s childhood abuse as a self-improvement project. That does nothing to change devastation experienced by veterans who are losing life-saving physical and mental health care, or to prevent child abuse?

If empathy offers so little, what is the purpose of face-to-face meeting? Or traveling to Palestine to see the daily humiliations under occupation? Of leading worship inside prison walls, hearing the stories of immigrants? How do we move beyond empathy’s pull towards subject and object, with the empathizing subject looking with pity on the object she will possess?

I recently spoke with a student who preached at the women’s prison in my city for the first time. She described the awkwardness, the incoherence of being an outsider preaching to incarcerated people. She wanted to ameliorate this feeling or at least make sense of it. And I reminded her that this incoherence is not the arrangement of worship but the institution itself. Preaching in the prison isn’t an exercise in community or creating empathy with those who are imprisoned. I want to bring my church members into prison so that they hate it, that they want to tear apart the walls.

I thought about the intro to Scenes where Hartman asks questions that offer us a way to slip past the haunting of empathy:

Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repressions of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance?

We bear witness. We are willing to return again and again to confirm the truth of what happened.

Scenes was written in 1997, and I recently read Hartman’s reflections on her first book, twenty-five years after its publication (the essay accompanies the newest edition). She writes that while the sections on empathy, social death, and violence received the most attention, she “tried to account for extreme domination and the possibilities seized in practice.” This is also a part of what we witness in prison, “ways of living and dying, of making and doing” that refute the state’s attempt at social erasure.

Perhaps, Hartman writes, what might drive our politics past subject/object is attending to “the vision of what might be” that is waiting to be discovered – in narratives of the enslaved, at Aida Youth Center in Bethlehem, in the women who give their testimonies at the end of each of our worship services, who add their voice to the sermon and affirm or reject what is offered from the pulpit. We look at the incomprehensibility of pain, the impossibility of knowing it, and witness that, somehow, here is what might be.