The term empathy is a relatively new addition to our moral lexicon. There is no interdisciplinary consensus about what it means, but it is often characterized as coming in two forms: emotional (knowing how another person is feeling) and cognitive (understanding how another person is thinking). Some writers prefer the concept of empathy as a replacement for older, more religiously loaded terms like love, charity, mercy and compassion.
Frequent appeals to empathy by well-meaning progressive public figures like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have occasioned a political backlash from both the secular and the Christian right. Allie Beth Stuckey, the Calvinist Christian author, popularized the phrase “toxic empathy,” and our Catholic vice president, JD Vance, urges us to focus our empathy on loved ones and neighbors.
It is in this milieu that Gad Saad’s new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, has become a bestseller.
Saad was trained as an evolutionary behavioral scientist and works as a professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. The civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s forced his Jewish family to flee their homeland. They found safety in Montreal, where Saad received his undergraduate degree before attending Cornell University for his doctorate. His special area of research focuses on how hormones influence, and are influenced by, consumer behavior.
The book is largely a jeremiad against what its author perceives to be the destruction of Western civilization at the hands of naïve do-gooders who regard empathy as the paramount moral value. Saad is not against empathy across the board. He acknowledges that it allows us to develop relatively stable pair bonds, maintain wider cooperative affiliations within communities and, within that context, engage in mutually beneficial forms of reciprocal altruism. While depicting empathy as a “noble and evolutionarily selected virtue, a central feature of our humanity given that we are a deeply social species,” he thinks we have gotten far too carried away.
Saad’s book offers a secular analogue to prophetic indictment: “I hope that this book…will awaken people from their stupor.” The first seven chapters of the book offer his diagnosis of empathy as the “disease” that is destroying Western civilization; his final chapter offers his proposed (and rather underwhelming) “cure”: We should cultivate disciplined and properly directed empathy and base policy on a rational analysis of outcomes rather than on how people feel.
Saad blames misplaced empathy for the homelessness crisis, irresponsible journalism, the suppression of free speech on college campuses, the “feminization of the West,” rampant cultural relativism, family dissolution, communism, the welfare state, weakening the military, escalating “parasitic taxation” and apparently every other item in his catalog of social evils.
His prime example of suicidal empathy is the West’s willingness to accept refugees and immigrants from predominantly Muslim cultures that do not accept the basic tenets of rights-based Western liberal democracies. Saad’s perspective is shaped by the fact that his parents went through a harrowing ordeal when they were abducted by Islamic militants in Lebanon. He is deeply convinced that Islam at its core (and not just Islamic extremism) is incompatible with Western values.
Rather than assimilate, he holds, Muslim immigrants seek not only to dwell in their own self-enclosed communities but also to undermine the bedrock moral and political principles of the very Western democracies that welcome them. In support of this claim, he cherry-picks stories of violent crimes by immigrants, while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Muslims both in the United States and in Europe live peacefully.
While not entirely opposed to empathy, Saad wants to rein it in. Rather than make policy decisions from pro-social emotional impulse, we should be rationally weighing long-term costs and benefits of various courses of action. But rather than promoting a utilitarian concern for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, he wants every individual to pursue his or her self-interest. He describes himself as a “classical liberal” informed by evolutionary science, but Saad’s promotion of free markets and his disdain for the welfare state might remind readers of a light version of the libertarian Robert Nozick. His rejection of out-group empathy as running against the grain of human nature might evoke memories of Ayn Rand.
Some of Suicidal Empathy is just common sense. Yes, distorted empathy is sometimes used to justify misguided diversity, equity and inclusion policies, the coddling of teenagers, and the valorization of victimhood. But distortions do not gainsay the value of empathy, properly understood. As my Jesuit high school Latin teacher never tired of reminding us, abusus non tollit usum: The abuse of something does not prohibit its proper use.
The limitations of empathy as a source of moral guidance are well known. It tends to be subject to familiarity bias, shallow in scope, situation-specific and mood-dependent; empathic burnout can be a cause of compassion fatigue. It is naturally extended to friends and others with whom we share social bonds but ill-suited as a response to huge numbers of destitute or desperate strangers.
St. Thomas Aquinas would note that the proper formation of our capacities for empathy must be accompanied by the cultivation of a host of other virtues like courage, temperance, justice and practical wisdom. He understood that helping others must be done judiciously and in ways that do not neglect our primary moral obligations to our “nearest and dearest.” He would agree with Saad’s claim that “empathy should be applied in the right measure, to the right people, at the right time.” Ethical responsibilities are disciplined by our finitude: “in a world of fixed monetary resources, empathy must be deployed in a strategically discriminating manner.”
Misreading Christian Compassion
The key issue, though, concerns the moral standards we ought to employ when making assessments about how to allocate resources. In theory, we can miss the mark either by caring too much or by not caring enough about people in situations of dire need and persistent deprivation. The parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Lk 16:19-31), however, suggests indifference toward the poor is a much bigger problem than is promiscuous empathy. The Gospels offer plenty of warnings about greed, exploitation and tribalism but not one about runaway compassion.
Suicidal Empathy suffers from other significant defects. One has to do with Saad’s utter lack of interest in providing clear, well-informed definitions for concepts like social justice, the welfare state and virtue. He claims, for example, that suicidal empathy is “driven by misplaced existential guilt” but neither explains what he means by this phrase nor distinguishes it from more familiar concepts, like moral guilt and shame. Strangely for someone who claims to be informed by science, he offers no empirical evidence for his claim that a single dominant factor—misplaced empathy—lies behind virtually all our social ills. Even the title of the book is muddled and confusing, calculated to jolt more than to inform readers of its content. Vastly complex, large-scale processes that contribute to cultural and social deterioration have nothing in common with suicide, the deliberate taking of one’s own life.
Second, Saad’s polemical agenda tends to be focused on knocking down straw men. For example, he writes: “The inability to recognize that all immigrants are not equally likely to be a net benefit to a host society defies the realm of human imbecility.” But who would deny that? Saad’s exaggerations are aggravated by his tendency to trade in false dichotomies, as when he proclaims: “Academia should not be about the celebration, elevation, and care of the ‘marginalized’ voices. It should always be about the pursuit of truth.” It does not seem to have occurred to him that paying attention to people who have been oppressed and silenced is itself a way of pursuing truths that had long been neglected or even actively suppressed by powerful beneficiaries of the status quo.
Christian readers will also be sensitive to a deeper and more fundamental set of problems. Compassion grounded in the love of neighbor often but not always includes affective empathy. The consistent feature of Christian compassion is benevolence, or willing the good of another, in a way that generates concretely helpful acts. “What is compassion,” St. Augustine asks in The City of God, “but a kind of fellow-feeling in our hearts for the misery of another which compels us to help him [or her] if we can?”
Christian ethics can appreciate the importance of knowing how others are feeling—but the focus is on providing concrete help. The Gospel of Luke describes the good Samaritan as “moved in his guts” (splagchnizomai, Lk 10:33) by the sight of the man lying beaten and broken on the side of the road. Moved by the sight of a suffering, endangered human being, he feels for him (which we might call “sympathy”) and so acts in concretely helpful ways.
Catholic moral theology draws a helpful distinction between affective and effective compassion. Some people act compassionately because they are emotionally moved by someone’s suffering (affective compassion), but others do so because they act according to moral principle, fulfill professional responsibilities or, like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, habitually exercise the virtue of mercy in concrete, practical ways (effective compassion). If your house is on fire, you don’t care whether firefighters recognize your emotional state—you just want them to get your dog out of there.
From a Catholic perspective, Suicidal Empathy grossly exaggerates the role empathy is said to play in justifying moral and social policies intended to address widespread human suffering, particularly when that suffering is rooted in systemic injustice. Catholic social teaching regards justice, not empathy, as the moral standard most directly relevant to large-scale social problems. Secular moral theories, too, justify egalitarian social policies on the grounds of fairness rather than because they best comport with empathic attunement.
Catholic social teaching urges us to assess social policies in light of a cluster of justice-related moral norms that include fairness, equity, the common good, the preferential option for the poor, subsidiarity, solidarity and human rights (including both immunity from undue government interference and positive entitlements to goods like decent education, housing and health care). The church continuously reminds us that humane immigration policies, international development assistance and emergency humanitarian aid should be both motivated by compassion and demanded by justice. “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required” (Lk 12:48).
So while Saad worries that we have become too empathetic, too indiscriminate in our sense of responsibility for others, too promiscuous in our concern for outsiders, bedrock Christian convictions alert us to the more pressing, opposite problem: sinful self-absorption, proximity bias, cold-heartedness, tribalism, xenophobia, racism and what Pope Francis called the “globalization of indifference.”
Suicidal Empathy does not provide much, if any, substantive justification for its sweeping generalizations. This is due in part to its refusal to consider arguments that thoughtful and informed opponents use to defend their positions. Saad’s harsh polemic against Islam, for example, never seriously considers the work of progressive Muslim political theorists. In a similar vein, he dismisses feminism without ever considering the arguments of distinguished feminist philosophers who might challenge his characterization of their ethical commitments.
Unfortunately, Saad’s habit of writing off those who disagree with him as stupid, duped or malicious—or all three—serves only to raise rather than lower the temperature of the firestorm of polarization currently engulfing our society. Instead of a serious and thoughtful argument, Suicidal Empathy thus reads as a long, angry op-ed intended to reinforce its ideological allies rather than persuade its intellectual opponents.
Given our current political culture, we should be especially concerned about the political uses of this book. The restriction of empathy to one’s own in-group provides cover for the current administration’s decisions to cut off life-saving aid to H.I.V.-positive pregnant Ugandans, turn away desperate asylum seekers from Afghanistan, strip Haitians of their temporary protected status and send deportees who have never been convicted of a crime to a brutal, maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The fact that tens of millions of American Christians support such policies is, at least from a Catholic perspective, profoundly scandalous.
My point is not to criticize Saad for not being a Christian. I do, however, call attention to the fact that his deeply individualistic, highly reductive view of the human person and his insistence that we dampen our concern for the “least of our brothers and sisters” are profoundly at odds with the fundamentals of the Gospel message.
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