The pendulum has started to swing back. It has become an article of faith for MAGA and, in particular, evangelical Christians, to view empathy as not a virtue but as a weak-kneed disease of the “woke” Democrats.
As David French documented in the New York Times: “Books like ‘Toxic Empathy,’ by the popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, and ‘The Sin of Empathy,’ by an evangelical pastor and theologian named Joe Rigney, have warned Christians against allowing their hearts to be influenced by progressive appeals to empathy.”
And then there is Samuel Sey, a Ghanaian-born Christian commentator with an American wife, who wrote last year, “The majority of people who are complaining about the deportations are not principled people defending Christian virtue. They are insincere people using Jesus’ name in vain to attack Trump.”
Then this month the pendulum swung back hard against Sey: he was arrested and deported by ICE. This deportation was beyond the pale, even for MAGA folks, resulting in a chorus of recantations, including by the extreme immigration hawk, Joel Berry:
“This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media in my life. The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan.”
Berry’s conversion is perhaps more evidence that empathy is, in the final analysis, not political but biological, something scientists have recently proven: functional MRI studies have shown that the human brain has a remarkable ability to mirror the actions and emotions of others through mirror neurons.
That’s why we involuntarily wince when we see someone mistakenly smash their thumb with a hammer. It is also why we are uplifted by another’s laugh.
Berry is not alone in linking a lack of empathy to evil: many believe the two can’t exist at the same time. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in 2011 argued that a process of declining empathy results in the onset of evil behaviours. (For those folks who don’t believe in the concept of evil, they can substitute “bad behavior” in its place.)
It’s true, however, that mirror neurons can have negative as well as positive consequences. One thing I have observed as a therapist is that the positive is more likely to happen in a one-on-one encounter. But in crowds, all bets are off.
That’s because our mirror neurons are again activated, but this time not by an individual, but by the crowd’s overall emotion. These neurons play a key role in “emotional contagion,” the tendency to “catch” others’ moods.
As such, our mirror neurons are crucial to strengthening social bonds, but they can operate in two ways: to strengthen society as a whole or to divide one part against the other. Trump is the master of the latter, demonizing Democrats, immigrants, uppity women, trans people, city folks, rude reporters — the list goes on.
Cruelty functions as a powerful form of negative crowd contagion. Trump’s mass rallies are a prime example. His mocking, taunting and fantasizing about violence against out-groups use many of the same mechanisms as Nazi Germany:
- Charismatic leader using grievance and humiliation to unify followers.
- Dehumanizing enemies, encouraging fantasies of domination or revenge.
- Turning political events into emotionally charged spectacles where cruelty is part of the entertainment.
This negative form of crowd empathy orchestrated by tyrants is very dangerous. History shows that when this pattern goes unchecked, societies can slide into more organized forms of persecution and violence than most participants imagined at the start.
I woke up Wednesday morning to the Blue Wave tsunami results of our midterm election. It should give us all hope!
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.