We're About to Watch Billions Die. Where Does "Empathy" Fit Here?

I used to think empathy was a good thing.

Now, not so much.

A long time ago, an obscure article made it pretty clear. Empathy wasn’t going to save the world. Neither were book clubs or English seminars. As the author of that article explained, “People who feel deep sympathy for characters can be indifferent and even cruel to real people who are suffering.”

Boy, have we seen that in action or what?

As a former academic, I’ve lost count of the times a full professor, a department chair, a dean, or a vice chancellor denied someone a raise or destroyed their career and then went into a meeting to talk about how to teach moral reasoning to students. And now here we are, as education dissolves, watching universities give awards to white supremacists and defend it with warnings about “viewpoint discrimination,” while arresting students for supporting Palestinians, banning masks at commencement ceremonies, and stomping down protests. It seems to me like they’re very much engaged in viewpoint discrimination.

About that article I mentioned…

It referenced a philosopher named Robert Solomon, who described “Nazi executioners shedding tears for characters portrayed by Jewish actors who were on their way to the gas chambers.” Solomon seems to be talking about the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp in Terezin, where prisoners did, in fact, perform for Nazi audiences. It didn’t matter how well they did or what tears of sympathy they elicited from their captors, though.

Out of 143,000 prisoners at Theresienstadt, only 6,000 survived.

That fact has wedged deep into my mind. Artists, actors, and musicians could move Nazis to tears with their work. They could make them feel deep pangs of longing and sorrow for the suffering of fictional characters.

The Nazis killed them anyway.

How is that even possible?

Even more importantly, as collapse accelerates, what role is empathy going to play, and how should we be thinking about it? According to the latest climate science, we’re about to witness the deaths of billions over the next two decades. (That’s assuming we’re not among the first billion to perish.) It’s going to make any genocide in history look mild by comparison. We’re going to feel a lot of emotions about that, so we’d better talk about it.

Here’s my first shot.