The Creatures That Know and Know Too Much
There is a new Michael Fassbender movie called The Killer. The trailer was getting insane airplay on the podcasts I listen to so I think I’ve heard it about eight million times. Fassbender repeats short mantras to himself, seemingly in anticipation of doing some killing. Trust no one. Stick to the plan. Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability. This is what it takes if you want to succeed.
These quotes have been rattling around in my skull for days, maybe even weeks. Sometimes the trailers put the little aphorisms in a different order, but they are all usually there. I’m a big Fassbender fan, I also love the director, David Fincher. I’m definitely going to see this movie. But that’s not why the quote has stuck with me. It’s because of the use of empathy.
The implication is straightforward: It will be easier to kill people if he doesn’t empathize with the victims — it’s less difficult to inflict pain on other people if you can’t feel that pain yourself, if you can’t relate or understand it. And neurological studies suggest an inverse relationship between capacity for empathy and violent behavior. So that all checks out.
The correlation between empathy and social behavior interests me, and having a killer talking about the benefits of reduced empathy got me thinking about a few different things. First, the relationship between empathy and violence generally. Second, the relationship between hate speech and empathy. Third, and probably most sinister, the fact that if I didn’t know I was listening to a trailer for a movie, I might have confused Fassbender for one of these hustle-culture, über-rational LinkedIn-famous influencer types that push the idea the entire world is a Hobbesian hellscape where the only way to survive is by out-competing everyone at all times.
Empathy is not a finite resource. Our capacity to empathize is not set in stone. Activities like meditation can enhance the brain’s ability to empathize. Conversely, exposure to hate speech reduces the ability to understand another’s pain and suffering. And if hate speech only reduced our empathetic response to the people targeted by the hate speech, that would be bad enough. But recent work shows a diminished capacity for empathizing with anyone.
An example of what I mean: For some reason you decide to join the KKK. You’re going to hear a lot of racism and prejudice of all sorts. As one would expect, you’ll become desensitized to violence against racial minorities and basically anyone who isn’t a white person like you. However, it won’t stop there. Your ability to share and understand the emotions with anyone, even your close friends, will be reduced as well.
Hate speech is on the rise.Social media provides a window into how hate speech can spread and amplify. People engage a lot when they are angry, and engagement on social media is profitable. Not only in dollars and sense but politically. Consider the words of Kevin Phillips, the political theorist credited with creating the GOP’s infamous Southern Strategy (passage from the NYT):
In what many considered a cynical calculation, he recommended that Republicans not dilute the Voting Rights Act because “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”
“That’s where the votes are,” he added. “Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
“The whole secret of politics,” he told the journalist Garry Wills during the 1968 presidential campaign, “is knowing who hates who.”
Phillips died in October and toward the end of his life, seemed to regret this calculation. But his conclusions unfortunately did not die with him.
I’ve been obsessed with the concept of empathy since college. I took a class called Primates and People where in an effort to better understand the origins and existence of morality, we looked for traces in our closest evolutionary relatives. Central to the discussion was whether or not chimpanzees and bonobos feel empathy — can they really feel and understand the emotions of another in their clan?
One of the primatologists we studied was the massively influential Frans de Waal. He pretty clearly thought you could see the building blocks of human morality in other creatures. For de Waal, reciprocal activity — I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine — that gave human beings an evolutionary advantage required some capacity for empathy.
In other words, empathy plays a key role in humans thriving as a species. We’re social creatures whose ability to understand the mental and emotional states of others helps us to survive.
And so this brings me to the third thing I wanted to mention. I don’t get the sense that empathy is a highly valued commodity these days. I know I’m not alone. It feels counter to the individualistic ethos implicit in so much of Western social and political thought. The notion that we’re all on our own and there’s no help on the way. Attacks on government programs and welfare, or even the commonly accepted myth of the “self-made man” all cut against the reality that we need each other and that cooperation is more important than competition. How could a country claim that it collectively values empathy when America’s poor are worse off than every other country in the OECD? Or that every single election, there are efforts to cut programs designed to help people who need help?
Does Fassbender sound that much different than a modern Fortune 500 CEO? Or a successful politician? I can’t say that I see much of a distinction. When lives are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet, it becomes a lot easier to fire people in the name of profit or to stomach casualties in a war. Suppressing empathy helps in both instances.
And I don’t know, maybe I’m nuts, but shouldn’t that be a bit concerning? If the point of politics is to collaboratively decide the structure of society, shouldn’t we discuss the fact that people who exhibit primary psychopathy (defined as “a selfish, uncaring and manipulative posture towards others”) seem to do well in corporate settings? Are that what we want to reward?
I don’t have easy solutions for any of these problems. We can’t just ban hate speech. You can’t just buy empathy. We’re not going to reorganize society overnight around something other than profit. But we can teach people how to develop empathy. That’s why I hope to persuade as many as I possibly can that developing empathy in yourself and others is a good thing. It’s why I’m glad schools are beginning to introduce mindfulness practice. Through empathy we can develop compassion for others, which motivates us to help others. Suppressing empathy is good if you want to kill people perhaps, but I don’t think most of us want to do that.
I want to leave you with a passage from Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel by Ray Bradbury. If nothing I said above convinces you of the importance of empathy, perhaps Bradbury’s prose will:
First things first. Let’s bone up on history. If men had wanted to stay bad forever, they could have, agreed? Agreed. Did we stay out in the fields with the beasts? No. In the water with the barracuda? No. Somewhere we let go of the hot gorilla’s paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore’s teeth and started chewing blades of grass. We been working mulch as much as blood, into our philosophy, for quite a few lifetimes. Since then we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels. It was a nice new idea and we were afraid we’d lose it, so we put it on paper and built buildings like this one around it. And we been going in and out of these buildings chewing it over, that one new sweet blade of grass, trying to figure how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different. I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them. He felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness. So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.
So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much.