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What is the role of empathy in the origins, the perseverance and the destruction of human society and civilization? Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. Let's take a look at a couple of videos. Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary. It does. Empathy is dangerous, empathy is toxic, empathy will align you with hell. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.
The empathy exploit. It's exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. So, crapping on empathy is so hot right now within Christian nationalism, but more broadly right-wing
authoritarianism and not because there's any validity to it, but because it is rhetorically useful for socially structuring power and values and boundaries and right-wing authoritarianism is closely connected with a lack of empathy. Now these two men obviously did not come up with these ideas themselves. After all, Musk only buys and takes other people's ideas. And here he points out in his interview that he took
this from God's ad, who recently published a book entitled The Paracetic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, and Initi tries to leverage his economics PhD and some training in the cognitive sciences to try to irrigate an air of legitimacy and validity to right-wing authoritarian identity markers. And he's got another book coming out soon called Suicidal Empathy,
and he's teased it in some social media posts and some articles such as this one, where he says, Suicidal Empathy, are you ready? It is so non-impathetic that Trump is deporting Hamas supporters. It is so non-impathetic that in the desire to eliminate astonishing governmental corruption and waste, some people will lose their jobs. It is non-impathetic to deport people who have entered the country illegally. It is non-impathetic to deny free healthcare to illegal immigrants.
It is non-impathetic to levy reciprocal tariffs to countries that otherwise are parasitic in their relationship with your country. It is non-impathetic to imprison a felon of color who has only 87 prior arrests. Key lesson, maximize empathy even if it brings the death of your society, your death will be celebrated by those urinating on your grave. And if you are adequately informed about these issues, you recognize that these are caricatures. This fundamentally misrepresents
both the nature of these social issues themselves as well as the activity and the reactions of the different sides of the political aisle. And the reason is, again, not because there's any legitimacy to the overall rhetorical point, but because these are effective identity markers, and they will waive them expecting this to generate a kind of collective effervescence of
ignorant cheerleading. And so if any of this resonates with you, if you're like, well, yeah, that makes sense. You're the target of this because you have been conditioned and socialized to believe these falsehoods about these issues, about progressive positions on these issues, and about right wing authoritarian activity related to these issues. But let's get back to empathy,
because that's primarily what's odd is targeting in this new book, Suicidal Empathy. And to begin, I want to start with skeletal remains of a Neanderthal known as Shanadar I. These skeletal remains show that this individual had some significant disabilities, probably deaf, probably at least partly blind, probably didn't have use of one of their arms, probably had a significant
limp. And yet for a Neanderthal, they survived into what would have been relatively old age, somewhere around 40 or into their 40s. And that's not plausible unless they had the support of a social group around them. And so this skeleton is evidence for social support on the part of people who did not directly benefit from providing that support. And when there is no clear
direct benefit for behaviors that are costly, we have to look elsewhere for what is motivating those behaviors. And cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and many others have identified empathy as the root of these behaviors. And empathy is also the root of the development and the perseverance of human sociality and civilization. What's going on here?
Now to do this right, we got to go back to the early stages of human evolution. And even before we could call ourselves humans, where we were mainly wandering around within small kinship units. And evolutionarily, we're predisposed to support the other folks in our kinship unit, unless other evolutionary adaptations come into play. But if it grows too large, we might not be able
to know everybody who is in the in-group. Dunbar's number is a famous estimation that we can only really personally know about 150 people at a time. But when social groups get larger than that, because of our ability to cook food, because of our ability to better hunt, because of a variety of features of human evolution, then we start running into people we don't know. And we have to be
able to figure out, is this someone I can trust? Is this someone I should cooperate with? Is this someone I should compete with? Is this someone I should just dispatch? And our minds developed ways to help us figure that out. And one of those things is something that begins in infancy. And it's based on the mirror neuron system. And this is the ability to mimic or simulate the activities we
see of others. And so this is why infants will kind of mimic what they see their parents on others doing. It's because their brain is actually compelling them to do it. And a part of this is the ability to draw conclusions about what's going on in another's mind, to draw conclusions about their mental state, to simulate what they might be thinking as well as feeling. And this gives rise to the theory of mind, our ability to draw conclusions about what's going on in other
people's minds. And this allows us to interact in more informed and calculated ways. But it also helps us to simulate what they might be feeling, which is what gives rise to things like sympathy pains and other things like that. So when we see other people experiencing things, there's a degree to which our mind is simulating those experiences. And all of this is intended to help us more
efficiently and effectively engage socially so that our social groups can grow larger and larger without breaking down. Because we can cooperate, we can compete when it becomes necessary or useful to us. And on a social level, things like religion are institutional frameworks that also contribute to that because they give us means of costly signaling. And that's ways to signal to others
that we might not know that we can be trusted, that we can engage in the behaviors that are expected of faithful members of the in group. And so religion is one of the social frameworks that facilitates the increased complexity and the increased size of social groups without them breaking down. And we call those features that allow increased complexity and size pro-social
features. So pro-sociality is things that contribute to the integrity and the cohesion of society. And empathy is one of the central motivators of pro-sociality because it allows us not only to draw conclusions about the mental states of others, but even to feel what they're feeling and that increases cooperation. And so there are two different dimensions of empathy. There is what is known
as affective empathy. And that's where you're feeling their feelings. And then the other is cognitive empathy. And that's when you're drawing conclusions about their mental state. And on the cognitive empathy side, there's a degree to which that can facilitate manipulation. If we understand what they're going through, we might take advantage of that knowledge. And so there can be a detrimental aspect of that. Now, whether or not empathy is helpful or harmful to human sociality and
civilization has to do with the scope of empathy. Because we have a variety of different social identities that are intersecting and that are more important to us or less important to us. And those social identities are not all encompassing. They are limited. And we are usually going to be most closely tied to the social identities that we grew up with, the social identities of those
who are closest to us, the social identities of those who look and talk and eat and dress and act like us. And so that limited scope can contribute to what is known as parochial empathy. And that is where we have much greater empathy for those who are closest to us to the degree that it creates antagonism toward the outgroup. And so empathy can be harmful when parochial empathy gets to acute
and causes us to harm the outgroup or to dehumanize the outgroup or to try to get rid of the outgroup. Now, not all empathy is parochial empathy. You do have a more general empathy that can increase the scope out beyond the in groups that are closest to us to include others who may be entirely within outgroups, who may not share any real significant social identities with us. And that's
the type of empathy that is more supportive of human sociality and civilization. So what folks like God's Ad and Elon Musk and Christian Nationalists and right wing authoritarians are doing is pointing to the reality that empathy can be harmful, but doing so in defense of the harmful type of empathy. Because when you look at God's Ad, he's very frequently being xenophobic, being
ethnocentric, being bigoted towards folks that don't fit into the social identities that are most important to him. And the same is true of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Christian Nationalists and general and right wing authoritarians in general. They are the ones who are most strongly committed to parochial empathy, but they're leveraging the fact that some empathy can be dangerous to try to make it sound like parochial empathy is the right way to go, but parochial empathy is
precisely the dangerous type of empathy. So they are undermining their own case. They don't have the foggiest idea what they're talking about. They're just trying to leverage some findings from these fields of inquiry to try to defend their own intuitive petty and naive identity politics, which are fundamentally right wing authoritarian and are engaged in precisely that kind of parochial
empathy. So that's the biggest problem in my opinion with folks like God's Ad and Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Christian Nationalists and right wing authoritarians talking about empathy. They are profoundly misinformed about the science of empathy. And when it comes to Christian nationalism and they try to rope in the Bible to support them, they're even more wildly misguided
because the Bible consistently and repeatedly talks about a need to protect the cosmic order and the social order because one is the canary in the coal mine of the other. Cosmic order is the balance and stability of the universe and the gods are the ones who have oversight over that or just the god of Israel with their divine counsel. Social order is the stability and the balance
of society and it's usually human rulers as representatives of the gods who have control over that. And social instability is seen as a reflection of cosmic instability and you can look at salm 82 for that idea where the foundations of the earth are rock because the gods of the nations have neglected their duties to the cosmic and therefore the social order. And this is why the orphan and the widow and the poor and the needy and the oppressed are idealized victims
within ancient west asian law codes and other kinds of ideological texts. So we see this in the laws of homerabi where homerabi says I have defended the rights of the poor and the widow and the orphan and then you go look through the laws of homerabi there's not a single law that supports the rights of the poor or the orphan or the widow and we see similar claims in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament about concern for the plight of the poor and the widow and the orphan
and the needy and the oppressed because a breakdown in the social order in social equity indicates broader cosmic problems indicates something very wrong is going on in the heavens and things are going to get worse here. And this is part of what the prophetic critique is all about the 8th century prophets down to Jesus. There was a concern for the elites within society who
might manipulate the economic systems who might manipulate the justice system who might manipulate land consolidation and debt consolidation and all these things to advance their own interests to the detriment of the poor and the needy and the orphan and the widow. And the biggest problem according to the 8th century prophets was that they were then turning around and going and performing the public requirements to put their piety on display. And Jesus talks about this as praying on
the street corners and disfiguring their faces when they fast. And they're doing this so that they can engage in the costly signaling showing everybody that they're the real ones that they're doing everything right while at the same time destroying the entire purpose of the law that demands those public performances which according to the 8th century prophets, according to Jesus, according to others, was the generation of a just a righteous, a merciful and equitable society because without
equity, you cannot have the justice and the righteousness and the mercy. And so this is not to say they were all communists. It's to say that they were concerned that social equity not get too out of whack because of the cosmic significance of that. So empathy is a big part of that. And when people try to crap on empathy and say that it's hurting us, what they're really talking about is that it is threatening to the structures of power that benefit the dominant group. That's the
in-group for these people. And that's the only group they care about. And so that's the parochial empathy that creates the kind of antagonism that can hurt others and that can lead to the erosion of human societies and human civilizations. So when people are crapping on empathy because it hurts civilization, they're the ones engaged in hurting civilization and they don't even know what they're talking about and they need to grow the hell up. And the fit for this video has been
Hellboy.
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