A fabulous piece, Erik! As a literary scholar kind of dude, I find myself thinking in particular about the always fraught response, at least since Sappho, to lyric poetry, that most "unmanly" of modes whose prima materia is porous, overwhelming feeling, impersonally personal mood. Modern poets such as Pound wrestled with the pejorative vibe around "lyric" through the classical vs. romantic dialectic that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century -- trying to carve out a culturally navigable space for subtle, deep feeling -- a kind of poetic, literary drama that somehow resonates with the political/cultural situation you discuss. But literary and political history aside, I suspect that as you indicate, the always fresh complexity here is the nature of awareness itself: our resistance and attraction to the larger moorings where self, other, and world lose their supposed separateness in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways.
Forgive this rather personal plug here, but I must give a shout out to one of the best writers about lyric, Eileen Gregory, whose magisterial essay "The Myth of the Lyric World" ends like this: "In the myth unfolded from the bittersweet nature of love, the vision of the lyric world is subtle, its life within a culture almost inherently fragile -- like beauty, its 'action is no stronger than a flower.' Yet the reality to which it gives access in its gracefulness is sacred and immortal. Lyric vision is essentially marginal experience, existing in moments of vision, in subtly realized contexts where imagination can be animated. When it has communal efficacy, it is delicate though powerful, coming into existence with intensity, altering the shape of the intractable world around it, then ever retreating, like Francis at his death retreated to his cave in the mountains, to a deeper center and to death." I am biased, since Eileen was my dissertation director years ago at the University of Dallas, a conservative Catholic liberal-arts college where I, neither particularly conservative nor Catholic, completed a Ph.D. largely as a way of communing with what was left of the "lapis-haunted air" (to borrow from Wallace Stevens) stirred up by James Hillman's time at UD in the late-70s. Anyway, her slim little volume 'Summoning the Familiar' is definitely worth picking up, as is her book about the poet H.D.
Everyone is trying to hijack empathy, because empathy is one of the most reliable pathways to group formation and what you alluded to "empathetic fusion" and the emotional blurring of self into collective. Hannah Spier’s recent piece on the “Progressive Cult” captures this dynamic well. https://substack.com/home/post/p-173857178. Progressivism doesn’t take the Christian route, but its aim is the same.
Since Fox News came along, legacy media has increasingly operated more openly as priesthoods as interpreters of meaning, arbiters of moral emotion, enforcers of group norms. The goal is no longer primarily to inform (maybe it never was), but to synchronize feeling.
Having left a religion myself, losing the feeling of oneness, of being safely “inside” something larger than yourself, produces a real BODILY sense of detachment and exposure.
My theory of religion is that religion is about the sense of belonging, shared thought, shared emotional posture, and shared modes of spiritual experience. (Theology is arbitrary). Religion activates the ghost in the machine of our proto-sociality as animals.
What creates the feeling of oneness and “inness” among chimpanzees? Grooming rituals, sex, parental bonding, etc. These are pre-symbolic sacraments. Our human layered cognition adds narrative, doctrine, but the "ghost" underneath is the same. In us, the experience is elaborated, abstracted, and chemically amplified—likely rooted in the same systems that govern sexual bonding and maternal/paternal attachment.
Empathy can be toxic when directed toward cohesion and not compassion.
"It felt like an unspoken request or comradely offer to chow down on mutual feelings of outrage, shame, and pity... I found that move memorably weird, like the conversation had been invaded by flying ActBlue spam."
Ugh, yes, this is very good language for it. Can relate.
Thanks for bringing this empathy war to our attention. I was not aware.
Yeah too woo - esp from the Christian right perspective. Don't know if you've seen but there has recently been a lot of noise in those circles about yoga as a portal for demons (key word: demon). Empaths surely welcome them as well which definitely knocks empathy down some serious notches. How did good old "compassion" fare in your research?
I mentioned the Theweleit books last night. Here's the other reference that this sparked. Probably paywalled, though I'm supposed to get free links. It directly supports your coordinated campaign insight. (Similarly, the Southern Baptist Church's position was somewhat positive on CRT for a couple of weeks until the word came down that it was going to be the issue du jour.)
My Insider Story of the “Focus on the Family” v. “Gay Rights” Culture War
Quoting: At Focus, I learned that evangelical leaders like Dr. Dobson considered the Republican party to be the political machine best equipped to endorse a Biblical worldview. In delighted harmony, Republican Party strategists salivated to win elections by securing the evangelical vote. Thus, a mutual agreement was formed. The plan became that evangelical leaders would introduce a “hot button” issue onto ballots at every local and state election. Evangelical ministries would provide “voting guides” to influence evangelicals to vote for the only correct “Christian” choice.
That is the gameplan. The evangelical "deal" with the Republican party has been on in one form or another since Reagan, but in today's very different "conservative" environment things have changed a lot. Say what you want about the Moral Majority but they were not explicitly white nationalist, or "dominionist" about secular power. The desire to use the state to inflict so-called Biblical values in undemocratic ways is pervasive today. Thanks for the link Alan!
I did a deep dive into the takeover of the SBC as part of a slow wandering WTF exploration that began when Trump won some of the upper Midwest states the first go round. Not sure what you're working on but it might be helpful.
Great stuff. Spinning off the telepathy section, I do think that the extremely popular noun form “empath” - as synonymous with “psychic” - has muddied the water of empathy and the affliction might be permanent. We might need a new word to get back to OG empathy. Karuna?
Interesting. Is it that "empath" is too woo? I'd say that's true, and unhelpful -- and I say that as someone who has a lot of natural empathy, even to my detriment!
Wow thanks for that! I have never heard of Cormac McCarthy's Whales and Men...Also this morning I was rereading Harold Beaver's introduction to the Penguin edition (1972) that he wrote notes for (and which also appear in the Folio edition). Super playful and esoteric: Masonry, Eliade, Gnosticism. Very worthwhile.
Gnostic Pulp is my current favorite Substack (I promise I’m not on the pay roll); always fun surprises there. I’ll check out Beaver’s intro! Break a leg in the class!
Empathy has been a right-wing target for quite some time, this is from 2009: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-androids-dream-of-electric-justice.html I was naive back then because I thought being anti-empathy would be a losing position, but it seems to have worked out quite well for the Republicans and is now part of the core of Trumpism.
Fascinating! I am not surprised -- I have come across some anti-empathy talk here or there but it makes sense it was picked up in the Obama years. One of the people in my Androids class shared an aspect of this critique. He was a longtime AA guy and he said that while there is some empathy when people come to a meeting, because you know they have suffered, it doesnt help to stay at that level, when what is called for is more of a tough love, get your shit together mode. Maybe a lot of it is context dependent...
Erik: In one of Sapolsky's lectures on Violence (and its Antidotes) he covers the child development research on theory of mind and when they first begin to show signs of empathy. What is two-edged about empathy is that the same power that helps Sally to love Schroeder helps Lucy to know Charlie Brown will try to kick the football. There is no inherent moral virtue to knowing how others are feeling.
Sociopaths, especially someone like Stalin, would have had the highest EQ in the Soviet, because he could just TELL who in the room might be disobedient and get rid of them before this adversary ever acted. True of social climbers of all kinds. https://youtu.be/8heSeatxgpg?si=c81O9vRtm9ugYEBT&t=4178
Yes there is not enough about the negative side of empathy and how it can allow for sociopathic degrees of manipulation. In the Androids discussion last night we pointed out parts in the novel where that is clear. The whole "mirror neuron" discourse a while back was a way of getting a biological handle on the stuff, and obviously the results are not always pretty of being a good mirror!
This is like quoting the definition of irony to explain all the ways that humor functions in human society. Definitions are not empirical nor ever complete representations of word usage.
My dictionary gives a couple of sentences to show usage plus a thesaurus, Wikipedia references, and more. As a former scientist turned author, I can say with confidence, that dictionaries define words and are useful. The article made up its own definition.
Wonderful essay. Thank you! Go Alembic!
Erik 🔥
Maybe I don’t know how to listen from the dry ground...
A fabulous piece, Erik! As a literary scholar kind of dude, I find myself thinking in particular about the always fraught response, at least since Sappho, to lyric poetry, that most "unmanly" of modes whose prima materia is porous, overwhelming feeling, impersonally personal mood. Modern poets such as Pound wrestled with the pejorative vibe around "lyric" through the classical vs. romantic dialectic that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century -- trying to carve out a culturally navigable space for subtle, deep feeling -- a kind of poetic, literary drama that somehow resonates with the political/cultural situation you discuss. But literary and political history aside, I suspect that as you indicate, the always fresh complexity here is the nature of awareness itself: our resistance and attraction to the larger moorings where self, other, and world lose their supposed separateness in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways.
Forgive this rather personal plug here, but I must give a shout out to one of the best writers about lyric, Eileen Gregory, whose magisterial essay "The Myth of the Lyric World" ends like this: "In the myth unfolded from the bittersweet nature of love, the vision of the lyric world is subtle, its life within a culture almost inherently fragile -- like beauty, its 'action is no stronger than a flower.' Yet the reality to which it gives access in its gracefulness is sacred and immortal. Lyric vision is essentially marginal experience, existing in moments of vision, in subtly realized contexts where imagination can be animated. When it has communal efficacy, it is delicate though powerful, coming into existence with intensity, altering the shape of the intractable world around it, then ever retreating, like Francis at his death retreated to his cave in the mountains, to a deeper center and to death." I am biased, since Eileen was my dissertation director years ago at the University of Dallas, a conservative Catholic liberal-arts college where I, neither particularly conservative nor Catholic, completed a Ph.D. largely as a way of communing with what was left of the "lapis-haunted air" (to borrow from Wallace Stevens) stirred up by James Hillman's time at UD in the late-70s. Anyway, her slim little volume 'Summoning the Familiar' is definitely worth picking up, as is her book about the poet H.D.
Your work is deeply inspiring, Erik. Thank you.
Hey Eric! Is there a recording of our "Freaky Jesus" from The Chalice? I would be very excited to check that out! Tim Kirk
Everyone is trying to hijack empathy, because empathy is one of the most reliable pathways to group formation and what you alluded to "empathetic fusion" and the emotional blurring of self into collective. Hannah Spier’s recent piece on the “Progressive Cult” captures this dynamic well. https://substack.com/home/post/p-173857178. Progressivism doesn’t take the Christian route, but its aim is the same.
Since Fox News came along, legacy media has increasingly operated more openly as priesthoods as interpreters of meaning, arbiters of moral emotion, enforcers of group norms. The goal is no longer primarily to inform (maybe it never was), but to synchronize feeling.
Having left a religion myself, losing the feeling of oneness, of being safely “inside” something larger than yourself, produces a real BODILY sense of detachment and exposure.
My theory of religion is that religion is about the sense of belonging, shared thought, shared emotional posture, and shared modes of spiritual experience. (Theology is arbitrary). Religion activates the ghost in the machine of our proto-sociality as animals.
What creates the feeling of oneness and “inness” among chimpanzees? Grooming rituals, sex, parental bonding, etc. These are pre-symbolic sacraments. Our human layered cognition adds narrative, doctrine, but the "ghost" underneath is the same. In us, the experience is elaborated, abstracted, and chemically amplified—likely rooted in the same systems that govern sexual bonding and maternal/paternal attachment.
Empathy can be toxic when directed toward cohesion and not compassion.
"The poor will always be with you, but I will not." - Jesus Christ
"It felt like an unspoken request or comradely offer to chow down on mutual feelings of outrage, shame, and pity... I found that move memorably weird, like the conversation had been invaded by flying ActBlue spam."
Ugh, yes, this is very good language for it. Can relate.
Thanks for bringing this empathy war to our attention. I was not aware.
Yeah too woo - esp from the Christian right perspective. Don't know if you've seen but there has recently been a lot of noise in those circles about yoga as a portal for demons (key word: demon). Empaths surely welcome them as well which definitely knocks empathy down some serious notches. How did good old "compassion" fare in your research?
I mentioned the Theweleit books last night. Here's the other reference that this sparked. Probably paywalled, though I'm supposed to get free links. It directly supports your coordinated campaign insight. (Similarly, the Southern Baptist Church's position was somewhat positive on CRT for a couple of weeks until the word came down that it was going to be the issue du jour.)
My Insider Story of the “Focus on the Family” v. “Gay Rights” Culture War
https://medium.com/gayoda/my-insider-story-of-the-focus-on-the-family-v-gay-rights-culture-war-a06f7798f65c
Quoting: At Focus, I learned that evangelical leaders like Dr. Dobson considered the Republican party to be the political machine best equipped to endorse a Biblical worldview. In delighted harmony, Republican Party strategists salivated to win elections by securing the evangelical vote. Thus, a mutual agreement was formed. The plan became that evangelical leaders would introduce a “hot button” issue onto ballots at every local and state election. Evangelical ministries would provide “voting guides” to influence evangelicals to vote for the only correct “Christian” choice.
That is the gameplan. The evangelical "deal" with the Republican party has been on in one form or another since Reagan, but in today's very different "conservative" environment things have changed a lot. Say what you want about the Moral Majority but they were not explicitly white nationalist, or "dominionist" about secular power. The desire to use the state to inflict so-called Biblical values in undemocratic ways is pervasive today. Thanks for the link Alan!
I did a deep dive into the takeover of the SBC as part of a slow wandering WTF exploration that began when Trump won some of the upper Midwest states the first go round. Not sure what you're working on but it might be helpful.
https://medium.com/@alantabor/baptist-betrayal-3a488e0ee7c5?sk=a29a7f8c94ed65fa5988f2862fb4408e
Great stuff. Spinning off the telepathy section, I do think that the extremely popular noun form “empath” - as synonymous with “psychic” - has muddied the water of empathy and the affliction might be permanent. We might need a new word to get back to OG empathy. Karuna?
Interesting. Is it that "empath" is too woo? I'd say that's true, and unhelpful -- and I say that as someone who has a lot of natural empathy, even to my detriment!
Very excited for the Moby-Dick class! I just read a great essay about The Whale & UFOs that might apply: https://substack.com/@gnosticpulp/p-170889870
Wow thanks for that! I have never heard of Cormac McCarthy's Whales and Men...Also this morning I was rereading Harold Beaver's introduction to the Penguin edition (1972) that he wrote notes for (and which also appear in the Folio edition). Super playful and esoteric: Masonry, Eliade, Gnosticism. Very worthwhile.
Gnostic Pulp is my current favorite Substack (I promise I’m not on the pay roll); always fun surprises there. I’ll check out Beaver’s intro! Break a leg in the class!
Empathy has been a right-wing target for quite some time, this is from 2009: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-androids-dream-of-electric-justice.html I was naive back then because I thought being anti-empathy would be a losing position, but it seems to have worked out quite well for the Republicans and is now part of the core of Trumpism.
Fascinating! I am not surprised -- I have come across some anti-empathy talk here or there but it makes sense it was picked up in the Obama years. One of the people in my Androids class shared an aspect of this critique. He was a longtime AA guy and he said that while there is some empathy when people come to a meeting, because you know they have suffered, it doesnt help to stay at that level, when what is called for is more of a tough love, get your shit together mode. Maybe a lot of it is context dependent...
Erik: In one of Sapolsky's lectures on Violence (and its Antidotes) he covers the child development research on theory of mind and when they first begin to show signs of empathy. What is two-edged about empathy is that the same power that helps Sally to love Schroeder helps Lucy to know Charlie Brown will try to kick the football. There is no inherent moral virtue to knowing how others are feeling.
Sociopaths, especially someone like Stalin, would have had the highest EQ in the Soviet, because he could just TELL who in the room might be disobedient and get rid of them before this adversary ever acted. True of social climbers of all kinds. https://youtu.be/8heSeatxgpg?si=c81O9vRtm9ugYEBT&t=4178
Yes there is not enough about the negative side of empathy and how it can allow for sociopathic degrees of manipulation. In the Androids discussion last night we pointed out parts in the novel where that is clear. The whole "mirror neuron" discourse a while back was a way of getting a biological handle on the stuff, and obviously the results are not always pretty of being a good mirror!
Same problem with cooperation--our so-called superpower. Chimps and humans can band together better than others, so ...we make war.
Why make it so complex? Here is what my dictionary says:
em·pa·thy | ˈempəTHē |
noun
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
This is like quoting the definition of irony to explain all the ways that humor functions in human society. Definitions are not empirical nor ever complete representations of word usage.
My dictionary gives a couple of sentences to show usage plus a thesaurus, Wikipedia references, and more. As a former scientist turned author, I can say with confidence, that dictionaries define words and are useful. The article made up its own definition.