Towards the end of the summer, the Tory-Reform defector Robert Jenrick authored an op-ed piece for the Daily Telegraph about the seemingly impossible economics of rising benefits bills because of mental ill-health. In his capacity as Reform’s Treasury spokesman, his task was to big up its plans to cut 25% of so-called welfare spending by 2030, and thereby tackle what he called the state’s “suicidal empathy”.
Straight away, I wondered where this most opportunistic politician had borrowed that phrase from, and instantly found out: a book with the same title, published this year by the Canadian academic Gad Saad, whom the dust jacket describes as having particular expertise in “the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour”. It comes with an endorsement from Elon Musk. “Western civilisation is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognised and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival,” says the world’s richest man. “All of Gad’s books, including this one, are great.”
Unfortunately, Suicidal Empathy is not great. It is, in fact, a baggy mess, glueing together absurd straw men (“suicidal empathy can cause people to care more about rapists and other felons than their victims”) to familiar arguments about immigration, Covid lockdowns and whether the word “imbecile” is offensive. One of its most head-turning claims is that the west’s supposed embrace of degenerate woke-ism is largely traceable to the fact that “women are much more likely to succumb to such emotional and ideological capture”. At a push, its most useful function is as a meandering guide to the soup of ideas simmering in the minds of hardcore Maga voters as they prepared for this week’s midterms.
There is a huge amount of this stuff around, crystallising the philosophical core of Trumpism and its adherent movements across the world – roughly, the idea that might is right and compassion is for wimps. We are now well beyond the culture wars and the US right’s long history of (to put it politely) Christian revisionism, and into the very serious prospect of a decisive western moral counter-revolution that may already be under way. That’s certainly the intention of the slew of voices responsible for podcasts, social media posts and other Maga potboilers – witness 2024’s Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, by the Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, or last year’s The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits, by the rightwing pastor Joe Rigney.
But here’s the crucial thing: the same moral push is also supported by alarming numbers of regular people. According to polling by the Public Religion Research Institute, while 84% of registered US Democrats support the proposition that empathy helps build a healthy society, only 54% of Republicans agree. Perhaps most strikingly, to quote from the survey’s accompanying blurb: “White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group in which a majority does not agree that empathy is a foundational moral value (42%). Instead, a majority (54%) say empathy can be dangerous.”
Much the same seems to be true of that possible Trump successor, JD Vance – a Catholic convert who now has the rare distinction of having locked horns with two popes. In April, Leo XIV plainly decried the US’s attacks on Iran, insisting: “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Vance’s response? “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Only a few months before, the vice-president insisted his “old-school” notion of Christian compassion descended in priority from “your family”, “your neighbor” and “your community” to “your fellow citizens in your own country”. Then and only then, he said, could you “focus [sic] and prioritize the rest of the world”.
Soon after, our era’s most pre-eminent moral philosopher was interviewed by the podcaster Joe Rogan. “The fundamental weakness of western civilisation,” said Musk, “is empathy, the empathy exploit.” Progressives, he said, have set themselves on “exploiting a bug in western civilisation, which is the empathy response”.
At that point, I went straight back to one of my favourite modern books: the classicist and historian Tom Holland’s bestseller Dominion, that brilliant history of Christianity and its global impact that illuminates how an emphasis on what we now call empathy (the word was only created in 1908, as the English translation of the German “Einfühlung”, or “in-feeling”) was one of that religion’s philosophical revolutions.
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“Across the Roman world,” Holland writes, “wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight.” Such everyday barbarism was also reflected in official attitudes to poor, disabled and infirm people – until a moral up-ending began with Rome’s conversion to Christianity under Constantine. As Holland writes: “Every week in churches across the Roman world, collections for orphans and widows, for the imprisoned, and the shipwrecked and the sick had been raised … Entire systems of social security had begun to emerge.” But there was an additional element of this sea change – which, in a modern context, stands in sharp contrast to everything from ICE detention camps to Musk’s vandalism of USAID and the 700,000 deaths it is reckoned to have already caused. As Holland puts it, “divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too”.
No one would claim Christian countries and institutions stuck to those ideas in the centuries that followed, but the modern US is surely now moral light years away. And there is a British story here, too, bound up with the changes brought to our politics by Margaret Thatcher – who was raised as a strict Methodist, and occasionally blurted out quite remarkable opinions about Christian teaching and questions of morality: in January 1980, for example, she claimed that “no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well”.
In this and so many other respects, she was way ahead of her time, opening the path to the kind of moral contortions we hear not just from Jenrick, but both his new comrades in Reform and his former Tory colleagues. Some have gone even further: let migrants drown, they say, while others accuse the lifeboat service – the lifeboat service! – of complicity in a supposed invasion of untouchables, barely pausing for breath before they mourn the decline of “Judeo-Christian culture”. In the States, a proper Republican drubbing on Tuesday might give the anti-empaths the kind of shock they deserve, but Musk’s power and influence alone shows that it will take a lot more than a single round of election results to really push them back. Meanwhile, all over the world, compassion, kindness and other such virtues gather a thick layer of dust, like old hymn books in a long-deserted church.
