Empathy and Radical Moderation

How you think about the people on the Titan matters

Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Bonus post this morning because Ben Dreyfuss has a wonderful piece that’s on point, particularly now that all five members of the Titan submersible have been officially pronounced dead. The post deserves its own full link, so here it is and go read it:

Let's Discuss The Left Wing Psychopaths Who Think The Titanic Tourists Deserve To Die

This piece hits so many radically moderate points head-on that I just couldn’t resist a quick post this morning (that turned long, as they do) to highlight the ways in which our tribalism undermines our humanity on pretty basic levels. So here’s a quick listicle of all the radically moderate points Dreyfuss hits and why we should care:

1. Humans matter: As Dreyfuss points out - with pointed profanity for emphasis - if your ideological priors convince you that other people actually deserve to die in pretty awful and brutal ways, you’re probably doing it wrong. This is especially true when one of the people you’re gloating over is a 19 year old kid who was terrified to go in the first place.

2. Humility matters because human life is complex: Dreyfuss argues that many internet commentators made snap decisions about whether five people deserved to live or die based on selected snippets of information on the internet. They created strawmen of these other human beings and then burned them in effigy. The reality, Dreyfuss says much more eloquently than I will at 7am on a Friday, is that none of us know these people at all. The relatives of the dead are not only distressed by the loss of their loved ones but now also have to confront the reality that internet swarms have dissected their loved ones’ worthiness to occupy this earth based on fragments from a Wikipedia page. It’s classic hubris of the most dangerous kind, but shrouded in the virtue-signaling of anti-capitalism.

3. Tradeoffs exist!: Ultimately, corner-solution thinking makes us terrible people. If you hate capitalism so much that you think all capitalists deserve to die, you’ve become a bad person. Maybe you didn’t start out a bad person, but you’re turning yourself into one. Tradeoffs exist and one tradeoff of human life is that you typically can’t wish death and destruction on other people without it affecting the way other people think about you or even how you think about yourself. Even more than that, doing this makes our society and culture a bad place to live too. As Dreyfuss notes, “Interpreting people generously is something you do not just for them, but because you yourself will one day hope to be on the nice side of an interpretation.” You might think it’s fair and just and good to come after rich people with pitchforks and dance on their graves, but one tradeoff of that kind of ideological thinking is that it creates a vicious cycle that makes the other side much less likely to empathize with you the next time you need help. There’s evidence that this vicious cycle is undermining our democracy.

So what to take away from all of this? First, I’m glad I’m not on social media more because while I saw whispers of the nastiness here and there, I was shielded from most of it because I don’t follow people on Facebook and am not on Twitter.

Second, I’m glad that most people felt the same way I felt about it, namely that this is a very sad thing for those individuals and their families, particularly since it appeared to be avoidable.

Third, we can be radically moderate about our empathy and we don’t need to parcel empathy out on ideological grounds. I can feel empathy for the crew of the Titan and the tens of thousands of migrants drowned in the Mediterranean, even though the causes of their deaths and their lives beforehand were polar opposites. I can feel empathy for both Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny because I can see how both were fundamentally failed by our awful treatment of the mentally ill. I can even feel empathy, as Dreyfuss suggests, for the “psychopathic” Twitter mob who rejoiced in the death of five human beings. I can and do feel empathy for those people because our toxic politics and culture has destroyed their online humanity to the point that they don’t even realize how inhuman they sound. And that’s a very bad thing.

But I also hope that the very good message that comes out of it is that most people - I think - responded appropriately to a human tragedy. And I have hope that we can continue to marshal our species’ incredible capacity for empathy to help those who need it, regardless of ideological commitments. Because we know from a long and painful history that ideological and tribal thinking is the destroyer of empathy. And that’s the first step to treating humans like objects to be used for your own ideological ends, which as we know, ends very badly for everyone.

As always, let me know what you think! Comment, subscribe and - please - share!