On empathy

Elon Musk says empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization.

Jesus

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

—Jesus

“Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.”

—Also Jesus

I won’t claim to be much of a Christian. I’m more agnostic than a believer or skeptic. I haven’t been to church very often since I was a teenager and that was a long time ago. I have read the Bible, though, and took a few religion classes in high school and college.

I came away from those experiences believing that the core message of Jesus is to treat other people with dignity and respect, regardless of who they are. I don’t think Donald Trump or the Republican Party treat people very well. In fact, I don’t think they would treat Jesus very well if he came back today.

The great divide between liberals and conservatives seems to me to be empathy. Right now, there’s a debate about the feeling because Elon Musk recently told Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.” From everything I’ve read, Jesus would come down on the side of being more empathetic, not less.

Republicans are cheering the deportation of immigrants, many of whom came here to find a better life. In particular, they are cheering a flight of Venezuelan immigrants sent to a harsh prison in El Salvador. Donald Trump claims the deportees are all gang members, but that’s not looking very likely. At least one was a soccer player who was tortured by authorities in Venezuela and was seeking political asylum.

The Venezuelans were given no due process. They were taken from their homes and jobs to detention centers and then to the airplane. Nobody gave them a chance to make their case that they were being wrongly deported. That’s not treating your neighbor as yourself. Cheering the injustice seems more ghoulish than Christian.

Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s circumstances. That seems to me to be what Jesus is saying when he says to love others as much as you do yourself and to treat them like you would like to be treated. His statements are, among other things, admonitions against prejudice and judgment without facts. He also says those premises are the very basis of his teachings and explain the meanings of the lessons in the Old Testament.

A lot of the same people cheering the deportations are the ones claiming that the United States is a Christian nation. If empathy is a core tenet of Christianity, and that sure sounds like what Jesus is saying, and the United States is a Christian nation, then those Christians applauding Trump for treating innocent people like hardened criminals should probably get themselves to the nearest church and ask forgiveness. They sure aren’t acting very Christian.

But I know they won’t. I grew up with these types of Christians. They’re the descendants of the people who went to a lynching on Saturday night and showed up in pews the next morning. They’re the same people who opposed integration because they lacked the imagination to understand the negative effects of segregation on African Americans. And now they are arguing that immigrants can be denied the “certain unalienable rights” that “are endowed by their Creator” because they aren’t citizens.

People like Musk equate empathy with weakness, but it’s not. Empathy is the root of justice, allowing us to see and feel somebody else’s experience to demand fairness, protection, or punishment on their behalf. Having empathy gives us the strength to stand with the Ukrainian people against Russian invaders. It gives us the strength to protect our communities from lawlessness. It makes us the nation that once told the world, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

I would argue that we are not a Christian nation but a nation whose foundation is based on Judeo-Christian values. Key among those is empathy.

Empathy is the strength of Western Civilization, not the weakness.