Society's Child

'Truthiness' and the death of empathy: When truth becomes disposable we are endangered beyond measure

Archbishop Richard Clarke
The Irish Times
Mon, 15 Aug 2016 20:47 UTC

As Dostoevsky's "idiot" would remind us, it may be beauty that will save the world, but is it impertinent to suggest that right now a more pressing requirement for saving the world may be empathy?

Empathy is that quality that enables us - theoretically at least - to enter into the feelings of others, particularly those in trouble, pain or distress. Social psychologists suggest it may be a basic and inbuilt moral instinct within most of our human species, something for which we are hard-wired.

It is beyond sympathy which may contain some element of detachment or sentimentality. As the derivation of the two words suggest, sympathy is to be alongside the emotions of others, whereas empathy is to be totally inside those feelings.

At its best, empathy makes us grasp that another person - every other person indeed - is not an object on a landscape but a real subject, a subject of beauty and of infinite value, regardless of who or what he or she may be.

It is empathy that refuses to allow us to distinguish and, in the worst sense, discriminate between those who are like us and those who are not. The Christian perspective will link all of this instinctively with the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, but it does, of course, have a wider dimension for all of humanity, including those who do not profess religious faith.

Greatest threat

As with all moral instincts, however, empathy may be suppressed, distorted or deliberately stunted in its application. Perhaps the greatest threat to empathy in the human psyche of today is the new attitude to truth in our culture.

"Truthiness" is a modern Americanism to describe that which need bear no relationship whatsoever to actual truth - in other words, truth which may be verified empirically or be based on objective logic; instead it will simply appeal to the hearer, be happily appropriated as convenient to believe and hence become the only "truth" they wish to hear.

The word "truthiness" was coined a decade ago as satirical, but it is satire no longer. There have, of course, always been lies, distortions and prevarications in public discourse (and in abundance) but whereas in a previous generation, for anyone in public life to have been caught out telling bare-faced lies in the public arena would have brought immediate disgrace and humiliation - think of John Profumo - this is no longer a reality; the Brexit debate and the US presidential election campaigns give ample enough evidence of this.

The mouthing of ludicrous untruths is regarded as requiring merely a shrugging of shoulders by way of response. Nor should we congratulate ourselves on this island that truthiness is an unknown aspect of public discourse.

Disposable commodity

When truth becomes a disposable commodity we are endangered beyond measure, and one of the casualties will be an empathy that extends beyond those whom we can identify as somehow worthy of our concern.

General Sir Ian Hamilton, who commanded the British and Allied forces in the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign in 1915, extolled propaganda (and we might here substitute the term "truthiness" for this) as "drawing nourishment from the sins of the enemy. If there are no sins, invent them! The aim is to make the enemy so great a monster that he forfeits the rights of a human being."

The arrival of such an approach - totally unblushingly - into public discourse within a democratic society has corrupted the moral foundations of free speech. If we cannot defy and defeat the openly manipulated half-truths, the total and unapologetic disregard for objective facts and the blatantly unsubstantiated but vicious innuendos that are the stock-in-trade of what passes for public debate in western societies, we are on a road to totalitarian vileness.

True and unfettered empathy is what makes civilised humanity of us.

Simone de Beauvoir recounted how her contemporary at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Simone Weil, was found weeping in pain on hearing of an earthquake in China that had taken thousands of lives. This was no sentimental self-indulgence; it was because, as de Beauvoir put it, Weil had "a heart that beat across the world".

Truthiness in the hands of those who have no care but for themselves encourages us to have a heart - an empathy - that would barely beat across a cupboard.

We live in an age when we can know a great deal of what happens around our world. Only when we are ready to interrogate the laziness, self-indulgence and mendacity of truthiness can we be fully human, capable of a true empathy for all who need us.

Logos - logic, truth, reality - does not create empathy, but a contempt for logos will certainly turn empathy into self-indulgent pretense.

Reader Comments

katesisco · 2016-08-16T17:21:35Z

Another way to put that is.........

Unfairness. An experimenter with monkeys refused to reward the correct response for an individual monkey even tho he rewarded the others when correct. The monkey treated unfairly refused to continue. Even monkeys recognize unfairness and it is so important for humans I believe that it is on par with sex and food and may even surpass them in importance.
Researching history, even to the fabled Atlantis where a stele in the middle of the city was inscribed with the laws, one sees that fairness-laws for all- is required for civilization to cohere. And one also recognizes that this establishment of laws is then fraught with power seekers that tweak and manipulate as to create the belief of fairness over its degradation.

binra · 2016-08-17T08:55:30Z

Honesty of being

Only insanity rises from dishonesty of self - a fragmented dissociation in which illusions of true and false masking the wanted and the feared or hated - relative to self image, battle with themselves in disregard of and diversion from the recognition of true. If you don't want the fruits - do not focus there - excepting to break the spell of a negative fascination. See it as it is - and not as it frames itself - and you - to be.

Self-illusion or 'concept-image' accepted in place of true being, becomes a distorting lens and filter through which all else is mistakenly framed or judged so as to reinforce, justify or validate the self-concept or self-narrative.

Acceptance and extension of true worth is not the attempt to 'become' worthy or to assert primacy at expense of others. It is simply honest acceptance of and alignment in true and a release or letting go of false.

False identity in thought brings feelings and experience of conflict, pain and loss - and rage, fear and guilt arising as a result. But regardless of what we feel, THAT we feel, is a core quality of awareness by which to experience and know the fruits of our thought and deed. Conflicted thought, fruits a painful sense of denial and disconnection, yet hides within the protected sense of identity. We do not recognize our own part in attracting or interpreting outcomes to reinforce an already scripted sense of self.

I cannot feel your pain - but I can feel a like resonance within my own being when with another in pain, and abiding with, as compassion of accepting embrace for my own, extends that quality of presence to you - to your free desire and willingness to receive it - not really from 'me' but from the recognition that is your resonance to the communication coming through me. Compassion is truly love.

But sympathy operates destructively in the 'name of love' to confirm another in their pain or limitation by joining in it's validation and projecting a 'victim' sense of invalidity rather than joining in shared willingness for healing, joy or sanity of true perspective.

Basically judging others, embodies loveless intent - even when seeming kind - whereas the relinquishment of the seeming power or right to judge another, allows the recognition of truth in them to open your appreciation and gratitude for them.

The idea of compassion is of knowing thyself rather than throwing the first stone. Look first within - not in self-blame - but in willingness to be shown what is true, rather than persist in asserting a false sense of self-protection at expense of true.

Because the nightmare is revealing itself truly insane, are we called to wake first to that it is not self-protection hate and blame and scapegoat - but self-delusion. And the honesty to our experience of conflicted fear and guilt wakes the direct and unequivocal need for healing. Such need to know is a true desire and not a self-conceit. A true receptivity of listening and feeling in place of self-assertive thinking.

A split off or hidden and denied sense of thinking has 'made' a complex distortion by which the true is obscure and so thinking is not the basis for understanding or revealing its own false premise. But the willingness to recognize another in and as the love that is your self forgot - undoes the impossibly complex entanglement... at the root.

nedlud · 2016-08-17T09:56:41Z

central planning

I suggest to the two commenters above and to everyone reading this article, that they become highly acquainted with the myth and legend of central planning.

Central planning is always done by really smart people who are not really very smart at all.

We are just about dead now, the life on this planet is just about gone.

Because of smart people and all the central planning they do.

Even when they say they are not doing it, they are doing it.

ned, out

binra · 2016-08-17T11:33:21Z

If your mind is your central planner - then a very tricksy clever ruse operates in your name and at your expense.
If your mind is willing to be still and listen - and recognize a function within wholeness - then you have woken up from the 'command and control' mentality that is so pervasively reflected in our world - though that is not all that is in our world.
So while a can join with your point - I take it at a much deeper level than focussing exclusively on what others do and in terms of narratives they set. And yes it is not enough to make a change of form while the core denials run unaffected.