Elon Musk is wrong. To spurn empathy is to spur evil

Empathy is dead, apparently. It’s dangerous, toxic, sinful and, I guess, uncool.

When Elon Musk told Joe Rogan this week that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy”, he was not just outlining his approach to government “efficiency” in slashing foreign aid programs and his dislike of social security, nor his own lack of empathy as detailed by his biographer Walter Isaacson. He was aligning himself with a burgeoning hard-right movement that insists people must steel their hearts against stories of pain or loss or suffering for fear of being manipulated.

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And, in further evidence that Americans are now inhabiting topsy-turvy land, this movement is being led by extremist Christians. As The New York Times’ David French, himself a conservative evangelical, points out, “in its most extreme political faction” the Republican Christian right “is turning against empathy itself”.

It’s a noisy faction, regularly consumed with power, that is mounting an argument that love – especially love for strangers – is a distraction. Which is confusing to anyone who has actually read the Bible.

Last year, a best-selling book by podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey was called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Last month, Joe Rigney, Minnesotan pastor and theologian, published The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits. He redefines empathy essentially as self-immolation: “if someone’s drowning, empathy wants to jump in with both feet and get swept away. Empathy jumps in. Whereas compassion says, I’m going to throw you a life preserver. I’m going to even step in with it and grab you with one arm, but I’m remaining tethered to the shore.”

The core argument is that progressives use stories of struggling, marginalised or poor people to coerce conservatives into supporting policies that they might otherwise oppose. So, if you were to point out that pausing aid to the anti-slavery group International Justice Mission might result in global enslavement of children, for example, that would be capitalising on “soft hearts”.

Christian nationalist pastor Josh McPherson says the word needs to be struck out of the vocabulary because “empathy is dangerous, empathy is toxic, empathy will align you with hell”. He also says, while acknowledging “this will be controversial”, that “women are especially vulnerable” to empathy and that husbands should exercise control over who their wives spend time with. Sounds fun. (It’s true that women regularly register as more empathetic than men.)

On X, those critical of McPherson’s comments were emphatic: “Jesus Christ would like a word”. And, wryly: “I just can’t understand why women are leaving Christianity”. One suggested: “This is a new pagan, proxy, secular religion that has worked on skinning and wearing the suit of Christianity for a long time”.

None of these anti-empathy guys quote the actual Bible to make their point. Just some bro-feels.

I do agree that there is an interesting, important discussion to be had about whether a focus on empathy (as understanding what another person feels) can undermine compassion (understanding what another person needs, and working out how to provide it). Some on the left, too, have queried empathy in recent years. In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that placing yourself in another’s shoes is a start but can amount to little more than role-playing.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, in Humankind: A Hopeful History, warns that empathy can harden us to adversaries if we become blinded by the spotlight we shine on “our chosen few”, and suggests we should instead train our compassion. His entire thesis, though, is that humans are basically decent, with innate tendencies towards kindness, goodness and generosity. If we always assume we are self-interested, he argues, we will bring out the worst in each other. He writes: “For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership.”

But this recent swing against empathy has been not about how best to help people, how best to alleviate suffering, but how to de-prioritise alleviating that suffering, and mute the voices of the dispossessed. Few would accept – including, ahem, the Pope – that in the interests of power, the least powerful must be forgotten.

If I could include just a small sample of what the Bible actually says on empathy: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17) “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered” (Proverbs 21:13).

President Trump said again this week that he believes he was saved by God, but this belief did not prevent him from freezing the funds of Christian organisations that help the poor and displaced, including World Vision, International Justice Mission, Samaritan’s Purse and Catholic Relief Services.

In building his robots and keening to Mars, has Musk forgotten what it is to be human? Or that history shows empathy knits societies together? That it leads people to volunteer, an act which then boosts their mental health? That kids who have low empathy are more likely to bully?

Or what happens when we ignore pain and mute the cries of the suffering?

Psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who interviewed Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials, said after all his work examining the psyches of those who committed the most horrendous acts of World War II that he had come close to finding a definition of the nature of evil: “It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants,” he said. “A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.