Empathy isn't a "bug" in Western civilisation, it's the foundation: Ivo Vegter

Elon Musk and author Gad Saad say Western civilisation is dying of "suicidal empathy", with a South African libertarian speaker set to make the same case locally. Ivo Vegter isn't buying it. He traces empathy from Aristotle to ubuntu, tests the claim against real history, and asks who actually benefits when kindness gets rebranded as weakness. His answer draws on Locke, the fall of empires and the numbers behind immigration panic, and lands somewhere very different from where Musk started. Read the full argument for what's really at stake when a society stops trusting its own compassion..By Ivo Vegter*.The theory that the West is dying of “suicidal empathy” misunderstands liberty, misunderstands the West, and misunderstands empathy itself.“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Elon Musk reportedly told Joe Rogan. (Sorry, I’ll never go to the primary source of rambling, three-hour podcasts.)“They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response,” he added. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.”Musk borrowed these phrases from Gad Saad, a professor of marketing currently at the University of Mississippi. He built a book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, and a considerable social media following upon it. Musk wrote the endorsement on its cover.The programme for an upcoming libertarian event includes the executive director of Lex Libertas and self-described “reluctant philosopher” Ernst Roets, whose talk will be entitled Wokeness and suicidal empathy in the West.Irrational altruismThe claim of Saad, Musk and Roets is that empathy, though a virtue in ordinary life, becomes, in Saad’s words, “maladaptively irrational altruism” when it is directed at the wrong targets.A society that lavishes compassion upon illegal immigrants, criminals, and adherents of hostile ideologies, the argument goes, will adopt policies – open borders, lenient bail, permissive asylum rules – that erode its own security, cohesion, and ultimately its survival. Compassion, unchecked by reason, becomes a solvent that dissolves the civilisation that produces it.Saad points to cases like the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train by a repeat offender out on cashless bail, as the fruit of a justice system marinated in misplaced mercy.Musk points to Europe’s admission of millions of refugees, some of whom go on to commit crimes against the natives.Assorted evangelical theologians have joined in, denouncing the “sin of empathy” and “toxic empathy” as tools by which progressives manipulate Christian compassion.It is a clever thesis. It appears to mirror Karl Popper’s admonition that tolerating an intolerant ideology poses a threat to the very existence of tolerance, since the intolerant, should they prove victorious, will suppress the tolerant by violence.It is a seductive thesis. It flatters its adherents as clear-eyed rationalists in a world of sentimental fools.It is also wrong. It is wrong about every one of its premises: about the foundations of Western Civilisation, about the nature of empathy, and about the hypothetical threat..Liberty comes firstPlacing my rejection of the notion of “suicidal empathy” on a sound footing will take us on a bit of a journey through time and civilisations, but let’s begin at the beginning.The moral foundation of a free society is not safety, nor cohesion, nor even prosperity. It is liberty.John Locke argued that all people are born in a state of perfect freedom and equality, and that no one may be subjected to the political power of another without their consent.Government exists by consent, for one purpose: the protection of life, liberty and property. A government that fails at this task, or turns upon the rights of its own people, loses its legitimacy.John Stuart Mill refined the principle in On Liberty, and it is worth quoting the context in which his oft-paraphrased harm principle occurs:“The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”This is not a utilitarian argument, in which liberty is granted conditionally, because it happens to produce good outcomes, and may be revoked when a clever social engineer calculates that coercion would produce a better result.Liberty as an innate right trumps utilitarian calculations. It is the axiom from which the legitimacy of laws, mores and traditions must be derived.The role of governmentLiberty obviously cannot exist under totalitarian government. Communism, socialism, fascism, or South Africa’s “developmental state” cannot foster liberty.Less obviously, and despite the intellectual appeal of anarcho-capitalism, it cannot exist under pure anarchy, either.If every square metre of land were privately owned, then surrounding landowners can, by simply withholding permission of passage, strip a person of their freedom of movement, speech, trade and association – imprisoning them on their own property or exiling them from it without ever laying a hand on them.That is why a minimal government is necessary: to protect life, liberty and property against force and fraud, and to provide those few services and public works – courts, roads, commons – that cannot conveniently be provided privately, but without which rights and freedoms cannot in practice be exercised.Liberty, then, is the right of every person to choose how to live their life, say what they will, go where they may, associate with whom they please, and trade how they wish – provided those choices do not infringe upon the equal rights of others to life, liberty and property. And government exists to enforce that proviso.Hold on to that axiom. We shall need it..Read more:.Ivo Vegter: From London to Pretoria, governments are assembling the machinery of media control.What is Western Civilisation?If empathy is the West’s “fundamental weakness”, it would help to know what the West is.While most of the adherents of the “suicidal empathy” thesis will answer “the Judaeo-Christian tradition”, and while it has been extremely influential in the West, Western Civilisation did not begin with Christianity, and is not defined by it.Its taproot lies in ancient Greece, centuries before the Christian era and entirely outside the Judaic tradition: in the natural philosophy of the Ionians, the mathematics of Pythagoras and Euclid, the ethics and politics of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the fractious, argumentative, experimental democracy of Athens.From those roots grew a civilisation that has never been just one thing.It has been pagan, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, deist and secular. It has spoken Greek, Latin, and a babel of subsequent vernaculars. It has encompassed republics and monarchies, lords and peasants, masters and slaves, merchants and monks, romantics and rationalists and nihilists.It has spent much of its history – including its recent history – at war with itself, often over Judaeo-Christian disagreements.What ultimately distinguished the West was not uniformity but the habits and institutions it developed for living with diversity: religious toleration, the separation of church and state, the protection of the individual’s person and conscience against both priest and prince. This created space for the rise of trade, the curiosity of exploration, and the impetus for invention.As I have argued before, secularism is the cornerstone of the modern, post-Enlightenment culture of the West.It was religious believers – dissenters, Huguenots, Puritans – who, fleeing persecution, established governments that were constitutionally forbidden from dictating what citizens must believe. The American First Amendment was written not to protect the state from the church, but the church from the state.Built by strangersNor did the West build its wealth in splendid isolation. Its richness – and on occasion, arguably, its survival – owes an unpayable debt to peaceable interaction and productive trade with other civilisations.When Western Europe descended into its early-medieval torpor, when Church fathers burnt everything that seemed inconsistent with the Biblical canon, it was Arabic-speaking scholars in Baghdad, Córdoba and Cairo who preserved, translated and built upon the Greek classics, sparking a new scientific revolution long before the Renaissance of Europe.Europe recovered Aristotle largely through the commentaries of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who became known in the West as “The Commentator”, and “Father of Rationalism”.Western numerals are Hindu-Arabic. “Algebra” and “algorithm” both derive from the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi; “alchemy”, “alcohol”, “alkali” and “zenith” come from the same intellectual tradition.Trade with the Far East brought silk, porcelain, paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass – novelties so thoroughly absorbed that we no longer recognise them as imports.The colonial era, whatever else may be said of it, stocked the Western economy with sugar, tomatoes, potatoes, maize, tobacco, cotton, rubber, coffee, tea, spices, and an endless inventory of raw materials and finished goods.Strip the foreign contributions out of “Western” life and there would be precious little left on the table, in the library, or in the treasury.So the civilisation allegedly menaced by empathy for foreigners is one founded upon liberty, defined by tolerance and internal diversity, and enriched at every turn by intercourse with alien cultures, both primitive and advanced.Keep that in mind, too..The Golden RuleNow for the third term. What is this “empathy” that is supposedly killing us?The word itself is young: coined in 1909 by the psychologist Edward Titchener as a translation of the German Einfühlung, “feeling into”. But the thing it names – the capacity to enter imaginatively into the situation of another, and to let that understanding inform one’s conduct – is as old as moral philosophy itself.Some 2,600 years ago the very first Western philosopher, Thales of Miletus, who substituted naturalism for the mysticism of his forebears, first formulated what has become known as the Golden Rule: “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.”The tolerant and liberal rabbi Hillel the Elder, who died in 10 CE, wrote: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour; this is the whole of the law, and the rest is commentary.”A later writer, in Matthew 7:12, attributes these words to Jesus: “Therefore, everything you would like men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”The Golden Rule is, besides the axiom of liberty, the most important principle in Western ethics.In other words, Western Civilisation is defined by considering how one’s actions towards others might be experienced if directed at oneself.Empathy is the whole of the law; the rest is commentary.A brief history of empathyThe idea of fellow-feeling permeates both religious and secular philosophy.Aristotle analysed eleos, pity at undeserved suffering, in his Rhetoric, and made friendship – willing the good of another for their own sake – a pillar of the good life.Epicurus, who taught that justice is a compact neither to harm nor be harmed, held friendship to be the greatest of the goods that wisdom procures.The thread runs unbroken through Western thought. Petrarch, the father of Renaissance humanism, recentred learning on the human condition. Erasmus pleaded the cause of peace, intellectual tolerance and moderation against the princes of Europe on the basis of Christian humanist principles.Francisco de Vitoria, lecturing at Salamanca in the 1530s, insisted that the peoples of the Americas were rational beings with rights of dominion that no conquistador could lawfully extinguish – founding international law and principles of free trade upon empathy for people his contemporaries were busy enslaving.Spinoza observed that we naturally imitate and share the affects of those we perceive as like ourselves. Even Hobbes, no sentimentalist, built his commonwealth upon each person’s capacity to read their own fears and desires in others.Hume declared sympathy the chief source of our moral distinctions, remarking that the minds of men are mirrors to one another. Rousseau made pitié, innate compassion, one of only two principles prior to reason itself.And Adam Smith opened The Theory of Moral Sentiments with the observation that however selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Fellow-feeling, for the founder of modern economics, was the very foundation of morals and of society.Thomas Paine wielded the same sentiment politically, defending the rights of man against Burke’s regret that the grand edifice of the Bastille was pulled down.Auguste Comte finally gave the disposition its name, coining “altruism” – living for others – as the mark of mature civilisation..Read more:.FT lunches with Errol Musk: “I'm Elon's father, not his pal'.Not uniqueNor is any of this a Western monopoly, which rather undermines the notion that it is a uniquely Western “bug”.A century after Thales, and five centuries before Christ, Confucius taught shu – never impose on others what you do not desire for yourself. Another Chinese philosopher, Mozi, preached impartial concern for all.The great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, reads: “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behaviour is due to selfish desires.”Buddhism made karuṇā, which translates as “compassion”, a cardinal virtue.The same Greek inheritance passed through Islamic civilisation, whose philosophers debated Aristotle’s ethics while its faith commanded zakat (almsgiving) and ihsan (excellence in kindness).The Quran offers its readers an even stronger formulation of the Golden Rule, namely, to repel evil with what is good. “Then will he between whom and you was hatred become as it were your friend and intimate.”And we in South Africa hardly need reminding of ubuntu: a person is a person through other persons.Empathy is not a bug in Western Civilisation. It is not even an exclusively Western feature. It is a golden thread through human civilisation as such, and the West’s greatest philosophers – the very people who built the intellectual edifice Musk and Saad claim to be defending – regarded it as the foundation of morality, society and law.Western Civilisation, then, is best defined by its empathy and tolerance for the beliefs, languages, cultures and social norms of others, provided these do not materially infringe upon the rights and freedoms of anyone else.The safety trapBefore completing the argument, allow me an aside on the kernel of truth the “suicidal empathy” crowd often gestures at: the tension between liberty and safety.It is perfectly correct that freedom carries risk.A society without prior restraint – in which people may move, speak, associate and trade without first proving their harmlessness to a society’s rulers – will suffer more unlawful acts than one in which everyone is presumed guilty until vetted.Some of the people a free society admits, whether at its borders or out of its prisons on bail, will do terrible things. The murder of Iryna Zarutska was such a thing, and nothing here should be read as minimising it.That perpetrator arguably shouldn’t have been let out on bail. In principle, however, what Saad and Musk consider to be pathological empathy is nothing but a matter of justice that is essential in a free society. In a free society, accused suspects cannot justly be punished before they are actually convicted. That means they can be detained only with good cause – if they pose a clear risk of either flight or further harm to society. One cannot simply imprison all accused persons until trial. Choosing when to grant bail, how high to set it, and when to withhold it, comes with a measure of risk, but the gravity of the injustice of wrongly incarcerating innocent people cannot be ignored..Maximal safetyObserve where the logic of safety-above-all leads. Maximal personal safety is available. It is enjoyed by the elite of every totalitarian police state, who stroll unmolested through swept streets, guarded by an apparatus that surveils everyone and detains anyone.North Korea has admirably little street crime. Thanks to the Stasi, social controls, extensive surveillance, and brutal suppression of both crime and dissent, the former East Germany had a low and sharply declining crime rate. It spiked after reunification.If safety were desirable in and of itself, that would be the model. It is not, because safety is only one value among several, and not the highest.Measures that enhance personal safety must always be weighed against competing objectives: maximal individual liberty, vigorous economic growth, rapid innovation, productive trade, rich scientific exchange, and a lively, open public life.Benjamin Franklin’s much-abused line about those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety was written in a different context, but the principle for which it is most often invoked holds true: a society that optimises for safety alone will end up with neither liberty nor, in the long run, safety.The rational question is never “does this policy carry risk?” – everything does – but “is this risk being managed from a presumption of liberty, or used as a pretext to abolish it?”The suicide that isn’tWhich brings us, finally, to the verdict on “suicidal empathy”.The theory holds that “woke” liberalism’s excessive concern for the well-being of others – immigrants above all – produces irrational policies that undermine the foundations of Western Civilisation. Every element of that claim collapses on inspection.First, the axiom. The principle of liberty applies to all people who have not violated the life, liberty or property of another. Not to all citizens; to all people. Locke’s state of nature knows no passports.A Salvadoran metalworker or a Syrian refugee who has harmed no one holds exactly the same natural rights as a native-born burgher, and a state that strips them of due process, dignity or humanity – like shipping a man to a foreign gulag without charge, in defiance of the courts – has abandoned the very principles it claims to defend.Empathy for such a man is not a malfunction. It is the axiom of liberty, functioning correctly.Second, the arithmetic. For humane treatment of immigrants to be civilisationally suicidal, it would have to threaten the liberal-democratic constitutional order itself.Constitutions do not fall to vibes, or to localised aberrations or sporadic protests; they fall to electoral supermajorities.There is no significant free society – not one – in which immigrant populations, or parties advocating the replacement of the constitutional order with something illiberal, come anywhere near the supermajorities required to amend a constitution..Read more:.Jay Naidoo: Can civilisational democracy survive the return of bombardment?.As I noted recently, the size of immigrant populations advocating, say, restrictive religious law is negligible in every Western country. In the US, it is arguable that there is a substantially more influential native population that is trying to impose draconian religious laws upon their fellow citizens.Either way, a civilisation does not commit suicide by treating a minority of its residents decently.Third, let me concede that immigration poses real problems, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.Cultural assimilation takes effort and investment, and is not automatic. Immigration can produce localised spikes in crime or social friction, particularly where young men are concentrated, idle and unintegrated.Cherry-picked statistics from such places will always be available to demagogues, yet there are genuine underlying challenges.But they are management problems, not existential ones, and they can – and must – be managed from a presumption of liberty: vetting for actual criminal records and extremist links, investing in integration, policing actual crimes, and insisting that everyone, native and newcomer alike, assimilate into the one non-negotiable creed of a free society, which is respect for the equal rights of others.None of this requires denying anyone their humanity, dignity or fundamental rights. Punish the guilty individual for their actions; never for a birthplace they did not choose and cannot change.Fourth, attracting immigrants is the mark of a thriving civilisation. People queue, swim and stow away to get into the West, precisely because its liberty, tolerance and openness have made it rich and safe beyond historical precedent.A civilisation in terminal decline does not suffer from immigration; it suffers from emigration, as anyone who has watched skilled South Africans stream through OR Tambo International can attest.When people stop trying to get in, that is when the West should worry. The “suicide” diagnosis has the patient’s vital signs exactly backwards.Who wields the knife?Let me sum up.Western Civilisation is founded upon axiomatic individual liberty, defined by tolerance and diversity, enriched immeasurably by openness to strangers, and morally scaffolded – by its own greatest thinkers, from Aristotle to Adam Smith – upon fellow-feeling for other human beings.The “suicidal empathy” theorists propose to defend this civilisation by rejecting the tolerance, closing the openness, revoking the universality of rights, and reclassifying its foundational moral sentiment as a disease. They would cut out the heart to save the patient.They are in venerable company, though not the company they imagine.Robespierre derided misplaced clemency toward enemies of the republic as barbarism. Lenin sneered at the abstract humanism of intellectuals who wept over the victims of his just and necessary terror.Every totalitarian movement in history has begun by explaining that compassion for a designated class of persons is weakness, decadence, a luxury the nation can no longer afford.It is a good rule of thumb that when a political movement devotes its energies to denouncing human kindness, the kindness is not the problem.Empathy did not build the gulags, the camps or the killing fields. Rejecting empathy did.Those who denounce empathy towards immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers as “suicidal” are not the defenders of Western Civilisation. They are a threat to the fundamental humanity and tolerance upon which it is built – and, unlike the immigrants they fear, they command the votes, the platforms and the governments to do it real harm.Western Civilisation is not dying of empathy. But it could yet die at the hands of the public enemies of empathy..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Empathy isn't a "bug" in Western civilisation, it's the foundation: Ivo Vegter

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