A SURFEIT OF COMPASSION

The “empathy economy” has become dangerously unbalanced

The term “empathy economy” has been used to describe the practice, in our feminized age, of appealing to or claiming “empathy”—usually meaning empathetic compassion—in business advertising. I think it is more useful to consider the term in a different sense, that of a resource that flows in its own system or economy.

The idea here is not complicated. Humans have various resources they spend, or employ as catalysts, to obtain things for themselves and others. The resource that dominates discussions is, of course, the external resource we call money. But humans in their quests also routinely draw on their personal stores of energy, intelligence, inventiveness, wit and charm, social status, “a sense of style,” acting ability, psychological stability, and many other traits and characteristics. Empathy—the ability to understand another’s mindset or emotional state, not in a detached way but by feeling, to some degree, what the other is feeling—is another one of these resources.

Men do not lack empathy, but women on average have a stronger capacity for it, not least in regard to empathy that triggers feelings of compassion for the poor, the hungry, migrants, etc. This trait presumably has deep biological roots as an adaptation for women’s traditional roles centering on child-rearing.

Since women, just in the past several decades, have begun venturing from their traditional domestic domain to become present and powerful in all public domains and institutions, their greater capacity for and tendency towards empathetic compassion has made this sentiment more important in the shaping of policy and culture. That’s putting it mildly—the shift has been massive. Western societies since the 1960s, the period of women’s rapid ascension to power, have embraced policies that would have been hard to imagine in the 1940s or 50s. Politicians often had low partisan motivations for these policies, e.g. liberalizations of immigration law brought in new voters, while more generous welfare programs kept poorer minorities on side. But they were able to justify such policies with unprecedented ease, thanks to women—by framing them as compassionate and therefore virtuous.

The cultural ascent of women has brought another strong albeit not-too-surprising trend: the decline of marriage, childbearing and the stay-at-home mom. The feminist movement, which both drove and was driven by women’s new power, encouraged this trend by telling women and even girls to attach less value to marriage and homemaking, and more value to career-oriented lifestyles. By the 1990s, Western societies were essentially saturated with this messaging, which could be found even in books and TV shows for toddlers. This had many knock-on effects, of course. For example, as it became the norm for women to have careers and to add their salaries to their husbands’, home prices rose—creating an ever-higher barrier to the formation of families, and limiting the average size of families that did manage to form.

What does all this have to do with the empathy economy? My suggestion here is that the ascension of women to cultural and political power, and the related trend towards a more atomized, low-marriage, low-fertility society, have greatly reduced the traditional use or absorption of empathetic compassion within the family-centered domestic sphere. Since this ancient, instinctual resource is produced naturally and automatically in women—it cannot easily be shut off—it must flow somewhere; thus, it has overflowed into the public sphere.

To put it more crudely: childless “cat ladies” and “wine aunts” have natural womanly stores of empathetic compassion, and tend to spend it on (apart from their cats and their wine) “starving African children” or “the homeless” or “undocumented immigrants”—both directly and by steering government policy—if they don’t have loved ones to absorb it instead.

It’s not hard to see as well that, as the demographic presence and cultural power of these compassion-givers have expanded, society has catered increasingly to their needs, e.g. by making it ever easier for these women to pour succor over the world’s unfortunates. And, of course, politicians, businessmen and their marketing experts have sought to exploit the sentiments and sentimentality of this important group.

By now, moreover, greater flows of empathetic compassion in the public sphere have become very much the norm. In that “cultural norm” sense—and cultural norms appear to bind women more strongly, on average compared to men—we should expect these sentiments to be prominent not only among single, childless women but even among women who have children.

My central point here, then, is simply that Western and other societies in which women have strong public presence and power are necessarily awash in empathetic compassion, which at least helps to explain many new and remarkable cultural and policy trends.

I haven’t attached a “value judgment” to all this. But the fixation on short-term emotional payoff that is typical of compassion-driven or compassion-justified new policies and cultural traits seems inherently dangerous, due to its relative blindness to long-term consequences. It is also dangerous, and frankly stupid, to assume that a trait evolved for the domestic sphere (or a relatively simple paleolithic social sphere) will work well in a modern complex social setting.

In any case, it follows from my argument here that, ceteris paribus, increasing fertility and family formation to more traditional, demographically healthy levels would eventually—against the resistance of the new cultural norm—reduce the current surplus of empathetic compassion in the public sphere. This in turn should make government policies and non-governmental actions aimed at “helping people” more judicious and sustainable, though of course Western societies face so many other problems that we may never experience a solution to this one.

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