The trouble with empathy
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Burchell
Download the complete article PDF
David Burchell's biography and other articles by this writer
No doubt the finite and meagre nature of our feelings does prevent us from extending our sympathies to those whom we have not seen in the flesh. It should not be so, and would not be with one who had nurtured his heart with the proper care.
– The Reverend Mr Crawley, in Anthony Trollope's
The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
Future historians might do worse than to term them Australia's empathy wars. I'm talking about the historical moment that began with appearance of the MV Tampa on the fringe of the Australian immigration zone in August 2001, and which took a new turn with the appearance of those terrifying, inexorable waves across the coastlines of South Asia on Boxing Day 2004. This was the time, more than any other in recent memory, when where you stood in Australian politics was defined by a single symbolically charged political issue – how you reacted towards the sudden influx of hundreds of foreign nationals into our immigration zones and our detention centres.
In practice, there seemed to be only two choices, and each was cut out in high relief. Depending on whom you talked to, the detainees were either a threat to our national sovereignty or a challenge to the nation's conscience. We needed either to reach out to them or steel ourselves against them. Their presence called either for a willed exercise of imagination and sympathy or for the deliberate refusal of such an emotion, suspected as a phoney political "stunt". It was impossible even to agree on a description of the detainees: they were either refugees or "illegals" – even though such empirical evidence as is available seems to suggest they are probably a mixture of both. As with all great wars, there was no room for a middle ground, because the battleground was the uncompromising tissue of the human heart.
Each side mustered its supporters for the emotional tug of war. On the one side, talkback radio hosts opened the airwaves to an outpouring of anxiety, suspicion, frustration and resentment. On this view, the detainees were frauds who had jumped the immigration queue and were clinging to their ill-gotten refugee imposture by a series of emotional ruses. And their professed supporters were a motley collection of interested individuals, plying a trade in caring for professional advancement, or else a coterie of self-gratifying "compassion junkies". In either case the plea for sympathy had to be resisted as a snare. In this respect, conservative intellectual opinion and popular criticism dovetailed to a surprising (and, to conservative intellectuals, no doubt, gratifying) degree.
On the other side of the trenches, there was less interest in the precise legal status of the detainees than in the purely human aspects of their plight. One's capacity to respond to another's imagined suffering was the key. From this side of no-man's-land, it seemed the problem lay not with a few malcontents, but with the soul of the nation itself. There was something about Australians that simply constrained them from an empathetic reaction towards their fellow humans in distress – a point of view that inevitably recalled the now-traditional sense of alienation of Australian intellectuals from the mundanity of ordinary suburban family life and its values.
IN 2002, AS PART OF THE RESEARCH FOR A SHORT BOOK on the "Western Sydney factor" in Australian politics, I surveyed the social-attitudes data on the asylum-seekers crisis. My resource was the Australian Election Study (AES), a lengthy questionnaire administered to a random selection of voters after each federal election. I was investigating the claim – then widely advanced – that outer-suburban voters in Sydney and elsewhere had been much less sympathetic to asylum seekers than Australians more broadly. As it happened, the claim seemed to be true enough, so far as it went. If the figures were to be trusted, Western Sydney residents were less sympathetic – by a margin of between 10 and 20 per cent – than were Australians generally, to the proposition that asylum seekers were all refugees and to several related propositions. This was more remarkable because, as a general rule, occupation and socio-economic status had only a limited impact on Australians' views on these issues. It seemed that when it came to anxieties about illegal immigration, where you lived was more important than how much you earned or what you did for a living.
Even more striking, however, was the range of factors that disposed people to being more sympathetic than average towards the claims of asylum seekers. From the point of view of statistical significance, the outstanding group of people who were more than usually well disposed were those who had received university educations of some kind. Indeed, university graduation was at least twice as good a predictor of one's views on the matter as income, occupation or even location. Subsequently, returning to the AES figures after a period of reflection, I found a couple of other variables that disposed people unusually favourably towards the claims of the detainees: regular church attendance and membership of an arts or cultural association. To put the matter at its simplest, the possession of a tertiary education, strong religious principles or an artistic bent seemed to affect a person's views on the bona fides of asylum seekers roughly twice as strongly as any other variable (bearing on either side) I could find.
Pondering these figures, the possibility occurred to me that many well-intentioned commentators might be approaching the "refugee question" the wrong way around. Perhaps the really significant question wasn't why so many people across the length and breadth of the country were more or less unsympathetic to the detainees' claims. Rather, it might be why a strongly sympathetic posture towards the detainees – in terms of the debate, asserting them to be asylum seekers rather than "illegals" – was so strongly associated with being a particular kind of person. Why did the overwhelming and insistent appeal to empathy on the part of asylum-seeker advocates touch a profound chord with specific categories of people, while leaving so many others entirely cold?
In one respect, the social-attitudes figures ought not really to surprise. After all, they tally more or less precisely with the public face of the asylum-seekers debate. Human-rights lawyers, social workers, the left wings of the mainstream Christian denominations, artists, writers and playwrights – these were all of them the main battalions of the pro-asylum-seeker cause as it presented itself in the electronic media. Was it possible that the rather lavish representation of such individuals on the "pro" side of the asylum-seekers impasse had shaped the manner in which the issues were publicly presented and understood? (Just as, perhaps, the public face of the Australian Republican Movement had served to shape the republic debate?) Was the "politics of empathy" even in certain respects a socio-culturally delimited way of looking at the problem? And – most unsettlingly of all – could it be that there was something to do with the instinctual resort of such people to an empathetic approach that might have actually contributed to the reluctance of many other Australians to follow their lead?
In recent years, cultural and social conservatives have devised an ingenious parlour game that involves tagging their leftish opponents as members of a cultural "elite" – an elite at once unworldly and interfering, out-of-touch yet strangely sinister. Given the numerical inferiority of conservative intellectuals nowadays, victory in this parlour game may be as much a matter of bolstering morale as of political strategy. In turn, "progressive" intellectuals have responded to the taunts obligingly – either taking refuge in familiar marxisant homilies about the "real" social elites supposed hiding behind the conservative intellectuals' backs, or else portraying themselves winsomely as the true intellectual outsiders in a mundus dominated by "free-market" cultural philistinism.
And yet, in truth, the cultural conservatives – for all their unedifying rancour and spite – do have a point. For an intellectual culture supposedly steeped in critique and "reflexiveness", in the critical interrogation of almost every received fact (or "fact"), it's striking how little self-reflection, how little "auto-critique", really happens among our academies, in our theatres and at writers' festivals. Harold Perkin observed, in his massive study of the "rise of professional society" in England since the late 19th century, how the university-educated professional classes, despite their ceaseless efforts to classify (and often parody) the commercial and administrative wings of the property-owning classes, incorrigibly "forgot themselves" as a class, even as they imagined for themselves a "special place" as "the guides and mentors, the Platonic Guardians of society". In this respect, perhaps, not too much has changed.
At the same time, I don't want to urge self-reflection purely as a moral principle: there's a pressing political problem here. For an important – albeit partially-hidden – element in the debates around elites and public opinion has been the complicated game of appeal– and counter-appeal around what has to be called, for want of a politer term, "cleverness". Cultural conservatives have appealed to public opinion on the grounds of social egalitarianism: the elites simply think they're cleverer than the rest of us. A not insignificant number of asylum-seeker supporters often seem to agree with them. When the former Labor Party President Carmen Lawrence recently commented, "If people use their brains and just a modicum of decency I think they'd reach the conclusion that the [mandatory detention] regime that's in place now is unconscionable and must be changed", she perhaps unwittingly summed up a submerged point of view.
And yet the cleverness argument – however gratifying it may be to protagonists on both sides – surely misses the point. Political astuteness is rarely a direct product of intellectual training, however rarefied. (Indeed, intellectual stubbornness not infrequently leads the highly-trained to quite heroic feats of political self-delusion.) The more important point, presumably, is that intellectual training of different kinds has the capacity to generate a shared moral and even emotional culture, with the capacity both to attract and repel, according to one's relation to it. Once – in a no doubt more culturally inegalitarian age – the existence of cultural differences of this kind was taken as a simple matters of fact. (And so it was simply assumed by the Victorians that ‘the gentleman' was a special kind of moral creature, on account of his peculiar and demanding code of conduct.) Nowadays we feel compelled to turn our eyes from them – even as we enjoy the sense of belonging, in some obscure way, to a very particular moral family.
IN THE 1950S, THE EMINENT ENGLISH HISTORIAN NOEL ANNAN sketched out a social history of the distinctive stratum – the "intellectual aristocracy" – with which he identified himself and his kind. His is one of those "classic" essays far more often cited than read. Indeed, today, it's most commonly footnoted by scholars as an arm-waving gesture towards the cunning survival skills of social elites, regardless of the sands of social change.
Annan's purpose had been quite different. He was concerned to show how it was that a particular culture – that of the modern liberal professional-academic classes – had emerged at a relatively precise moment, out of quite specific human material, and then how it had developed and maintained a cohesive ethos and style of life through the course of several generations. Among the chief elements in this style of life were the habit of incorrigible intermarriage, a stubborn inter-generational reproduction of social position (Annan was struck by his subjects' almost entire absence of upward social mobility), and an ingenious capacity to recreate habitual modes of thought and moral argument into new terms. And in contrast to almost every other scholarly account of intellectuals, Annan's was frankly biographical and even autobiographical – right down to the detailed genealogy of individual intermarriages and affinities, rendered (in Annan's inimitable fashion) after the manner of a triumphant fox hunt.
The morally charged and highly literate individuals at the centre of Annan's account were brought together in the first instance by a shared education and training. They emerged out of the bosom of the modern university-educated professions of the middle third of the 19th century and were solidified into a cohesive social grouping around the developing professional principles of competitive entry and promotion through merit. Yet "the magnet which drew them together" as a cultural force was moral rather than occupational: it was the practice of philanthropy and the cultivation of what would become known as the social conscience. And this, in turn, grew out of their religiously driven "sense of dedication, of living with purpose, or working under the eye, if not of the great taskmaster, of their own conscience". For evangelicals, as one of their historians insists, conscience was "the principal guide to action". Initially, it had demanded a critical attention to the moral scourges of alcohol and gambling. Yet, by the last decades of Victoria's reign, it had softened its heart and opened its arms. This was the moment of the case worker and the participant-observer, when moral reformers deliberately chose to live next to slum neighbourhoods and to walk daily among the objects of their solicitation.
Whether Evangelical (as were the great majority of their first generation), Quaker or Unitarian, these "intellectual aristocrats" shared an ethos of personal moral duty and high-minded intellectual seriousness. They were bookish and preoccupied with political and philosophical debate; they were deliberately neglectful of their personal appearance and utilitarian in their tastes in furnishings and interior design; they held no truck with polite manners or social niceties and were contemptuous of their social superiors (and, as they saw it, intellectual inferiors). Repelled by the casuistical puzzles by which Anglican clerics like Cardinal Newman justified their skilful doctrinal compromises, they valued honesty and sincerity of belief in spiritual matters above all else.
Like their much later descendents, they were preoccupied by causes. Rather than apartheid, their great humanitarian scourge was the Atlantic slave trade; instead of East Timor they had Bulgaria; instead of "national liberation movements" they had "national self-determination" ones. And they were constantly aware of their religious and social marginality as dissenting Protestants. Just as the baby-boom academics of the later 20th century would envisage themselves as first-generation critical intellectuals in a new democratic era of tertiary education, the "intellectual aristocrats" of the latter 19th century had a keen self-consciousness of being the first generation of religious dissenters allowed into a previously sectarian university system.
Over the course of three or four generations, the outward beliefs and formal moral codes of these families altered with remarkable swiftness, yet the tone persisted. If the first generation was earnest and evangelical, the second was still earnest but of an interior religiosity; by the third and fourth generations the evangelical impulse and liberal political outlook had been entirely subsumed within an interiorised spirituality that was perfectly compatible with atheism, Fabian socialism or even Marxism. One generation's Christian anti-slavery activist bred the next generation's liberal social reformer or austere Fabian pamphleteer; by the fourth generation the young might be singing the Internationale and signing up for Spain.
Perhaps most striking, though, was the way that an interiorised religiosity gave way to deep and abiding preoccupations with the inner life, and with psychology and psychoanalysis. Here the limit case was perhaps the Bloomsbury circle, that self-absorbed gathering of Edwardian descendents of almost all the original "aristocratic" families. Casting themselves adrift from the religious belief and social commitment of their ancestors, the youthful Bloomsberries clung to a philosophical credo within which the highest achievements were interpersonal intimacy and "beautiful states of mind". "Conventional morality" was disdained, and moral judgement deputed to the intuitive faculties of the interior self. And yet, as JM Keynes later recalled, the result was not pure immoralism: rather, the acolytes were by turns Calvinistic in their austerity, Platonic in their loftiness and Romantic in their high miserableness. They did not abolish morality so much as aestheticise or psychologise it: according to Virginia Woolf, one came by one's morality "by reading the poets". And while they disdained the mundane world of party politics and public service, they maintained a lofty global consciousness. In 1914, they all became instinctual pacifists and anti-patriots, sympathised with like spirits in all countries and described the war as a "crime against civilisation". The effect was one-part Edwardian dandyism and one-part 1960s counter-cultural oppositionalism.