Empathy Isn't Always (or often) Pretty

On seeing the worst parts of ourselves in others

Photo by Isaac Chou on Unsplash

I want to begin with a proposition: empathy is good, but if you’re doing it right, it should probably make you uncomfortable. I'll walk you through how I got here.

Every year, my family and I watch the Lord of the Rings movies (extended editions) around the Thanksgiving holidays. (I wrote about this practice last year for Popular Culture and Theology). The relatively slow pace of the season provides the time to luxuriate in the epics, and the themes of hope and light add to my experience of the season of Advent.

During this year's re-watch, I found myself thinking more about Frodo's fraught relationship with Gollum. After Gandalf cautions Frodo to not be so "quick to deal out death and judgement" in his fear and loathing of Gollum, Frodo spends the rest of the trilogy trying to save the little creep's life and soul, nearly at the cost of his own.

No doubt, much of Frodo's motivation is a form of empathy. Gandalf's wise, merciful speech shakes Frodo and he is able to see his nemesis with new eyes. Eventually, Frodo glimpses a nightmarish, potential future self in the creature, as a result of his bearing the weight of the ring.

As the One Ring gnaws at Frodo's soul, he is able to see Gollum as a being to be pitied as well as loathed. Yes, he is an untrustworthy villain, but there are very particular extenuating circumstances that Frodo learns to identify with. Eventually the hobbit puts voice to this self-motivated empathy: "I have to believe he can come back," he explains to Sam at one point. The implication is not subtle: Frodo knows that if a few things break the wrong way, he may very well end up like Gollum, gnawing at raw fish in a loincloth. This catastrophic potential is the root of the wisdom in Gandalf's "death and judgement" speech: the thin line between our present selves and our worst selves.

This is something I've been thinking about for a long time now.

One of the features of the social media era (and yes, it is a feature, not a bug) is the deeply perverse moralizing at the core of its discourse. The algorithm's demands incentivize a harsh moral worldview that aims "death and judgement" at all the internet's villains. It's what drives the call-out culture of certain left-leaning communities as well as the transgressive trolling of certain right-leaning communities (it may be hard for liberals to accept that the alt-right is driven by morality, but no who says moral judgement can't be rooted in perversity?).

Let me take a moment to reflect here on a group that I find mostly intolerable: the trolling, transgressive bad boys of the internet.

These trolls live on our X-Twitter feeds and in Facebook meme groups and on chat boards across cyberspace. They find delight in making other people feel uncomfortable and disgusted; when this happens, they feel they've achieved their highest purpose. But even these groups operate from a moral system for the most part. The people they target generally violate some principle they hold dear or they represent to them some destructive development in the social fabric. We like to think of them as pure nihilists, but generally, they do believe in something, even if that something is wicked. They’ve been warped by the Utopian vision of their chosen ideology.

Take the incel, for instance. These men have somehow convinced themselves that their sorry lot in life is the fault of exclusionary social structures that conspire against them. When they "do a Gamergate" or something, they genuinely believe they are struggling for a kind of social justice. Their morals are out of whack, but they are morals.

So if these are the most repugnant people I can think of, how can I muster empathy for them, if I've decided to avoid dealing out judgement? And even more importantly, why on Earth would I do that anyway?"

I fall back on the "there but for the grace of God" thing.

An honest recollection of my younger days would reveal that I was very much the same kind of social outcast that many of these folks were. So what's the difference between me and them? Yes, I surely made better choices at times and I absolutely believe that matters. As Camus said, after a certain age, a person is responsible for their own face.

But if I'm still being honest, I also have to admit that I was very lucky. Thank God the internet didn't exist when I was 17. What kinds of cesspools might I have crawled into when my mind was aflame with all that righteous indignation? When I think about these people, I feel a little like our favorite Hobbit. As Frodo travels to Mordor with Gollum, he often looks at him with a kind of awestruck horror. He sees in Gollum a worst-case scenario for his own life, should things break just the wrong way.

I absolutely believe that the incels and their kin are horrid. But they were also unlucky to live when they did. They were unlucky to have stumbled into a digital social network that incentivizes the worst parts of human psychology. They are, in their own way, like Sméagol, who happened to be fishing in the wrong lake on the wrong day.

Of course, like Gollum, these people make the daily choice to give into their ugliest impulses and they eventually become responsible for the hideous face they show the world. When Gollum finally follows his lust for the ring into the lava of Mount Doom, it is tragic. But he nonetheless got what his actions deserved.

Still, on this Thanksgiving, I was very grateful that I wasn’t socialized on the internet.