Where’s the empathy? As yet another message, order, and policy change comes blasting out of the White House, accompanied by fraudulent statements and outright lies, I keep asking – and many of us are wondering — where is the empathy for those who have been fired, furloughed, abandoned, deported, demeaned, despised? If the empathy is there, I don’t see it. I do see vengeance and gloating, and I hear vicious comments about retribution and payback, but empathy? No evidence that I can find.
There is no end of speculation about the reason for a lack of empathy. Narcissism, Asperger’s syndrome, sycophancy, sociopathology, lust for power. All are plausible and are undoubtedly in the mix, at least with some of those who are engineering the takedown of democracy and our government. But I think there is something deeper and more insidious at work in all of this.
Self righteousness.
Self-righteousness is a feeling, buoyed by the illusion of certainty, that an action, a position, an ideology is right. Always right. Self-righteousness runs the risk of not hearing, and not abiding – any other perspective or position. Self-righteousness, especially in the extreme degree, which is on daily display these days, strangles empathy. Self-righteousness runs the risk of transforming compassion into moral weakness. Self-righteousness feeds the ego, and can inflate it to a degree that the soul gets cut off, or shut down, or renders it unrecognizable. Those who travel on the path of self-righteousness can more easily identify enemies, and keep them as irredeemable foes.
As my anger swells, my outrage deepens, my fear tightens my stomach, and my anxiety invades my sleep, I am tempted to meet the self-righteousness coming out of Washington with — self-righteousness. That I can easily sit astride a moral high horse and declare this Presidency to be a disgrace, an embarrassment, and that his allies and supporters are misguided, and need to be ashamed.
I can acknowledge that temptation, and have at various moments given into it. It can make me feel good, and morally superior, and more spiritually gifted than others. It is a psychic and spiritual trap that is hard to escape. And my self-righteousness just perpetuates the vicious cycle: the self-righteousness of others kindles mine, which serves to escalate the opposing self-righteousness. And on and on it goes; conversation reduces to win-lose arguments and listening becomes preparation for the next self-righteous salvo. Besides which, in my experience at least, President Trump and his advisors are more locked in, far more practiced, and indeed more ruthless in their self-righteousness. I am no match for them.
Jesus offers lament as an alternative to self-righteousness. His lament emerges as he weeps over the city of Jerusalem as it is beset with corruption and degradation. (Luke 13:34) His lament is a sadness. It comes from the soul. Lament provides space for reflection; and can provide preparation for action that is not rooted in self-righteousness, but is instead guided by love.
Self-righteousness runs the risk of denying the humanity of another, which then makes it easier to treat the other as an object rather than a person. Lament is enveloped in compassion, and thereby renders another person as a subject of interest, as a fellow human being on life’s journey. Lament doesn’t mean caving in to one’s principles or position, but it does require us to engage in the onslaught we face from a different angle; that we stand as witnesses to compassion and empathy and challenge what is becoming a wrecking ball to democracy.
At almost every moment I am tempted to regard Donald Trump as an object of derision. To dismiss him as a fellow human being. There are forces and voices that encourage me to do so. When we join in the practice of “othering”, we take a dangerous situation and make it worse. Lament enables us to stay related to one another, and to see each other as created in the image of God, as imago Dei. Even when, no, especially when, we don’t want to.
Lament opens the door to empathy and compassion – not only for those we are challenging — but also for those who are bearing the brunt of cruelty and injustice. Hard though it may be to do so, we need to continue to journey through it all. It may be the only pathway to healing, of ourselves and of the world. That was the path taken by Jesus, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and scores of others. We would do well to follow them.
