The Curse of Empathy
“The fundamental weakness in Western Civilisation is empathy.” Elon Musk
In 2023, while spending vast oceans of time writing a book called ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressor’ that could not be published (I’m still working on it – one day, one day), I wrote the following sentence, “An expert teacher operates routinely, daily, minute-by-minute at the deepest levels of human empathy it is possible to inhabit.” I believe this to be true.
Many of us were brought up to “be nice” and were told that behaving empathetically towards others was a good thing: not that it would necessarily benefit us (other than perhaps in terms of improved human relationships) but that it was a good thing in and of itself. The lesson bedded in and became an intrinsic part of how we negotiated and understood the world. I turn 60 next week and now feel we were all accidentally lied to and that the key value many of us have lived by is little more than a dead bird rotting round the neck of the person carrying it. Empathy can be worse than useless for those who must own it.
You only have to take the shallowest dive into realms geopolitical, edu-political or even into the arena of human relationships, to become deeply disheartened by the seemingly indisputable fact that those of us who suffer the curse of empathy seem to have been missing out on a version of a superpower. The ability to hurt others without experiencing shame at having done so, without any access to the emotion that would cause us not to hurt the other again, if you think about it, gives you a greater range of options behaviourally than its obverse. There are people who are capable of being entirely Machiavellian in their dealings with other humans, and this allows them a certain ruthlessness that ends up having positive effects on their positions in hierarchies and on their financial situation.
How this plays out on schools is in the rapid promotion of people with careers and ambition who, given that the key human skill in the classroom is to operate empathetically, might not necessarily have had that much aptitude for the core role. Some people seem motivated more by power than by anything else, and their shallow experience of the core skills of teaching can find them holding the reins of control over the pedagogic and behavioural cultures of the schools or academy chains without much deep-rooted knowledge that there are many different ways of doing things, many different ideas as to what good teaching looks like and that we are not meant to be in service of ourselves.
The irony here for the empathetic teacher who has perhaps devoted themselves to their craft for decades is that they can be subject to enforced and “non-negotiable” pedagogic cultures that these teachers know are not good for the children they serve. They are forced by people who have little in the way of human empathy to operate against their own value system. These cultures, which generally take their inspiration from one not very clever book and that one book alone, enforce silence where discussion is healthier, see rote and recitation as more valuable than investigative talk, publicly shame children by awarding them ‘demerits’ and force them to traverse corridors in serried lines with their mouths firmly shut at all times. This is all done in the name of “results”.
Such cultures appear to have little empathy for the children they host. The argument is that the ends, the results, justify the means: it is a definition of Machiavellianism. It either ignores or doesn’t know about the tradition of the profession, is entirely unaware that there is more than just the one way to get results and fails to understand that there are long-term psychological outcomes that occur as a result of the way in which children are treated. There’s more than one version of results, y’know?
But the person with shallow or only cognitive empathy does not necessarily care about these things. While they may claim otherwise genuinely convincingly, they might not care to notice the psychological impact of the cultures they enforce on the people who spend their time in them. It is possible that they might not be psychologically attuned to do so in any case. Ultimately, their pay packet and future prosperity are based on grades on certificates, and all other considerations can go hang. They may be seen as role models by junior staff who seek to emulate their ruthlessness. And so, the cycle continues.
There is also the difficulty that the person with shallow empathy can tend to claim expertise they simply don’t have. An absence of the experience of shame causes one to be capable of shamelessness, and there are those (many) who are more interested in the appearance of things rather than in their reality. All the time they can delude people who know less than them that they know a lot, the masquerade continues. Such people, in the words of Harry G. Frankfurt, speak, “extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant,”[1] and their thoughts and published works are guilty of, “some kind of laxity that resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline.”[2] The career path of the education system as is rewards grift, and we have a legion of influencers whose influence is based on the sale of a new and entirely see-through version of snake oil: routines are everything, cognitive load theory is meaningful, learning is merely memorisation, recitation is of value: inconsequential rubbish, repackaged and sold, again and again, that has had no positive impact on children’s experience of school at all but has served a self-interested cadre.
How do we fight this? It seems now impossible to do so. And recent government change appears to have done little to nothing to reverse the direction of travel. But there are those of us who will continue pissing in the wind … in entirely unsuitable clothing for a hurricane … pointing out that an education system that has little empathy for the experience of the children it is meant to serve is one we may have cause to look back upon with a version of horror.
[1] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press: Princeton 2005) p63.
[2] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press: Princeton 2005) p23.Thanks for reading Phil’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.