Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon on love versus empathy in modern culture
Bishop Robert Barron delivers a Sunday sermon contrasting the Christian concept of love with the modern cultural emphasis on empathy.
Summary
Bishop Barron opens by discussing Gad Saad's book Suicidal Empathy, using it as a springboard to draw a sharp theological distinction between empathy and love. He argues that empathy — defined as feeling another's feelings and avoiding harm to them — has been elevated to a supreme cultural value in ways that threaten truth, justice, and genuine love. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas's definition of love as "willing the good of the other," he contends that real love sometimes requires hurting people's feelings. He connects the cultural dominance of empathy to the postmodern critical theory underlying what he calls "wokeism," arguing that when objective moral truth is rejected, empathy fills the vacuum left behind. He closes with a call for Christians to reassert the biblical understanding of love in the public square.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Suicidal Empathy and the problem with making empathy supreme
Bishop Barron: Peace be with you. Friends, I just finished reading a really interesting book called Suicidal Empathy by a man with a very poetic name — Gad Saad. Gad Saad is a Canadian social psychologist, and the book, I think, along with Chris Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution and James Lindsay's Cynical Theories, is the best exposure and takedown of the lunacy at the heart of much of the wokeist philosophy that dominates things today.
Saad's analysis focuses on empathy. What is empathy? Empathy is feeling the feelings of somebody else, entering into the feelings of another person, and a desire not to hurt or wound those feelings. That's empathy. Is empathy a good thing? Yes — a perfectly decent thing. All things being equal, you should be empathetic with people. All things being equal, don't hurt people's feelings.
Here's the problem, and I think he's right about this: empathy is not a supreme value. Empathy is not something which is always and everywhere the right thing to do. Empathy is not the center around which all of our value system revolves. And in the measure that it has become that, lots of mischief has happened. It has become so exaggerated, in fact, that it threatens truth, reality, justice, and — I'll get to this — love. If you put empathy, so defined, at the center of your preoccupation, truth, reality, justice, and love are going to be threatened.
Examples of empathy displacing justice and truth in contemporary culture
Cases in point abound. All you have to do is look around the culture today. So that biological men won't feel bad about themselves, we'll let them compete in women's sports and frustrate the dreams of thousands of young women. So as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we'll allow them, even if they're unqualified, to have positions in universities and the corporate world. So that everybody might feel included, we'll characterize the meritocracy as white privilege, and so on. Most of the moves of wokeism are predicated upon the primacy of empathy — the supreme value being: don't hurt the feelings of other people. But what if what we're doing is unjust? What if it's unfair? What if it's not really good for people? Well, that takes second place to empathy.
It becomes so exaggerated, Gad Saad argues, that it becomes in fact suicidal — that it undermines society itself.
The distinction between empathy and love: Thomas Aquinas
Now, as I was reading his book — and he's not coming at this from a religious standpoint, he's doing it more from the standpoint of social psychology — I kept thinking of the distinction between empathy and love. Love is indeed the supreme value taught to us by the Bible. Love is indeed what stands at the heart of the moral life. But love, everybody, does not mean primarily feeling the feelings of somebody else. Love does not mean primarily not hurting people's feelings. Love, as Thomas Aquinas teaches, means to will the good of the other.
Empathy is to feel the feelings of the other and not harm those feelings. Love is willing the good of the other. Does that mean that sometimes loving involves hurting people's feelings? You bet.
A couple of simple examples. You're a conscientious college professor. Someone turns in their work and it's pretty bad — mediocre at best. And so you give that paper a C or C minus. Will you hurt the person's feelings? Undoubtedly. If I got a C, I'd feel terrible, I'd probably be angry, my self-esteem would be wounded, my feelings would be hurt, certainly. But what would that conscientious professor be doing? He would in fact be loving that student. Why? He'd be telling him the truth about the quality of his work and probably incentivizing him to do better, encouraging him to become a better writer, a better researcher, a more careful student. The C hurt his feelings, to be sure, but that C was in fact an act of love.
How about a priest in the confessional? Suppose someone confesses a very serious crime. The priest of course can't violate the seal himself, but he could tell the penitent: "Look, you need to go to the police and you need to turn yourself in." Is he hurting his feelings? I'm sure. Is he making his life more difficult? No question about it. Is he wounding his self-esteem? Probably. But is he loving that person? Absolutely. By telling him to turn himself in, to do what's right, to do the just thing, he's willing the good of the other. He's loving him even as he hurts his feelings.
And then look — any parent listening to me right now, you get this. What if a parent truly said, "My purpose with regard to my kids is never to hurt their feelings. My purpose is to empathize with my kids so completely that I never hurt their feelings, wound their pride, or make them feel bad about themselves"? Well, welcome to being the worst parent of the year. It's a disaster for you and for them. No — every good parent knows to will the good of your kids, and in fact, frequently you have to hurt their feelings. Frequently you have to wound their self-esteem, because you're doing what's right, not what's merely empathetic.
Upon that distinction, so much turns, so much rests.
St. Paul on love and the law
Now, listen to St. Paul. It's our second reading for today. We're still reading from Paul's letter to the Romans — this master text of our tradition. Listen to Paul: "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law." He's saying a mouthful there. For a Jew of Paul's time, the law — the Torah — was everything. It was to walk the path of the Lord. How do you fulfill the entirety of the law? Paul says: through love. Mind you, he doesn't say through empathy. He doesn't say by not hurting people's feelings. No — by loving, by willing the good of others, I fulfill the law.
He gets more specific. Listen: "You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet." That's pretty hard-edged stuff. He's not wishy-washy about what's good and what's evil. These commandments delineate what should be avoided and what should be pursued — these laws that govern life. Follow those, and you'll be expressing love. It's all summed up, Paul says, in the saying: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
Wokeism, critical theory, and the collapse of objective truth
Now, let's go back to wokeism for a minute. I know the game that everybody plays, which is: "Oh no, to be woke just means you're alert to social injustice and you care about the suffering of the poor." Look, just for the record, I'm for social justice, I'm for caring for the poor — but that's not what wokeism means, everybody. That's a kind of cloak put around it. Wokeism, and I've read the avatars of wokeism, is a popularization of critical theory, which is a postmodern theory coming out of the French and German academies — names like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, and many others.
What is one of the distinctive marks of this postmodern critical theory which has morphed into wokeism? One of the distinctive marks is that there are no objective epistemic and moral truths. In fact, claims to know the truth — epistemically or morally — are seen by critical theory as a power play. It's what's used by powerful people to keep marginalized people down. And so what they very often do in this French and German critical theory is try to unmask, deconstruct, and get behind claims to objective moral and epistemic truth, to expose the oppressive power games that are really going on.
Any of that sound familiar? Because it's all over the wokeist rhetoric and literature today. But watch what happens. If you say there are no objective moral and epistemic values — just my truth, your truth, what I think is good, what you think is good, but no objective truth or goodness — what's left? Empathy. What's left is empathy. There's no objective truth or good, and so: well, let's just tolerate each other and try not to hurt each other's feelings. It makes perfect sense to me how empathy has moved into the center, because the objectivities that Paul's talking about — adultery, murder, stealing, and so on — have been marginalized. And so what moves into the center is empathy.
Why Jesus said "love," not "empathy" — and the call to re-engage
In light of all this, can you see why Jesus didn't say, "Have empathy for one another"? What he said was, "Love one another." Why St. John does not say, "God is empathy" — no, he says, "God is love." Upon that distinction, everybody, so much turns. If we allow love to devolve into empathy, then we have this collapse that we see all around us today.
I think of Chesterton's famous line: "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they'll believe in anything." Nature abhors a vacuum. The same is true at the intellectual level. When something moves out of the center, something else is going to move in. I've often wondered whether wokeism is a result of Christianity losing its place at the center of the culture. Go back even fifty years, and there was a consensus around the great moral and spiritual values that ought to undergird a society. When people said "will the good of the other," they knew what that meant. They knew what those goods were. But as that has receded, as Christianity has become unsure of itself and has retreated from the public square, what has moved in is this postmodern wokeist theorizing, which has replaced love with empathy.
What orders our lives? There's always something that's going to be in the center, always some magnetic point. Wokeism says empathy. And Gad Saad is right, it seems to me: in the measure that empathy becomes the center, the society ends up committing suicide.
We need, I think, to reassert with biblical boldness that what stands at the center of our society is not refraining from hurting people's feelings, but the kind of hard-edged language of love. Remember, it was Dostoevsky who said, "Love is a harsh and dreadful thing." Dead right. Love is not sentimentality. Love is not refraining from hurting feelings. Love is willing the good of another, and that can involve something very demanding. Don't retreat, biblical people. Don't retreat to the cultural sidelines. Bring this great teaching about the centrality of love back into the cultural conversation. And God bless you.