‘Suicidal empathy’ is fake science Humans are more than animals

In the strange case of Gad Saad, we have a public intellectual and cultural firebrand whose most intelligent haters tend to half-agree with him. Saad is a Canadian professor of marketing with a background in evolutionary psychology, originally of Lebanese Jewish origin, whose new book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, was Amazon’s no. 16 best-seller in books on its May 12 debut. This book, like Saad’s 2021 best-seller, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, promotes a big, catchy idea that seems to explain a broad cultural problem. The Parasitic Mind purported to explain why so many people were able to believe obviously bonkers stuff during peak woke. Suicidal Empathy addresses how “misguided” concern for certain categories of people — criminals, victims, Muslims, the homeless, immigrants, trans athletes — has prompted Western elites to act against their own self-interest and endanger Western civilization. This idea is so apropos that it has grabbed very well-timed headlines, thanks to a New York Post story on a young woman who declined to prosecute a man who attacked her on the subway — because of empathy; she didn’t want to send another black man to jail — only to regret it after her attacker allegedly killed an elderly man. 

Saad, then, has a knack for a viral concept and an undeniable grasp of the behavior of the human animal: many people tend to feel that he’s onto something. He also has a rollicking prose style that’s salty, outrageous, and fun to read. To show up the ridiculousness of re-naming various socially inimical groups to avoid stigmatizing them —“undocumented” instead of “illegal” for illegal immigrants, “unhoused” instead of homeless, for example — he sarcastically suggests the same treatment should be given to rapists. “I have suggested that we stop using the hurtful term ‘rapist’ as this might marginalize the Rapist Community. I propose ‘undocumented lovemaker’ or perhaps ‘altruistic sperm donor,’” he writes. After decades of speech policing, this kind of thing has some appeal. His section on empathetic suicide has a certain virtuosic flair, name-checking, in a single paragraph, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, Romeo and Juliet, the Japanese concept of shinju (mutual suicide by lovers), and the Prince song “I Would Die 4 U.”

His ideas, however, which are so intuitive and broadly sensible in outline, are incoherent in execution, and cumulatively land somewhere between off-putting and hateful. Thus, it’s a matter of some urgency to understand how he can seem so right but be so wrong.  

The pillar of Saad’s “suicidal-empathy” premise is that some people are dangerous to us, and if we let them have their way, they’ll wipe us out. It’s basic human nature, he says, and this is obviously true. Thus, he argues, it’s self-sacrificing to the point of idiocy that Western elites put the interests of such dangerous (and sometimes anti-Western) people before their own. The reasons he gives for this are a little bit muddled and contradictory, but feel true, as well. At the individual level, people show empathy to their natural enemies out of a “narcissistic moral grandstanding” and desire to seem like “the epitome of kindness, compassion, sympathy and empathy.” This kind of behavior conveys a social benefit to the individual, but is bad for the group as a whole. This, he claims, is a “misfire” of empathy, which he seems to mean in an evolutionary sense: an emotion that once provided an evolutionary advantage (being nice enhances your ability to band together for survival, find a mate, and pass your genes on), has become a disadvantage (your civilization will be wiped out; you yourself are more likely to die at the hands of a criminal). 

The proof is vibes-based at best. In the book’s introduction, Saad airily declares that “while most people understand the meaning of empathy and how it relates to compassion and sympathy, the academic literature draws some fine distinctions that are unnecessary for our current treatment.” Really? We’re in for an allegedly scientific explanation of how a core human virtue has become pathological, and it doesn’t matter what the virtue is? 

Next he purports to explain how empathy might go wrong, with the statement that it is associated with “a wide range of other-oriented behaviors, ranging from the positive (e.g., altruism) to the negative (e.g., aggression).” This sentence is vaguely constructed, but it implies, maybe, that empathy is well known to sometimes be “associated” with aggression. In the following passage, however, the author tells us that serial killers don’t feel any empathy, rendering the “association” with aggression a contraindication. Never mind, here is another way empathy can be “associated” with aggression: in the movie Silence of the Lambs, the character  Buffalo Bill lures a young woman into his van by pretending to be disabled. As per Saad’s loose characterization of the work of some Danish anthropologists, this means empathy “has a darker side”: sometimes it can get us in trouble.

Sure, but is this really empathy going wrong, in an evolutionary sense? Might not kindness to the weaker members of a group, in general, still be a good strategy? Or, if being “the epitome of compassion, kindness, sympathy and empathy” is considered status-enhancing, might this not also be evolutionarily desirable? A perusal of any dating app will tell you that being triple-vaxxed and anti-Trump is the only way to get laid in an elite metropolis. A well-thought out, scholarly argument would be welcome showing that empathy really has become an evolutionary drawback for over-educated humankind. Instead, to prove his point, Saad offers the example of female sperm whales, whose child-protecting “Marguerite formation” behavior, evolved for the wild, makes them more likely to get killed by hunters. A single whale behavior really doesn’t prove anything.  

The whole book is like this: it is a blizzard of references — a study here, a movie there, plus some rage-bating political commentary and internet-stories — that appear to be connected but really aren’t, or that could be connected to other anecdotes, movies, or ideas if you were making the opposing argument, too: just like whales, humans engage in all kinds of group-protecting behaviors, many are noble. And it relies on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime, which is warranted given the anti-police rhetoric of the past few years, but is also a sign that the argument is emotional, not rational. Clean streets, safe public transportation, and robust policing are all positive civilizational values; we might say they’re good in themselves, instead of a hysterical response to evil. By the end of the book, his hammering on the perpetrators of crime started to make the progressives seem like they have a point.   

The treatment of “suicide” is even less developed than that of empathy. In a brief section, Saad talks about ways that suicides are or historically could have been an evolutionary adaptation — human sacrifice served a cultural purpose; so did sacrificing one’s life for honor; and in some cases, mass suicide has been seen as preferable to imprisonment. This section finishes with the statement “to recap, while individual and group suicides have been documented across cultures and eras for many reasons, there is something unique about the West’s feverish desire to commit collective suicide.” 

This is a new idea, not recapping any previous argument, nor is the uniqueness of the West’s desire later supported. The suicide section raises more questions than it answers. If some suicides were of evolutionary benefit, could there be something beneficial about the current supposed suicidal empathy? Was the young woman lured into Buffalo Bill’s van perhaps sacrificing her life for the honor of not being the type to turn away from a person in need? It sounds absurd but altruism — and empathy — are virtues as old as biblical religion. The book of Exodus repeatedly instructs the Israelites to care for the stranger, because they were once strangers in Egypt. Surely, there’s something to it, though you wouldn’t know it from reading Gad Saad. And surely we need to know precisely, not vaguely, what exactly these virtues are, and how we ought to deploy them, even as we remain vigilant about how they can go too far.

This is Saad’s real problem. He has ahold of a universal — people have a right, and even a moral obligation, to defend themselves and their communities — that is vexed by a countervailing moral principle — altruism and self-sacrifice — and he’s trying to regulate the conflict using evolutionary psychology, which either doesn’t have the tools, or doesn’t seem to in his hands. We are animals, but we aren’t just animals; there is much more than mere survival of a random group of people at stake here; there’s an underlying right and wrong. He feels it — and the readers do too, which is likely why so many like his work — but without religion, culture, scholarship, even science to make sense of the issues, we get mere vitriol, and a shocking lack of empathy, suicidal or otherwise. 

 

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