Beyond the narcissism of empathy: ethics and identification
[Sting’s ‘Russians’ plays on the TV of Mark and Jez’s front room]
JEREMY: Do you think he really wondered, Sting, if the Russians loved their children, too?
MARK: No, it’s a rhetorical question, you know like, ‘Can you feel the force?’ or ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’
JEREMY: I’m not so sure. He really seems to be sincerely hoping that the Russians love their children, too. Which I think is a little bit patronising.— Peep Show, Series 1, Episode 4 (Channel 4 Productions, 2004)
Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s wonderful 2019 film, is a deeply counter-cultural experiment in narrative and counter-narrative. This isn’t going to be a review (watch the trailer to get a flavour of its premise and central character, a young and enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth with an imaginary Fuhrer for a best friend). As such will be spoiler free but we’d wholeheartedly encourage any reader to seek it out. Critically, it was deeply divisive - garnering an early flush of witheringly poor reviews as well as effusive praise and ending up on the shortlists for Best Motion Picture Oscars and Golden Globes. Having loved Waititi’s earlier work I was put off and didn’t seek it out, as I’d have found a mediocre offering by him something approaching heartbreaking. But better (and to my mind much more deserved) reviews followed—and I’m so glad I acted on a trusted recommendation and went ahead and saw it). Some of that critical mixture can be pinned on the subjectivity of humour and of artistic appreciation, and the singularity of Waititi’s vision: it is always strange, marginal, and insurgent, even in less confronting fare such as the tenderly brutal silliness of Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
But I’d argue that Jojo Rabbit has troubled audiences and critics not for its aesthetics, nor, in truth, for locating humour within the dying days of the Third Reich, but because it runs joyously and horrifyingly counter the narrative presumptions of contemporary liberalism. While it has been praised for anticipating the rightward turn of the world in the age of Trumpism (despite being scripted well in advance of Trump’s political rise), the truly subversive nature of the film lies in its invitation to explore the structures of hegemony beyond the narcissism of weaponised victimhood that accompanies the self-regarding individualism of the liberal consensus—a consensus which dangerously (and we would argue catastrophically inaccurately) understands itself to be a project of the Left.
“It'd be such an ignorant thing to do / If the Russians love their children too”: Liberal pretensions from past decades remain absurd but retain a moral clarity absent in contemporary counterparts.
A familiar category error animates this confusion: when Waititi describes his project as being to make ‘anti-hate, pro-love’ film, liberalism understands him to be talking about their unique cultural property. An elision between liberalism and goodness not only belies the brutality of liberalisms fundamentally individualised framework, but supercharges the sort of discursive positioning which led Hillary Clinton to condemn vast swathes of the electorate as a ‘basket of deplorables’ or UK remainers to frame Brexit as a fundamentally racist endeavour. By the time you’ve framed your antagonists in this light, your own project assumes an axiomatic goodness, despite the brutal realities of Democratic rule from Flint to Fallujah, or the horrific camps at the borders of Fortress Europe, or the impoverishment of Greece for the good of global capital. As absurd and patronising as Sting’s crooning, satirised above by Peep Show, was, there was a moral clarity to the presumption that counter-ideologies are held in good faith and do not undermine primal decencies—and a useful humility in the presumption that a collective ‘we’ might be undertaking barbarism in the name of overcoming it. To find Mitchell and Webb in quite a different context, the abandoning this discursive position I-know-I-am-good-because-you-are-bad, is necessary for that most foundational of moral questions, “Are we the bad guys?”
And yet patronising Sting, from the vantage-point of 2020’s dumb virtue-polarisation, appears ethically sophisticated. At the level of political spectacle, the last four years have seen the grim apotheosis of the neoliberal claim that ‘the personal is political’. While always a grim clarion-call for individualism, in integrating it into our social understanding, we have also integrated its inversion and treat all politics as if it is first and foremost and interpersonal contest—an inversion which blunts and neuters material contests of power. Whether it’s a basket of deplorables, or a racist provincial Brexiteers, elite liberal narratives imply that—rather than being downstream of material reality—its antagonists are wilfully embracing wickedness, wholeheartedly embracing behaviour which, can be ‘called out’ as a demon might be, by the power of goodness.
And from there, we easily lapse into hyperbolic claims are that we are sleepwalking into fascism. To consider them seriously, it is worth investigating the mechanics by which really existing Nazism told its own story. As Steve Reicher has carefully picked apart in his friendly critique of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil, via Zimbardo and Milgrim’s infamous experiments, those who participated in nazi atrocity did so for the most part not banally, not reluctantly, but enthusiastically and creatively. Yet this horror was not the wilful embrace of deplorability, but the eager pursuit of virtue.
The story we tell of where the ‘us’ ends, and the ‘them’ begins is, Reicher argues, a more important force in accounting for crimes against humanity than any Zimbardo-inspired idea of the ‘agentive state’ into which aggressors in Belson or Abu Ghraib fell. Reicher examines Goebbels’ first command of the National Socialist, “Love Germany above all else, and your ethnic comrade as yourself.” (“Lieber Deutschland über alles und deinen Boltsgenoffen wie dich selbst” – Das kleine abc des Nationalsoziolisten) Qualities of ‘love’, ‘support’, ‘doing good’ can be marshalled into a tight definitional boundary which allows the most appalling wrongdoing be self-understood and celebrated as virtue.
And it is this dynamic which Jojo Rabbit dramatises so effectively and compellingly. Jojo’s participation in the junior ranks of the Third Reich are not animated by wilful childish cruelty but by values we recognise, admire, and celebrate: he is sincere in an ethic of service, self-sacrificing in the face of something larger than himself, desires to live courageously, wants the best for his community and to protect them from danger. While liberal reviewers of the film have protested at its ‘humanising’ of nazis and its invitation of sympathy for the devil, perhaps the most unsettling element of the film is the way it reintroduces us not only to our own ethical slipperiness, but to the horrors of which we are capable, not in spite of our hopes for virtue, but because of our moral drive.
The deep liberal moralism (a commitment to living virtuously by liberal standards, and a zeal in carrying it out) which Jojo Rabbit undermines, acts as a sort of Big Other—a godlike figure with the power to license and legitimate. These questions turn a number of our instincts on our head: just as monstrosity is licensed by an embrace of virtue, not wickedness, so the installation of a Big Other does not constrain our capacity for evil, but opens it up:
But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoevsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable.
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Along with the necessary killing of god as we traditionally understood him, as de Beauvoir was advocating, perhaps the lesson we can draw from Jojo Rabbit is the need to kill the god-like Big Other of moralism, and conviction of our own virtue which, also, ‘pardons, effaces, and compensates’— and the quality, seemingly perversely, of empathy which underpins it. Certainly, in deriving a morality of victimhood, it has led us astray ethically and in our storied understanding.
The moral emptiness of empathy with victimhood: ‘The girl in the red coat’ from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 holocaust epic ‘Schindler’s List’
That the moral drama of a story operates by building sympathy with its characters is obvious. The ethical implications of sympathy for the victims are as slight as the storytelling task of generating such sympathies. In the face of so obvious and unspeakable a horror as the holocaust, the artistic task of generating sympathy with its victims is a simple one. And it has no moral implications: no-one needed the cinematographer’s trick of the ‘girl in the red coat’ in Schindler’s List to teach them genocide was wrong, and affecting though it is, it has no explicatory power as a warning from history—this is pure idealism: nazism did not come about through an excess of ‘bad’ emotion, and a repeat of tyranny cannot be prevented through an injection of sufficient ‘good’ emotion. In raising sympathy with the victim, the audience are—perhaps treacherously—assured of their goodness. Once again we exist in the clumsy but persuasive world of discursive positioning: if I am moved by the plight of the angelic child in the red coat, then I am on the side of the victim; her persecutors are the bad nazis, therefore I am a good person. While we are neither against emotional manipulation—how else can art operate?—nor hold that art needs moral purpose—a recipe for bad art and worse ethics—this formulation is as seductive as it is dangerous.
Empathy itself—generally assumed to be a straightforward good—is implicated in this problem. A feature of the personalisation of politics, in recent decades it has become a watchword of liberal policy-makers, a refrain of Obama during his tenure, as if an (assumed) positive feature of interpersonal relationships can be scaled-up to become a policy panacea:
Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.
— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy
If we understand empathy as an evolutionary contingency rather than a moral force then it becomes a curio we can examine, searching out its implications critically, rather than as an edict to be obeyed. And perhaps this gets to the heart of the liberal aversion that first greeted Jojo Rabbit. It evoked empathy with nazis (albeit in the cause of an obviously anti-Nazi message) and this caused a deeply troubling cognitive dissonance: if I admire, like, or empathise with these characters, then it must be the film which is deficient—it cannot be either me, or my moral spider-sense, empathy which is at fault? Bloom compares empathy with anger—another evolutionary contingency which emerges in childhood and which can spur action, but which we approach much more critically:
But I would worry about the irrational, arbitrary, and self-destructive aspects of anger, so I wouldn’t wish that my child possess too much of it. And I would make sure to add plenty of intelligence, concern for others, and self-control. I would want to ensure that anger is modified, shaped, and directed by rational deliberation. It would occasionally spur action, but it would be subservient to the capacities for rationality and compassion. If we were all constituted in this way, if we could all put anger in its place, ours would be a kinder and better world.
That is how we should think about empathy too.
— Paul Bloom, ibid.
Without this approach, empathy becomes a form of narcissism in which we experience viscerally our own inherited stories reflected back to us, with a guttural moral force that confirms their rightness as axiomatic. Empathy lurks at the heart of the injunction to ‘love your ethnic comrade’. It individualises us by raising the pain of an single sufferer above that of a nameless collective. It identifies us with the pain of those who look and feel like us, and distances us from a critical appraisal of our capacity to inflict suffering in its valorisation and identification with the suffering of others—but usually only others who mirror us and our interests. A not insignificant casualty is that it deprives us of great artistic works, whose artists are ‘cancelled’ for evoking sympathy with the devil, from Nabokov to Waititi, with whom we began.
So what? If there’s nothing at stake other than a sense of storytelling and moralistic oneupmanship, then this is nothing more than a narrative curiosity. But the discursive positioning—I am good because you are bad—in this empathy-virtue axis, has four important ethical costs which extend well beyond the artistic:
First, in hyperbolically framing the current moment as a battle between the forces of liberalism and fascism, the Big Other of our own virtue licenses all brutality which falls short of fascism—so low an ethical bar as to impoverish and endanger us all. If the 2020 US presidential election takes the trajectory it is currently assumed to take, then this discursive position will be amplified ad nauseam: and so the vice president to the administration with the cruelest immigration policies in US history will be trumpeted as the alternative to ‘kids in cages’ because the quality of Trumps cages are some how fascist, and the technocratic cruelty of a putative Biden regime will be more aesthetically acceptable;
Secondly, the empathy-virtue axis, in ensuring certainty of our own moral righteousness, blinds us to the dynamics of projection at every level: interpersonally we fail to recognise the self-reflective impulse often disguised in our irritation with the other, and more significantly, we fail to recognise the persecutory dynamics with which we undertake the fight when animated by our own righteous anger, something Mark Fisher unpicked in perhaps his most famous essay;
Third, empathy imagines a connection with the suffering, and at best seeks to end this suffering—obviously, if banally, an ethically useful move. But in its current form, this too easily elevates suffering and victimhood to a weaponised virtue—and so claims an unwitting material interest in the continuation of this suffering. The accrual of identity and oppression quotients is elided with uncritical moral rightness which animates neoliberal identity politics haphazardly and dangerously (from licensing online harassment in the name of trans rights, having identified the vulnerability of the gender non-conforming, or muddying the fraught questions of Israel-Palestine with appeals to the horrors of the Holocaust);
Finally, if empathy is the reaching of the self to an imagined other, it is a double illusion—an illusion performed by an illusion which turns back on the illusory self and endows it with the quality of stability and goodness, rather than the fruitful emptiness—and so metaphysically neutral possibility—that it is. Rather than a mutable and fallible emptiness, the liberal humanist self is not only substantial, but inherently good. This operates as a formidable barrier to that important question, such a prerequisite for ethical action, ‘are we the baddies?’
It is only the critical imagination which can undertake this task and stories can enliven and enrich this task—as Jojo Rabbit does with an uncanny lightness of touch. If we truly want lessons from our history, there is an ethical necessity to read ourselves imaginatively into the position of oppressor and the persecutor, the tyrant and the banal bureaucrat officiating ‘evil’. Against our instincts, empathy leads us counter this direction, valorising the victim with whom we associate, and confirming our moralistic rightness through the intensity of our contingent feeling. Jojo Rabbit offers a way out of the performance of our vulnerability into an imagination of our culpable cruelty—but does not condemn its ‘sympathetic’ Nazis to their fate. The dynamism and possibility that comes with the imagination makes it superior to the fixed nature of so much empathic entrenchment.
Beyond the narcissism of empathy we have a critical imagination, a curiosity, and a looser sense of our illusory selves. From overcoming twitter mobs, to ending pogroms, to escaping the catch-22 of capitalist realism, these are the tools we need to see us beyond to the not yet real — and stories which upend our moralistic comforts, such as Jojo Rabbit, can expand the imagination to these fruitful ends.
