David Burchell | January 12, 2009
UNTIL our own times, few civilisations showed much emotional interest in distant peoples.
Medieval Europeans were titillated by reports of dog-headed men and other far-off monstrosities, but chiefly because they provoked interesting thought experiments (what's human and what's not?). Medieval Muslims were so incurious about the Europeans, they called them all Franks, or Frenchmen, and distinguished them by body smell.
The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire made much out of the human toll of a catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon, because he believed it proved his arguments for the non-existence of God. There's no evidence he shed any tears.
It's we, the emotional sophisticates of the modern West, who invented the idea of global empathy. On our large-screen televisions we're joined up momentarily with the suffering faces of far-distant innocents, the better to make sense of the sorrows of the world. That's why, when the stories came in last week about the emaciated children discovered beside their dead mothers in a shelled house in Gaza, we immediately visualised the scene in our mind's eye. And our hearts felt a stab, as if these were our own children. Neither geographical distance nor paucity of factual detail is any longer a barrier to our capacity to feel.
Global empathy is one of those illegitimate children of the imperial experience whose origins we like to forget.
In the days of the British Empire, Australians greeted reports of distant massacres of British soldiery with a new urgency, as if we too were witness to the Indian Mutiny or overrun by African tribesmen at Mafeking. Even today, the same impulse appears to unite the sympathy of pious Muslims everywhere -- towards suffering peoples of their own kind. After the catastrophe of World War I, however, a new generation of critical intellectuals turned the tables on imperial sympathising, rerouting all that emotional energy towards the victims of European colonialism.
This was the generation that took Gandhi, that eminently Western non-Westerner, as its moral hero. But there were few enough Gandhis in the moral history of the 20th century. And so that generation's offspring switched their sympathies to new, more troubling heroes, from Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to Yasser Arafat. In the process, empathy became, in effect, the handmaiden of ideology. We learned to bestow empathy on those we approved of in our political fantasies, and to withhold empathy, with determined efficiency, from those we did not. We became gymnasts of the heart.
And so the '60s generation wept bitter tears for that young girl, half-alight with napalm, who ran naked down that Vietnamese road. But the curious economy of empathy required them to avert their eyes from the massacre of civilians by the Viet Cong or the barbaric behaviour of North Vietnamese prison guards. Just as, today, we weep bitter tears for those hapless prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay even as we withhold them from the wretched political inmates of Cuba's Guantanamo Provincial Prison, a few hundred metres away.
The same complicated moral logic was on evidence in The Netherlands last week when two high-profile Dutch political figures assumed leadership of a demonstration against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Harry van Bommel, a former schoolteacher, serves as Socialist Opposition spokesman on international affairs. Gretta Duisenberg, once a flamboyant socialite, is the socially conscious wife of the former Dutch central bank chief. Each has spoken at great length about the Palestinians' plight. (According to Duisenberg, Israeli rule in Gaza is worse than wartime Nazi rule in Holland.)
And each looked thoroughly comfortable in their skins as they led the crowd in chants of that old party tune, "Intifada, intifada, Palestinian state!" Even as, in the background, their fellow demonstrators could clearly be heard singing the more uninhibited political ditty: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" And so here they were together: the warm heart of the global conscience and the icy blood of Hamas, united within the same pulsing breast.
For the discriminating empathist, Israel presents special problems as an enemy. After all, it's hard for someone who trades in the currency of sympathy to deny any moral capital whatsoever to a state founded as a refuge for one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet.
The easiest solution to this dilemma is not to ignore the past, but rather to reconfigure it for your own purposes. Hence those familiar formulas, which hardly merit sober political analysis: Zionism equals fascism; Israel equals Nazi Germany; Gaza is a concentration camp; the Palestinians are the new Jews. Indeed, these aren't political slogans in the normal sense. They're a ritual language of degradation, employed to place your defiled opponents beyond the empathetic pale.
When empathy isn't serving as ideology's handmaiden, it puts in overtime as its usher. And while the present wave of sympathy towards the inhabitants of Gaza is no doubt sincerely felt, in some quarters it's also serving to usher in an altogether more pragmatic political calculation. For some time now many Western supporters of the Palestinian cause have been discreetly shifting their political allegiance away from Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority -- whom they mistrust as Western collaborators -- and towards that superlative foe of Western interests, Hamas.
So Britain's The Guardian last week editorialised in favour of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, to be engineered by withholding EU funds from the West Bank until Fatah submits. The alternative, the paper thundered, was a Fatah "satrap" (that old imperial imagery again!) under Israeli dominion.
And editorialists everywhere have been talking about Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, as if they were now the acknowledged spokespeople for Palestinian interests.
Yet, without lubrication from our discriminating tears, this change in political sympathies might be a little hard to swallow. After all, this is the same Hamas whose websites extol the divine achievements of its suicide bombers and whose children's TV exhorts a new generation of martyrs shaped in the same incandescent image. On Hamas's Friday-night TV sermons, the imam likes to recall the perfidy of the Jews towards Mohammed 1300 years ago: a broken pact that, as readers of Ibn Ishaq's biography will know, obliged the prophet to behead an entire Jewish tribe with his sword. Hamas, demonstrably, does not trouble itself much with the politics of empathy beyond the confines of its own kind.
And so, having elevated empathy to a universal faculty, it seems we've come full circle.
Now we're willing to authorise any kind of exotic political creed, with any kind of consequences, so long as it promises to rid us of the spectre of those distant children in distress.
UNTIL our own times, few civilisations showed much emotional interest in distant peoples.
Medieval Europeans were titillated by reports of dog-headed men and other far-off monstrosities, but chiefly because they provoked interesting thought experiments (what's human and what's not?). Medieval Muslims were so incurious about the Europeans, they called them all Franks, or Frenchmen, and distinguished them by body smell.
The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire made much out of the human toll of a catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon, because he believed it proved his arguments for the non-existence of God. There's no evidence he shed any tears.
It's we, the emotional sophisticates of the modern West, who invented the idea of global empathy. On our large-screen televisions we're joined up momentarily with the suffering faces of far-distant innocents, the better to make sense of the sorrows of the world. That's why, when the stories came in last week about the emaciated children discovered beside their dead mothers in a shelled house in Gaza, we immediately visualised the scene in our mind's eye. And our hearts felt a stab, as if these were our own children. Neither geographical distance nor paucity of factual detail is any longer a barrier to our capacity to feel.
Global empathy is one of those illegitimate children of the imperial experience whose origins we like to forget.
In the days of the British Empire, Australians greeted reports of distant massacres of British soldiery with a new urgency, as if we too were witness to the Indian Mutiny or overrun by African tribesmen at Mafeking. Even today, the same impulse appears to unite the sympathy of pious Muslims everywhere -- towards suffering peoples of their own kind. After the catastrophe of World War I, however, a new generation of critical intellectuals turned the tables on imperial sympathising, rerouting all that emotional energy towards the victims of European colonialism.
This was the generation that took Gandhi, that eminently Western non-Westerner, as its moral hero. But there were few enough Gandhis in the moral history of the 20th century. And so that generation's offspring switched their sympathies to new, more troubling heroes, from Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh to Yasser Arafat. In the process, empathy became, in effect, the handmaiden of ideology. We learned to bestow empathy on those we approved of in our political fantasies, and to withhold empathy, with determined efficiency, from those we did not. We became gymnasts of the heart.
And so the '60s generation wept bitter tears for that young girl, half-alight with napalm, who ran naked down that Vietnamese road. But the curious economy of empathy required them to avert their eyes from the massacre of civilians by the Viet Cong or the barbaric behaviour of North Vietnamese prison guards. Just as, today, we weep bitter tears for those hapless prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay even as we withhold them from the wretched political inmates of Cuba's Guantanamo Provincial Prison, a few hundred metres away.
The same complicated moral logic was on evidence in The Netherlands last week when two high-profile Dutch political figures assumed leadership of a demonstration against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Harry van Bommel, a former schoolteacher, serves as Socialist Opposition spokesman on international affairs. Gretta Duisenberg, once a flamboyant socialite, is the socially conscious wife of the former Dutch central bank chief. Each has spoken at great length about the Palestinians' plight. (According to Duisenberg, Israeli rule in Gaza is worse than wartime Nazi rule in Holland.)
And each looked thoroughly comfortable in their skins as they led the crowd in chants of that old party tune, "Intifada, intifada, Palestinian state!" Even as, in the background, their fellow demonstrators could clearly be heard singing the more uninhibited political ditty: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" And so here they were together: the warm heart of the global conscience and the icy blood of Hamas, united within the same pulsing breast.
For the discriminating empathist, Israel presents special problems as an enemy. After all, it's hard for someone who trades in the currency of sympathy to deny any moral capital whatsoever to a state founded as a refuge for one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet.
The easiest solution to this dilemma is not to ignore the past, but rather to reconfigure it for your own purposes. Hence those familiar formulas, which hardly merit sober political analysis: Zionism equals fascism; Israel equals Nazi Germany; Gaza is a concentration camp; the Palestinians are the new Jews. Indeed, these aren't political slogans in the normal sense. They're a ritual language of degradation, employed to place your defiled opponents beyond the empathetic pale.
When empathy isn't serving as ideology's handmaiden, it puts in overtime as its usher. And while the present wave of sympathy towards the inhabitants of Gaza is no doubt sincerely felt, in some quarters it's also serving to usher in an altogether more pragmatic political calculation. For some time now many Western supporters of the Palestinian cause have been discreetly shifting their political allegiance away from Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority -- whom they mistrust as Western collaborators -- and towards that superlative foe of Western interests, Hamas.
So Britain's The Guardian last week editorialised in favour of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, to be engineered by withholding EU funds from the West Bank until Fatah submits. The alternative, the paper thundered, was a Fatah "satrap" (that old imperial imagery again!) under Israeli dominion.
And editorialists everywhere have been talking about Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, as if they were now the acknowledged spokespeople for Palestinian interests.
Yet, without lubrication from our discriminating tears, this change in political sympathies might be a little hard to swallow. After all, this is the same Hamas whose websites extol the divine achievements of its suicide bombers and whose children's TV exhorts a new generation of martyrs shaped in the same incandescent image. On Hamas's Friday-night TV sermons, the imam likes to recall the perfidy of the Jews towards Mohammed 1300 years ago: a broken pact that, as readers of Ibn Ishaq's biography will know, obliged the prophet to behead an entire Jewish tribe with his sword. Hamas, demonstrably, does not trouble itself much with the politics of empathy beyond the confines of its own kind.
And so, having elevated empathy to a universal faculty, it seems we've come full circle.
Now we're willing to authorise any kind of exotic political creed, with any kind of consequences, so long as it promises to rid us of the spectre of those distant children in distress.
Source: The Australian
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