Love Is Not Empathy

By David Warren But first a note from Robert Royal: We're moving well again in our fundraising. And it would be good if we started to move fast enough that we won't need to spend a lot more time at this necessary campaign. There are serious challenges that call for our full attention - and action. And we need to get back to them. We're getting close to our goal for this period. So let me urge all of you who have not yet given to this mid-year campaign that you do so today. Let's make this campaign a success. The need is great and time is short. And now the column... The proposition I have stated so boldly in my headline has enjoyed some support among (not necessarily Christian) amateur and professional psychologists. But unless they are Christian, they are unlikely to see the implications. That "love" in our current profane culture is misunderstood, or we might rather say "misdefined," I assert to begin with. We have come to understand it as a development of sexual lust, or by comparison to our esteem for kittens and puppies. Babies, when they are lucky, may also be loved, and perhaps a little differently than a "hot" girlfriend, or a charismatic boy. But still, best avoided. A baby can be special, because his (not "its") empathy is demanded, and is difficult. He is needy in ways that would make an adult uncool. Our empathetic affection will run dry when the babe is crying - unless nature has provided you as a parent. The child's non-parent, living with the mother, is a potential danger to it. We begin to see that empathy is the flip side of narcissism. Like narcissism, as traditionally understood, we may think we love someone that we do not even know. It is a transient passion, perhaps best represented by the Hallmark card. Love, it has been observed, in literature and non-pornographic art, is more closely allied with marriage than with sex. That is why a couple may continue to be "in love" when they are old and wrinkly; and too, why old friends continue to be faithful. Conversely, the absence of love easily accounts for the divorce rate having gone through the roof, since "love" became something that happens to you, as it does in commercial songs. And it has also been broadened, so that the modern person may get married to something incapable of love, such as a bridge, or a pervert. Something similar is happening within modern friendship. That love can be invented by the humans is a fact of nature; one that was implicitly explained by Christ, or by Paul in his instruction to men. For he tells husbands to love their wives, as if they would not automatically do this. It takes work, just as it takes work to love one's neighbor. (Ask any husband, or neighbor.) But it is like any other invention. Once it is assembled, it takes care of itself, as if it were a good and reliable machine. The comparison is not entirely inapt, when we consider the breadth of persons we are commanded to love, within the Christian dispensation. We must know them, to love them; they must have "being." One is even commanded to love Hamas terrorists (or "Palestinians" as they call themselves), for God must surely love them, and know them, well. We cannot imagine Him loving from ignorance. For God is the universal lover, and God knows, everything. Empathy must be a choice. It is to imagine oneself in the position of another, suffering the same hurts and enjoying the same pleasures - without being that other person. That's why empathy can work as a strategy. A policeman shows great empathy when he is able to identify the criminal by the circumstances of the crime. He reads this "signature." Similarly, in war, the general must have enough empathy to understand his enemy's capacities. By imagining himself in the same position, he can guess what his enemy will do, and intercept the attack, or close up his own exposed defenses. Wars have been won with ingenious empathy. For the purposes of strategy and tactics, however, the general need not love what he sees....