Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives, leading the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to famously declare that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
五年前，埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）在播客录像带中告诉乔·罗根（Joe Rogan），“西方文明的根本弱点是同理心，同理心剥削”。到那个时候，西方人太关心他人的痛苦以至于为自己的最大利益提倡的想法已经是一个公认的保守主义思想。这一理论没有理论地思考和行动，而是动弹做出的情感决定，损害了他们的福祉和祖国的福祉。在这种思想中，善解人意的政治方法有利于自由主义的信念。长期以来，思想与感觉之间的明显反对使保守派感到困惑，导致右翼评论员本·夏皮罗（Ben Shapiro）著名地宣称“事实不在乎您的感受。”
But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party’s positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous.
但是，这种反同情世界观的当前升级，现在是右翼社交媒体帖子，文章和书籍中的常规话题，可能不太可能是一个合理的论据，而更多的是对保守派的一种应对机制，而应对某些特朗普 - 阿德米式政策的胜利，而不是像噩梦般的儿童那样，而不是某些人，而不是噩梦般的妇女，则是不受欢迎的妇女的痛苦。在ICE监护下，几天后被拒绝治疗后，失去了中期怀孕。呈现这些案件的保守派可能会因自己的奸诈同情而背叛。这种程度的人类苦难当然应该引起善解人意的反应，无论受欢迎与否。即使这样，也有理由认为，在面对党派立场的现实时，并没有改变他们的意见，而是一些保守派可能会决定，这种情况引起的令人沮丧的情绪必须是一种幻影或窍门。这都是荒谬的 - 让我们感到难过的事情通常是因为它们很糟糕，而且在精神上是危险的。
Xochitl Gonzalez: What happened to empathy?
Xochitl Gonzalez：同理心发生了什么？
This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others’ suffering seriously. That’s why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. Charlie Kirk, the Republican activist who runs Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished “the No. 1 psychological trick of the left” with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives “by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts” and then perverting them “to morally extort us into adopting their position.” Taken at face value, the idea that Christians are sometimes persuaded into un-Christian behavior by strong emotions is fair, and nothing new: Suspicion of human passions is ancient, and a great deal of Christian preaching deals with the subject of subduing them. But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians.
对于基督徒来说，这当然是正确的，他们的信仰通常劝告认真对待他人的痛苦。这就是为什么《纽约时报》最畅销书由保守派评论员艾莉·贝丝·斯塔基（Allie Beth Stuckey）出版的原因，有毒的同情心：进步主义者如何利用基督教的同情心，这是如此令人不安。在她对基督徒的右翼右翼反同情思想中，斯特基（Stuckey）是一名福克斯新闻退伍军人斯特基（Stuckey），最近在美国右翼非营利性转折点举办的一次会议上讲话，他认为，让边锋经常操纵善意的信徒来采取罪恶的争论和政治地位，通过利用他们的自然宗教倾向来照顾他人，从而采取罪恶的信徒。经营美国转折点美国的共和党激进主义者查理·柯克（Charlie Kirk）说，斯塔基（Stuckey）拆除了“左派的第一名心理窍门”，她的观察是，自由主义者“利用我们的语言，我们的圣经诗句，我们的概念，我们的概念”对保守派的同理心对保守派进行了同情，然后将他们验证为“在道德上勒索我们的位置”。从表面上看，有时通过强烈的情感说服基督徒被说服成非基督教行为是公平的，没有什么新鲜事物：怀疑人类的激情是古老的，而大量的基督徒讲道涉及征服他们的主题。但是有毒的同情不是讲道。这是一名政治小册子，建议基督徒如何在政治辩论中更好地争论 - 这是一个更好的保守派，而不是更好的基督徒。
Empathy is an ambiguous concept. When it was imported into English from German a little more than a century ago, empathy referred to one’s capacity to merge experiences with objects in the world, a definition that current usage bears little resemblance to: The Atlantic reported in 2015 that “the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts,” such as “knowing another’s thoughts and feelings,” “actually feeling as another does,” and “feeling distress at another’s suffering,” a kind of catchall term for having a moral imagination. Stuckey’s definition doesn’t distinguish among these different elements; she instead frames empathy itself as a specific emotion rather than a psychological capacity for understanding the emotions of others, which makes her usage especially confusing. Whatever it is, empathy isn’t something Stuckey wants to reject altogether: Jesus embodied a kind of empathy, and it can be, she says, “a powerful motivation to love those around you.”
移情是一个模棱两可的概念。当一个多世纪前，当它从德语中进口到英语时，同情是指一个人与世界上的物体合并经验的能力，当前用法的定义与：2015年的《大西洋报道》报道：“社会心理学家C. Daniel C. Daniel Batson，几十年来已经研究了八个不同的概念，实际上是在这种想法上，他的想法是另一种感觉，”以及“对他人的痛苦感到困扰”，这是一种有道德想象的术语。Stuckey的定义在这些不同的元素之间没有区别；相反，她本身就是一种特定的情感，而不是理解他人情绪的心理能力，这使她的用法特别令人困惑。不管是什么，同理心都不是斯特基想要完全拒绝的东西：耶稣体现了一种同理心，她说：“一个强大的动机，是爱你周围的人。”
Arthur C. Brooks: What’s missing from empathy
亚瑟·布鲁克斯（Arthur C. Brooks）：同理心缺少什么
The toxic kind of empathy, she contends, is the kind that makes you double-check your specifically conservative political priors. Some examples: “If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant” and “If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.” This argumentative technique, in which Christians are asked to consider their political positions in light of the logic of their own faith, can hardly be described as empathy in any common sense of the term. This linguistic confusion between rational arguments about whether a person’s political positions are adequately Christian, on one hand, and arguments that people should reason from emotion, on the other, runs through the entire debate about empathy. What Stuckey seems to be saying is merely that progressive assertions summon certain emotions inside their conservative debate partners—such as pity and compassion—that make them unwilling to defend their premises, regardless of whether said conservatives are actually inhabiting the emotional states of other people. Labeling those emotions as fruits of toxic empathy is a strategy for dealing with them: It resolves the tension between what one feels and what one thinks by dismissing one’s feelings as misguided. This approach glibly ignores the possibility that such emotions are in fact the voice of one’s conscience, and takes for granted that ignoring one’s sympathies for other people is a good Christian habit of mind.
她认为，有毒的同理心是使您双重检查您特别保守的政治先验的那种同情。一些例子：“如果您真的很富有同情心，您会欢迎移民”和“如果您真的是基督徒，您将为社会正义而战。”这种辩论性的技巧是，根据自己的信仰逻辑，要求基督徒考虑他们的政治立场，在任何常识上都无法将其描述为同理心。关于一个人的政治立场是否充分基督徒的理性论点与人们应该从情感上推理情感的论点之间的这种语言混乱是在整个关于同理心的辩论中的经历。Stuckey似乎在说的只是，渐进的断言在其保守的辩论伙伴（例如可怜和同情心）内召唤某些情绪，即使他们不愿意捍卫自己的前提，无论说保守派是否真的居住在其他人的情绪状态下。将这些情绪标记为有毒同理心的果实是与之打交道的策略：它通过将自己的感受视为被误导而解决了人们的感受与人们所想到的事情之间的张力。这种方法可忽略这种情绪实际上是一个人的良心声音的可能性，并且认为忽略对他人的同情是一种良好的基督教习惯。
In that sense, the toxic-empathy rhetorical framework, built for producing peace of mind for conservative debaters, threatens to render Christians insensitive to moral demands of Christianity that run contrary to conservative preferences. “Toxic empathy claims the only way to love racial minorities is to advance social justice,” Stuckey writes at one point, “but ‘justice’ that shows partiality to the poor or to those perceived as oppressed only leads to societal chaos.” It’s true that every person should be judged equally in the administration of the law, but it’s also the case that Christianity actually does dictate that the needs of the poor and powerless should be prioritized in society. Far from being a misleading interpretation adduced by bad-faith actors in political debates, it is rather the plain meaning of the Gospels, attested to by thousands of years’ worth of Christian saints and thinkers who have declared that God especially loves the poor and the oppressed. That fact remains as radical today as it was when Jesus was preaching, and now, just as then, there are people who can’t stand to recognize it.
从这个意义上讲，旨在为保守的辩论者带来安心的毒性同情言辞框架，威胁要使基督徒对基督教的道德要求不敏感，这与保守的偏好相反。Stuckey在某一时刻写道：“有毒的同理心声称爱种族少数群体的唯一途径是提高社会正义，但'正义'对穷人或被压迫的人只会导致社会混乱。”的确，每个人都应在法律管理中得到同样的判断，但基督教实际上确实决定了穷人和无能为力的需求在社会中优先考虑。不可思议的演员在政治辩论中毫无误导的解释，而是福音的简单含义，这是数千年的基督教圣徒和思想家所证明的，他们宣布上帝特别爱穷人和被压迫者。今天，这个事实仍然像耶稣讲道一样激进，现在，就像那时，有些人无法忍受认识。
