Why we need critical empathy in the post-truth age of Trump
This essay — it is more of an incoherent string of thoughts, really — is inspired by a core tenant that I’ve thought about since Donald Trump’s election on November 9, 2016, and his Inauguration as the President on January 21, 2017.
It is as follows: to not concede ground to ideologies and actions that dehumanise and inflict violence — real, emotional, symbolic — on vulnerable and marginal groups.
In a series of tweets immediate after the election, I said the following:
“Those who bear the burden of violence cannot be forced to reconcile with their oppressors.”
This was directly in response to many conservative commenters’ urge to “build bridges,” or to accept and work with Trump — who won the election on a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic plank (he’s also an alleged serial rapist and a serial liar). This is something erroneously attributed to the “vast majority” of the people (while, in truth, a little over a fourth of Americans eligible to actually voted for him).
Trump’s ascent signals deeply distressing times, to say the least. His gag order on US funding to NGOs and government programs that offer safe abortions; his executive orders to restart the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL pipeline; and not to mention the ban on Muslim refugees, and the US-Mexico border wall.
His ascent to power, as we have realised by now, is a part of the global right-ward shift in politics — in Britain, France, Germany, India, Poland, Hungary, Austria, to just name a few. In that sense, many argue that it isn’t in anyway exceptional, but merely exposes the hidden political brutality that a vast majority of the world has suffered, and will continue to suffer. What makes it pernicious, however, is how this heralds what many describe as a “post-truth” or a “post-fact” world. Trump’s complete disregard for factual knowledge, his incendiary and derogatory comments against women, minorities, people with disabilities, the press, his grossly oversimplifying-yet-effective speech, and the massive surge in fake news characterise this new era of the post-truth world (which really isn’t all that new).
Again, this isn’t exceptional to Trump: we saw the same with the Tories during Brexit, with the Indian government when it demonetised 86% of the cash in circulation, with the European Union’s complete and utter disregard of the refugee crisis and the mass, watery graveyard in the Mediterranean. At the very least, then, Trump signifies an apogee in such a right-ward, neo-fascist movement, with its legacies in the violence of colonial and neo-colonial rule. Also, to be fair, what accounts for the “truth” has always been a contested category in politics. As Rune Møller Stahl and Bue Rübner Hansen point in a Jacobin article, “truth” — and thus, falsity and facticity — have been at the heart of extreme centre politics and it is them who are mourning it loss now.
The nostalgia for the truth, thus, is something I don’t share either.
Indeed, one of the foundations in our trainings as critical social scientists and anthropologists has been precisely to interrogate the cultural construction, and political enforcement, of different regimes of truths. We were — and still continue to be — politicised to reject “Truth” with a capital T; the Truth of post-Enlightenment; the Truth of Western Colonial modernity; the Truth of neoliberalism; the Truth of postcolonial nationalism.
Audrey Lorde had written, asking whether the master’s tools can be used to dismantle his house, referring to the arduous task of using the tools of oppressors (language, politics, ideology, etc.) to fight back against oppression. I feel that we are now entering a moment where there is a perversion of Lorde’s question: Whether the slave’s tools of resistance are being used to oppress her further.
This is why I think the dangers of the post-truth world, of which Trump is but the latest exemplary, if not a leading ideologue, are significantly palpable.
And I am struggling to understand why it is so.
Is it because the tools of our trade, deconstruction, critique, and so on — which we have relied on so far to speak truth to power — aren’t effective anymore? Is it because the very basis of fashioning alternative and subversive politics is being co-opted and perversely upended (like the Trump Administration’s invocation of “alternative facts”)? Is it because we, despite our relentless critique of the “Truth,” still hold on to certain fundamental evidences (or truths with a small ‘t’), like the evidence of experiences of violence, vulnerability, suffering, pain, hurt, solidarity, and resistance? Is it because we know — deeply, intuitively, and reflexively — that when the powerful and privileged claim that they are marginalised, that they (ironically) need “safe spaces” to spew their hatred, it exacerbates inequality and violence?
In a recent article on Huffington Post, anthropologist Paul Stoller argues that one way in which anthropologists and other politically engaged academics can resist is by making their scholarship public. He writes, “Indeed, these troubled times compel scholars to wade into the unpleasantly turbulent waters of public discourse in order to resist oppression, violence, political bullying, and intolerance.” He cites the recent collaborative read-in organised by anthropologists in the US and the world, where they read Michel Foucault’s eleventh lecture from his Society Must be Defended, which deals with the political control over life and death (what he calls biopolitics) — a very pertinent and relevant theme in this context, especially with racism and violence.
However, I would go a step further than Stoller and argue that, while many anthropologists have already been publically and politically engaged over the last several decades, what we need is more empathy as the basis of our engagements — more specifically, we need what I call critical empathy.
Immediately after the Election, we’ve seen protests that (re)claim love as the basis of a new politics — #LoveTrumpsHate, for instance — exemplified by CNN commentator Van Jones’ “love army.” But love isn’t enough. As Kara Brown argues in her Jezebel piece, “you don’t have to love your oppressor or those who would sleep just fine at night with full knowledge of your oppression.” Instead of love, she says, she has “empathy for other human being — even the ones that don’t look like me.”
Empathy is in many ways at the heart of the anthropological endeavour, since our very work makes us encounter difference — both outside our homes and cultures, and also within. And while it may be relatively easy to empathise with cultural others whose politics we’re sympathetic with, many anthropologists show why empathy remains crucial even when we study cultural others that are “repugnant” — a term I borrow from Susan Harding — like white supremacists, fundamentalists, and so on. But empathy cannot be uncritical.
This is why I believe that we need “critical empathy,” and not merely empathy.
Let us first examine the critical aspect of this, which draws from an eclectic mix of ideas and practices, including feminist and decolonial movements, cultural studies, the philosophy of the Frankfurt school, and critical race theory. ‘Critical,’ here, refers to a state of constant, relentless critique and demystification of the terms which frame debates. To paraphrase the decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo, this would change the terms of the conversation, not merely its contents. It is about questioning received wisdom and received hierarchies of oppression.
As I wrote above, such established forms of critique, however, fall terribly short in post-truth time, or are completely upended or overturned. This I suspect is inevitable. And this is precisely why we must assert the importance of empathy, which sees the cultural or social context of such actions, and continually warns against a pessimistic return to essentialism — either in “our” moral superiority, or their “barbarity” (notice how progressive or liberal speech ironically reinstates colonial binaries?)
Empathy here doesn’t mean that we “humanise” Trump and the politics of hate that he represents; it doesn’t mean that we normalise bigotry, racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, classism, and the like — we can, and must, speak out against them. The act of critical empathy is a conscious political act of unlearning and relearning which doesn’t take truth as its foundation — either in revealing, or demystifying it.
Instead, critical empathy must be understood as relational in how it can link our understandings of vulnerability and privilege, precariousness and oppression. We need empathy to question this doctrine of false equivalences, which compares historical oppressions like racism or sexism with privilege masquerading as hurt; which refutes the ideas of “reverse sexism” or “reverse racism” because it knows what sexism or racism actually mean, and what it does to those facing the brunt of it. It means that while there is a sociological basis to understanding the grievances of the so-called “rust belt,” or the Bible belt in the Deep South, that cannot come at the cost of justifying or exonerating the structural nature of violence, be it against women, immigrants, blacks.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a possibility of resuscitating and refashioning critical empathy as a tool that the master cannot co-opt to continue oppressing the resisting slave (I am certain that this term isn’t my invention, and that it predates Trump insofar as we talk about political resistance across history). That there is a need for those of us privileged enough to not worry about political brutality until now to listen patiently to oppressed folks — the millions of women marching across the US and the world; the First Nations at Standing Rock and elsewhere in US, Canada; the Black women and men on the streets; the multitude of migrants in the Mediterranean, in the US-Mexico border; the Dalits and adivasis in India; the indigenous peoples across the world; the postcolonial subjects; the political refugees — and empathise.
Note
I have found that the term “critical empathy” has been used most notably in two academic publications, where it deals largely with aesthetics and literary criticism. The first is a chapter by Eric Leake, and the second a peer-reviewed article by Benjamin Morgan. While my usage of the term has certain parallels in its ultimate function, the context and manner in which I use it clearly differs.
