Empathy, Not Appeasement
Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
Recently I received some criticism that amounted to: “Why isn’t it enough just to offer true arguments? Doesn’t your approach amount to pulling your punches and pandering to the audience’s unwillingness just to go by the logic of the viewpoint?”
On one level, it’s weird to hear that charge directed at me. Because anyone who’s read my books or essays knows I don’t pull my punches. (Hell, usually the criticism I get is: “Come on, Watkins, why do you have to be so brutal to the opposition?”)
But on another level, I get where the criticism is coming from.
When I read things in the liberty movement intended to persuade non-supporters, it’s often mealy mouthed and appeasing. Witness, for example, libertarian appeals to the left, which amount to, “Hey, we’re just like you! We believe that Black Lives Matter and that our duty in life is to help the poor! We just think there’s a better way to do it, please don’t reject us!”
And that sort of approach might seem to follow from my advice to empathize with people and what they find plausible in the ideas they currently hold.
But it’s not. Empathy is not appeasement.
There’s a popular Christian saying: hate the sin, love the sinner. It’s actually a really awful perspective when taken in the religious context that we’re supposed to love everyone and that a person’s identity is essentially disconnected from their choice, actions, and character. (That’s the perspective Jim Taggart invokes in Atlas Shrugged when he tells his wife he wants to be loved for himself—not for anything he thinks, says, or does.)
But the saying resonates with people precisely because we often do need to make distinctions between the person and their particular ideas or choices. Think of raising a kid. At some point, you’ll probably catch your kid in a lie, and what you need to convey is not, “You’re corrupt through and through,” but, “I hate that you lied because I love you and you’re better than that.” And then you want to understand, what positive did the child think they were achieving or what negative did they think they were avoiding by resorting to dishonesty? How can you help them see that there were better ways of coping?
I think of intellectual issues in a similar way. Good people can adopt really bad ideas for understandable reasons. And if you don’t connect with them at that level, if you adopt a condescending attitude that your ideas are obviously true and they’re stupid or corrupt for not seeing the Truth, then you’ll miss out on opportunities to promote better ideas.
And you’ll lose out, not only because THEY will reject your arguments, but because you’ll absolve yourself of the responsibility of improving your arguments. If your starting assumption is, “Look, I have the truth, I’ve stated the argument plainly, and all of you hoi polloi can take it or leave it,” then why bother sharpening your arguments? Making them clearer, more compelling, easier to understand and process?
You should be hard on bad ideas and confident in the truth of your good ideas. For example, you shouldn’t try to appease the racist, anti-Enlightenment ideas of Black Lives Matter. But you should be sympathetic to those who see injustice against blacks and don’t grasp why sanctioning that movement is self-defeating. After all, they haven’t been offered a genuine alternative—certainly not an alternative that seems to have any plan for achieving real change.
Here’s another way to think of it. I had a conversation with the rapper and popular Twitter personality Zuby where I observed that he had a way of being relentless in his criticism of bad ideas without it coming across as a person attack. He said “I’m kind to people. I’m ruthless to terrible ideas.”
I think there’s a time and a place for not being kind to people—above all, to the intellectual leadership and professional advocates of terrible ideas. But as a rule of thumb, I wholeheartedly agree.
