“Why Would You Want Empathy?” August 15, 2011

At the risk of trivialising the previous week of thankfully ebbed unrest in this country, I’m reminded of a bit in Malcolm In The Middle.

Reese, the eldest and most rampantly antisocial sibling, is sent to cookery class as punishment but soon proves himself a natural in the kitchen. However, true to his gleeful misanthropy, he needlessly sabotages everyone else’s work during a competition he was already set to win. In the ensuing reprimand, parents Hal and Lois are shocked by the depth of their son’s clueless malevolence. It’s a neat bit of writing, mainly as it helps provide a psychological bedrock for a character that could otherwise remain two-dimensionally comic:

Hal: Reese, do you know what empathy is?
Reese: No.
Hal: Well, empathy is putting yourself in other people’s shoes so you can feel what they do. If you hurt someone, empathy makes you hurt as well.
Reese: Then….why would you want empathy?

Reese, yesterday.

Now, I’ve been little more than a passive observer of the week’s events, but as the looting spread and the crisis worsened, my interest cultivated a gnawing tension in my stomach. It’s a tension I normally associate with realising I’m wrong about something, and embarrassing myself in debate. It soon became clear, especially by the evening of the 8th, that these attacks were not politically motivated. At least, not in the explicit sense of the student protests/riots of November 2010. People weren’t just throwing rocks at police and trashing bank branches, as though this is somehow effortlessly justified in comparison. They were looting independent retailers, newsagents and homes, in areas where friends of mine live. A Croydon landmark and hundred-year-old family business went up in flames for little other reason than mattresses burn fast. In a clip that has now become viral and therefore eminently disposable, a wounded exchange student is helped to his feet and promptly mugged in what amounts to the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Of course, you already know this. It’s the awfulness that 24hr news was made for. Even typing this feels a bit like so much dry rot, but I’ve only just found a way into it by bringing up the ‘Malcolm In The Middle’ thing.

I felt ‘wrong’ because these events weren’t only an assault on our general values and way of life, they felt like a personal assault on my left-leaning sympathies. However much the root cause could be attributed to Tory policy, or the convolution of economic fiasco, these were still people who would rob your bloodied slumping form while their mate points his Android for posterity. These were people who had squandered any moral high ground on appliances and tracksuits. The concerns and values of the liberal left were inadvertently incubating such looters, similar to how the conservative right were harbouring white-collar crime, like tax fraud and expenses fiddling.

Meanwhile, people are conflating excuses with explanations. Understandable, but still damaging to the discourse (and therefore progress) in this country. What was once about politics and protest is now about thugs, ‘pure and simple’. ‘Scum’ we can all agree on, numbered in their hundreds across the country. The fears/secret hopes of an entire tabloid readership ingloriously realised, transcending any need for context. After all, what could possibly justify all this?

Yes, that's the spirit.

The problem in addressing the numerous failures that led to this tragedy is that they largely meld with concerns leading to criminality and arseholery in general. Capitalism is trenchantly unfair; the poor afford less rights and opportunities; parents and peers are a corrupting or non-presence, people ‘abuse’ the welfare system and ‘don’t know the true value of a shoe’, or something. That’s not to mention various neuro-scientific discoveries, suggesting the subconscious is far ahead of our decision-making. The quantum mechanics of the particles comprising the atoms comprising the synapses in our brains are well out of our jurisdiction. Free will is an illusion and our parents f***ed us up, as did their parents ad nauseum. Justice is a composite patch-job on the leaky basin of reality that doesn’t quite work and never quite did. Nevertheless, we do what we can and it gradually improves through revision and nuance, honouring valid social movements as belatedly as possible.

With all that in mind, the well-meaning liberal search for communal rationale is in danger of redundancy, dwelling on flaws too impractical to fix in our lifetimes and offering no applicable solution in its place. This leads to the greater danger of the right-leaning reactionary, demanding a tangible drug for the freshest wound, regardless of its sustainability or consequence. They don’t just want them evicted, and their property seized (including that of their family). They want them shot, strung up or, worst of all, clipped round the ear hole. These people, without wishing to draw too much of a fatuous parallel, also don’t want empathy.

It can be misguided, or patronising, or offensive, but empathy is crucial to understanding the cause of any atrocity. It can also help dilute the blame to a mushy, unsatisfying gruel, where society, or even reality, is the ‘real’ criminal and ‘true’ justice is listlessly elusive. Nevertheless, the fact remains that facts remain.

Here’s Reese fighting a goat.