The attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast was a vile and terrifying crime. The violent response targeting people for the colour of their skin was vile and terrifying.
It was supposed to be a protest about lax immigration and asylum laws, but the rioters did not care about the migration status of those they targeted, just what they looked like.
Two Ugandan care workers, Sumayah Nakazibwe and Stella Ariokot, who were cowering in their home as flames devoured nearby houses, were advised to don their care uniforms as a protective measure.
Their Protestant pastor, Jack McKee, came to their rescue, bitterly exclaiming that he never thought to see the day when he would have to save Christian women from attack in a Protestant community. He had to persuade some 20 masked and stone-wielding rioters to let him in.
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“Suicidal empathy”, an ugly, dangerous phrase coined by Canadian academic Gad Saad, is one of the phrases currently deployed by the anti-migrant and anti-asylum seeker movement. It is the title of his latest book, which has featured in the New York Times best-sellers’ list for hardcover non-fiction for the last four weeks. Saad is a Canadian citizen whose Jewish family fled from Lebanon, and a professor of marketing at Concordia University, Montreal.
Our problem is not too much of the wrong kind of empathy, but not enough of the right kind. Empathy indeed needs to be balanced with prudence and wisdom
His thesis is that empathy, “a noble and evolutionarily selected virtue, a central feature of our humanity”, can be misdirected to the extent that it causes “civilisational suicide”. He believes that when people empathise too much with migrants to the extent of allowing people who actively want to undermine the values of the host society to enter, or sympathise so much with people driven to crime that they ignore the rights of victims, they are committing what he calls civilisational seppuku, that is, ritual suicide as originally practised by the Japanese. Saad lists almost with glee people who tried to be caring and good and who ended up being raped or murdered by those they were trying to help.
Of course, being too kind to dangerous people is unwise. Prudential judgment should always be exercised. It is also true that there have been progressive excesses, and egregious celebration of the October 7th attacks as a natural consequence of Israel’s actions, rather than focusing on the truly vicious nature of the rape, killing and kidnapping of Israeli citizens.
But Saad weaponises extreme situations of progressive over-reach to warn against any empathy for the stranger seeking help. His work offers a pseudointellectual cover for people forcing small children to flee their homes in Belfast.
CS Lewis spent an idyllic childhood in Belfast until he was 10. While I watched the rioters, the words of one of his most famous fictional characters, Screwtape, echoed in my head. In The Screwtape Letters, a satire written as letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, the ethical universe is inverted so that anything that distracts people from goodness is praiseworthy. He tells Wormwood how useful it is to warn people off the virtue they are least likely to practise in the first place.
As he explains, “We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic.”
He goes on to say that “cruel ages are put on their guard against sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants, we make liberalism the prime bogey.”
Saad was never in danger of practising extreme empathy. The tone throughout the book is vicious. His description of Kamala Harris as a “lobotomised cackler” is typical of his style. Elon Musk, also an immigrant, promotes Saad’s views. When challenged to show compassion because he himself is an immigrant, Saad says that comparing Musk or himself to “Muhammad the jihadist” demonstrates the extent of human imbecility. Open borders do not exist anywhere in the world, except in the strictly limited sense of free travel areas for EU citizens, but Saad fulminates against open borders as if they were in operation everywhere.
For Saad, taxation is theft, aid to the developing world should come with reciprocal strings attached, and Islam poses an existential threat to Europe. He is incapable of seeing that Musk’s gutting of USAid has only increased the push factors for migration, as poverty and disease increase in the Global South.
There are legitimate concerns about migration in a country where housing is disastrously scarce, and a GP visit might involve a three-week wait. But the inexcusable actions of the Belfast rioters only serve to make those concerns harder to hear.
Our problem is not too much of the wrong kind of empathy, but not enough of the right kind. Empathy indeed needs to be balanced with prudence and wisdom. But promulgating a concept such as suicidal empathy is likely to rob us of all empathy for anyone outside our limited in-group. That would be a kind of suicide of the soul.
