David French and the Pink Spiders of Empathy | Doug Wilson

objective reality independent of feelings matters or to quote the problematic phrase that david french had a problem with facts don't care about your feelings introduction david french recently wrote about what he sees as a significant developing problem with the issues of empathy and sympathy in the church as yours truly got mentioned in his piece i thought that this would be a good time for a refresher on this most significant topic despite initial appearances this is not an esoteric debate about a bunch of nothing it does not have to do with whether we place more emphasis on the third or fourth dictionary definition of a word like empathy no the correspondence view of truth itself is actually at stake and that means everything is at stake it really is a big deal two things right at the front end let us start with this initial problem with french's approach quote christians of all people should understand the ultimate empathy of the incarnation itself as the book of hebrews declares for we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses but we have one who has been tempted in every way just as we are yet he did not sin the american crisis of selective empathy this actually has more to do with selective translation than with selective empathy the difficulty is that the greek word that french renders here is empathize is actually sympathy the word that we obviously get sympathy from but sympathy is the culprit in the video by brene brown that french applauded at the end of his piece i've posted that video down at the end of this post so you don't have to click around hunting for it so if you want to get yourself oriented first you might want to jump down there and watch that video before reading any further however if you decide to depart these august premises in order to look at it over on youtube you may there ascertain that we are not battling with some little off-broadway understanding of empathy that video has almost 17 million views and it obviously seems quite reasonable to a whole lot of people including david french for some reason the thing that got people riled about this discussion was the idea that empathy was sinful according to our stipulated definition of empathy to take on that stipulated definition seemed reasonable to me because the word empathy is of relatively recent coinage and the definition we are resisting is obviously a widespread one and in my view very destructive but notice that no one was outraged that sympathy a characteristic considered virtuous for thousands of years was being backhanded as something that quote drives disconnection moreover brown managed to do all this with a variation of the straw man fallacy a form which might be called the funny voice refutation the sympathetic deer in the video says the most frightfully ham-handed things and does so in a funny voice clearly in the wrong the empathetic bear says ham handed things also but he gets away with it in the video because no funny voice was used for example the deer repeatedly says well at least but the bear supposedly modeling how we all ought to be acting comes into the hurting person and says i know what it's like down here are any of you incapable of imagining a stereotypical dolt who barges into personal tragedies with an i know what it's like i didn't think so have any of you ever thought to yourself something like no you don't here's another big problem with french's analysis quote this is a christianized version of the famous secular conservative statement that facts don't care about your feelings there are multiple problems with this approach especially for christians first as a practical matter the prioritizing of our own judgments often implies wisdom and knowledge we don't possess take for example the argument that quote untethered empathy is dangerous in the context of racism and abuse that it prevents solid fact-finding and sound judgment close quote the american crisis of selective empathy i must frankly say that it had to have taken a lot of work to misunderstand a point this badly french says rightly enough that quote unquote the prioritizing of our own judgments often implies wisdom and knowledge we don't possess this is absolutely true this is why there are numerous situations especially when accusations of racism and abuse are involved when empathy is demanded from us and we must refuse to give it why precisely because we don't trust our judgment we withhold judgment because we don't have the facts yet we know we don't have the facts yet even if we think we have the facts scripture demands that we respect and follow certain processes that assume that we don't have the facts proverbs 18 13 proverbs 18 17 that we don't have all the facts when we first hear about a situation is an article of faith with us and withholding judgment is not making a judgment so when someone tells us a horror story about some racist taunt or some abusive behavior to respectfully withhold judgment until we know more is not the same thing as accusing the person who told us the story of lying it actually demonstrates our commitment to the truth which is the true friend to anyone who loves the truth we have a responsibility to be loyal to the account of what actually happened which we don't know yet because we don't know yet we must not accuse the whistleblower of lying because we don't know and we must also not empathize with the accuser which is tantamount to making a judgment against the accused why because we know how frail our judgment can be so david french wants us to be suspicious of our own judgments okay we said that's what we are doing let's investigate carefully taking our time what are you doing so scenarios matter let me illustrate what i mean i want to set out three scenarios for you and note how dangerous it is to respond to each one of them with the same kind of simple empathy quote john i just heard that my father died in a car wreck close quote quote john despite everything you say my father and i both believe that the vaccine mandates our tyrannical close quote quote john i hate to tell you this but my father began sexually abusing me when i was 12 and he kept it up for years close quote the first is simply horrible news but with no real question about the fact of it the second is a political disagreement with each taking their side and the third is an implicit accusation against the speaker's father they are not the same kind of statements at all and it is beyond irresponsible to demand that we take them all in with the same empathetic response now what would terrible responses to each of these statements look like if someone were to say in response to the first statement something like well he was probably speeding anyway that would be terrible if someone were to reply to the second one with quote you unvaccinated people are the worst i hope you all die and i hope that it will be really painful the entire time you are dying that too would be an ungodly sentiment let's defer for just a moment on a terrible response to the third statement because that terrible response lies right at the heart of this debate what would a straightforward empathetic response look like with each with the first it would simply be to weep with those who weep and i don't think that anybody really cares if in the process the word sympathy and empathy get treated as synonyms in such circumstances they probably are synonyms and whether or not anybody else cares i sure don't i don't care because i'm not quibbling about words tomato to motto with the second we should respond graciously but we probably need a word like sympathy to describe a good response instead of empathy why if we adopted brown's insistence upon empathy over against sympathy when we encounter someone who differs with us on some important political issue we would have to engage in quote unquote perspective taking and quote unquote staying out of judgment her first two characteristics of empathy both of which render political and cultural debate impossible in order to get to the debate you would have to abandon empathy entirely but you wouldn't have to abandon sympathy in order to debate someone and this is also why an empathetic response to the third kind of situation is really problematic in fact it is more than problematic this is a conflagration of empathy that is currently burning our country down there's no good way to respond to the third situation with empathy because we still care whether or not the accusation is true to respond to the third situation with empathy i'm so sorry to hear that how could your father do that is to validate the accusation and stand with the accuser it is as the saying goes to believe all women this is why i deferred discussion of the terrible response to each scenario the empathetic response as brown defines it is the terrible response to an accusation in this scenario empathy is a destroyer remember in the meantime another counselor trained in the same school of thought is supposed to be saying the same thing to the father who has been telling him that his daughter has just falsely accused him of sexual abuse this is how untethered empathy lays waste to everything an important qualification when someone makes an accusation how should they be treated with dignity and gracious respect they should be assured that the accusation will be taken seriously and will be fully investigated we will find out the truth because we care about what actually happened the one thing we won't do is confound a charge with a trial incidentally tethered empathy is simply the same thing as sympathy you reach out to someone who is drowning but you keep one foot on the bank there's an objective reality outside the feelings of both of you and that objective reality is what makes biblical compassion even possible if you remove that objective reality a reality that is bigger than all the parties involved then you may call it empathy but what it really has become is nothing more than sentimental tribalism you already know whose side you are on and you feel accordingly the disease that is killing us this disastrous error is why america is currently burning down and the name of the oxygen that feeds the conflagration is empathy we have fragmented into countless identity groups and whenever some incident happens we don't need to know what actually happened before our empathy is engaged we go straight to the empathy which is how lynch mobs do it this is part of twitter's business model this is the cancer of our relativism this is the malaise of our time and we have done it to ourselves quote oh israel thou hast destroyed thyself but in me is thine help hosea 13 9 so this is not the growth of christian compassion as some would have it but it is rather the weaponization of untethered emotion and sentiment a woman accused is a man of raping her and he flatly denies it if you extend empathy toward either one of them without knowing what actually happened then you ought never to be allowed to serve on a jury anywhere and if biblical justice were a wet halibut you wouldn't recognize it if some fishmonger at pike's place market in seattle slapped you in the face with it to give the feelings of the first person to talk to you pride of place is to utterly confound the different kinds of statements that people can make to you you must not render a standard empathetic response to wildly different statements the mri revealed that i have a brain tumor and i have written 13 letters to the mayor and he still won't do anything about these little pink spiders that run up and down my spine are statements that ought not to be treated as though they were the same kind of thing they are not the same kind of thing in the first instance you can extend sympathy to this person because there is no reasonable dispute about what is actually happening in the second there is a radical disconnect between what the person is saying and what is actually happening in brief the little pink spiders are not actually happening and the brain tumor is objective reality independent of feelings matters or to quote the problematic phrase that david french had a problem with facts don't care about your feelings definitions matter as brene brown defines it the objective truth doesn't matter in all this and david french called her treatment outstanding and we are not just dealing with the self-report of someone who is feeling depressed french himself applies this standard to the world of perceived racism and abuse in such situations we are supposed to begin by recognizing their truth those fatal words their truth are that large dark spot on the x-ray of your lymph nodes but the sacred word truth doesn't take the personal pronoun the same way that my boots or truck or laptop might i don't care about my truth i care what would have been true had i never been born i care about the truth so empathy requires that we set aside the concerns raised by this actually happening fetish of ours and enter fully into the experience of the one reporting whatever his malady is recognizing it as his truth and thus it is that a man becomes one of the arsonists burning down western civilization this may not have been intended but it is certainly what is happening just look around with the little pink spider's example the divide between perception and reality is caused by mental illness or the dts or lsd or something like that speaking of reality do you guys remember that concept good times good times but such a disconnect can have multiple causes it can be caused by high respect for authority and if fauci says it it must be so it can be caused by extreme loyalty to your tribal identity and so if a white cop shot a black man that's all you need to know and you might not need to know even that much in french's case it may have been caused by detestation of that strange orange comet that dominated our night skies for a few years following 2016. it can be caused by misbegotten gender solidarity such that you live in a world where women never lie unless it is about biden then you get what might be called an intersectional puree and the predominant flavor that usually results from this leftist slushie reveals that you have more solidarity with democratic operatives and the members of the press who sleep with them than you do with violated women for those who believe i may have put too many eggs in the pudding there are many conservative christians and maybe even david french himself who might want to grant that i have a limited point if we restricted ourselves to certain obscure and very dark nihilistic corners of our culture like the english department at behemoth state or the house ways and means committee but they still have strong memories of a once coherent american mind and so they have faith that our institutions are still basically sound and that the kind of insanity i'm talking about will surely not become all that widespread surely this sympathy empathy debate is just linguistic not strangling no this is widespread and it is already messing with all of our categories it is everywhere and has gotten into everything christians who have tended to dismiss all this feelings trump truth stuff as the troubled ravings of certain demented philosophers out on the periphery somewhere have not been paying attention this is now the ruling paradigm in our universities our law schools our corporate world our courts and in our media there is a radical disconnect now operating between reality on the one hand and how we are all required to behave on the other this disconnect is being enforced and with a heavy hand for the sake of feelings perhaps you doubt what i say and perhaps also you've not been paying attention can a christian be fired from virtually any major corporation today for addressing a co-worker with a pronoun that does not align with that person's feelings i thought so does the covet virus hit you in the face while walking to your table in a restaurant but go floating over your head once you are seated no so perhaps you and millions of others are going through these inane little rituals simply so the fearful feelings of others may be assuaged do we live in a time when a garage door pull can be mistaken for a threatening lynching noose and multiple fbi agents scramble as a result why yes yes we do can a young man be kicked out of college because a young lady had sex with him regretted it later and consequently felt like it had to have been abused well yeah that happens also these things and many others like them are not simply mistakes they are the necessary result of allowing the concept of their truth to serve as an adequate replacement for the truth and the hyper defensiveness over the sacred territory of empathy is one of the things that has groomed us to accept all of this this debate did not erupt because someone objected to the word sympathy gaining a new synonym no it erupted because some of us are suspicious of big wooden horses especially we can hear the warriors inside but still here we all are empathizing away like crazy we are acting like we never read the essay by c.s lewis called the poison of subjectivism we continue on blissfully unaware of how a conservative activist like david french could find himself participating in what lewis once called presciently the abolition of man david french brene brown outstanding what what was outstanding to each his own truth and if david french replied as i have no doubt he would that of course he believes in objective truth i would simply request that he take an incident in quote the context of racism and abuse apply brown's empathetic approach to it while plainly holding on to the idea of objective truth good luck

Channel: Blog & Mablog

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Keywords: doug wilson, douglas wilson, blog, blog and mablog, mablog, dougwils, canon press, canon, moscow, moscow idaho, pastor doug wilson, empathy, sin of empathy, pink, spiders, empathetic, sin, french, david french, david, joe rigney

Id: K27wkjQ1k74

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021