Painful truths: psychologists unpick the ethics of empathy
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Love is so last century. What the world needs now, the only thing that there’s just too little of, is empathy. Empathy is widely touted as the key to effective management, good government, better medical care, improved wellbeing, higher-achieving schools, excellent parenting, even world peace.
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Yale-based psychologist Paul Bloom found more than 1,500 books available on Amazon with “empathy” in the title, which looks like a publishing bubble ready to burst. One of the latest to join them is by TV producer and former Arts Council England chairman Peter Bazalgette, whose effusive The Empathy Instinct has the hyperbolic subtitle How to Create a More Civil Society. This compendium of empathy’s supposed virtues is a useful summary of all the impressive claims made for it, often underwritten by the scientific trump card du jour: the evidence of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans. Bazalgette’s zeal reaches its peak when he reports approvingly of a group of schoolchildren singing “Empathy is great. We love Empathy. You should too.”
It’s clearly time for a backlash, and Bloom has stepped up to put a much-needed halt to the bandwagon. Against Empathy sounds iconoclastic but, like so many books with sweeping titles, two pages in the reader discovers that a much more qualified claim is being made. Bloom admits in the prologue that the book might have been called Against the Misapplication of Empathy or Empathy Is Not Everything. He gives a rational defence of his bolder choice but surely the marketing case was stronger.
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https://www.ft.com/content/0f3e15c2-dc07-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fhome_us%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct
Love is so last century. What the world needs now, the only thing that there’s just too little of, is empathy. Empathy is widely touted as the key to effective management, good government, better medical care, improved wellbeing, higher-achieving schools, excellent parenting, even world peace.
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Yale-based psychologist Paul Bloom found more than 1,500 books available on Amazon with “empathy” in the title, which looks like a publishing bubble ready to burst. One of the latest to join them is by TV producer and former Arts Council England chairman Peter Bazalgette, whose effusive The Empathy Instinct has the hyperbolic subtitle How to Create a More Civil Society. This compendium of empathy’s supposed virtues is a useful summary of all the impressive claims made for it, often underwritten by the scientific trump card du jour: the evidence of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans. Bazalgette’s zeal reaches its peak when he reports approvingly of a group of schoolchildren singing “Empathy is great. We love Empathy. You should too.”
It’s clearly time for a backlash, and Bloom has stepped up to put a much-needed halt to the bandwagon. Against Empathy sounds iconoclastic but, like so many books with sweeping titles, two pages in the reader discovers that a much more qualified claim is being made. Bloom admits in the prologue that the book might have been called Against the Misapplication of Empathy or Empathy Is Not Everything. He gives a rational defence of his bolder choice but surely the marketing case was stronger.
