Conspicuous Compassion
What exactly is “empathy” good for?
original article
Nicholas Kristof reports from his hometown of Yamhill, Ore., on the sad life and early death of his high-school cross-country teammate Kevin Green, who was laid to rest Saturday: “The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs.”
Kristof doesn’t actually dispute the doctors’ opinion as to the proximate cause of Green’s death. His quarrel is with some straw men who have a different view from Kristof’s of the ultimate cause:
Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin—obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps—as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?
That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap.Yet Kristof’s account of his friend’s life makes some good points on behalf of the straw men. Green did make a series of bad choices, including fathering children out of wedlock: “He fell in love and had twin boys that he doted on. But because he and his girlfriend struggled financially, they never married.”
When he lost his job because of a back injury, the girlfriend took the kids and left him. That’s when he let his health go: “Kevin’s weight ballooned to 350 pounds, and he developed diabetes and had a couple of heart attacks,” Kristof reports. “He grew marijuana and self-medicated with it, [Green’s brother] Clayton says, and was arrested for drug offenses.”
Even Clayton Green lends his support to conservative arguments about the baneful incentives of welfare: “Disability [benefits] helped Kevin by providing a monthly check that he desperately needed, but it also hurt him because he might have looked harder for a job if he hadn’t been getting those checks, Clayton says.”
The other side of the story is that Kevin Green was a victim of emergent economic change:
[Kevin’s] dad, Thomas, had only a third-grade education and couldn’t read. But he had a good union job as a cement finisher, paying far above the minimum wage, and he worked hard and made sure his kids did, too. . . . The local glove factory and feed store closed, and other blue-collar employers cut back. Good union jobs became hard to find.Even before the back injury and breakup set off the downward spiral, Kevin was able to get only lower-paying, nonunion jobs.
For all this, Kristof proclaims himself agnostic as to the ultimate cause of Green’s early death: “I have trouble diagnosing just what went wrong in that odyssey from sleek distance runner to his death at 54, but the lack of good jobs was central to it. Sure, Kevin made mistakes, but his dad had opportunities for good jobs that Kevin never had.”
It’s not an unreasonable argument. It seems fair to surmise that Green’s life chances would have been better had he not come of age at a time when the value of unskilled and semiskilled labor was declining as a result of market forces beyond his control.
Another point—which Kristof doesn’t develop, except to observe in passing that “family structure dissolved”—is that if Green had lived, say, 50 years earlier, he and his girlfriend would likely have been unable to resist the social pressure to marry after she became pregnant. That in turn would have made it harder for her simply to walk out on him, an action that, according to Clayton Green, “knocked him to the dirt” and “destroyed his self-esteem.”
But how does any of the foregoing support Kristof’s contention that “an empathy gap” is “one of this country’s fundamental problems”? That is the central conceit of the column, which is titled “Where’s the Empathy?” and concludes by vainly consoling the decedent: “Those who would judge you don’t have a clue. They could use a dose of your own empathy.”
Were Americans more empathetic in 1960, when Thomas Green was a new father, than they are today? Did empathy create those union jobs that were so much more plentiful when the Green père was of working age? Is there any plausible way in which empathy could have countered, or could now reverse, the trends toward globalization and automation that contributed to Kevin Green’s difficulty making a living?
Kristof does not even attempt to grapple with these questions, not that much grappling is required. It seems obvious that the impersonal economic and social forces that contributed to Green’s undoing have little if anything to do with empathy or the lack thereof.
So what purpose does “empathy” serve for Kristof’s argument? Mostly, it seems to us, that of a status display. In a particularly unattractive passage, Kristof reminds his readers that he is a lot more successful than his high-school chum ever was: “My kids would see Kevin and me together and couldn’t believe he had run cross country with me, and that he wasn’t 20 years older.”
Dan Calabrese argues that it is not Green over whom Kristof wishes to assert his higher status: “Kristof needed to let us know all the failures in Kevin Green’s life because he wanted to tell us something about Nicholas Kristof, which is: Kevin Green made all these mistakes and lived all these failures, but Nicholas Kristof did not judge him, unlike all you horrible people. Nicholas Kristof is morally superior to you.”
It seems to us Calabrese doesn’t quite hit the target here, though he comes close. Kristof’s ideal reader is one who shares his sense of moral superiority. The message is more like: Nicholas Kristof did not judge him, unlike all those horrible people. You are morally superior to them.
In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” economist Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to refer to displays of luxury for the purpose of asserting one’s status. The Kristof column, like much of his work, is an example of conspicuous compassion—an ostentatious, status-seeking display of empathy.
To be sure, Kristof is no gentleman of leisure. He is an industrious journalist who produces close to 100 columns a year, plus blog posts and the occasional book. His affluent readers eagerly consume his work, which reinforces their own high moral status. It’s nice work if you can get it.
