An interesting article by neuroscientist Orli Peter:
Across the Middle East, militant groups from Hamas to the Syrian rebels orchestrate calculated psychological operations. Seen from a clinical point of view, they demonstrate exceptional skills in cognitive empathy, which they use to manipulate our emotions.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand and model the thoughts, feelings and values of others. It’s like hacking into someone else’s algorithm for how they think and feel, enabling you to predict their reactions to your actions. On the other hand, emotional empathy – what the West excessively values – is the ability to feel what you believe the other person is experiencing.
Cognitive empathy takes effort to construct, whereas emotional empathy is involuntary. Anti-Israel militants have been able to turbo-charge their propaganda by using their cognitive empathy to manipulate Westerner’s emotional empathy.
Using cognitive empathy, militants have learnt to present their cause as aligned with Western humanitarian values, carefully curating their image as champions of freedom and justice. This dynamic is rooted in asymmetrical power relationships, where weaker groups often develop a detailed understanding of powerful parties, using cognitive empathy to identify and press the psychological buttons that influence those in power. These terrorists often possess a stronger cognitive grasp of Western psychology than Westerners understand jihadi psychology.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. However, many of those who project sympathy for the jihadis are not doing so because they have emotional empathy, but because they want to be believed to have emotional empathy. This is particularly the case, I think, in the case of media people and academics.
Also, empathy toward one group of people can serve as a self-justification for the unwholesome pleasures of cruelty–direct or vicarious–toward another group of people. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the anti-Semitic behavior which is being justified by claims of empathy toward people in Gaza.
I remember something Chesterton said: ”
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
There is today way too much latching onto pity toward a socially-acceptable set of designated victims and closing of minds toward the facts of the case (Chesterton’s “untruthfulness”)….and closing of hearts toward other groups of people who are being harmed by the policies purportedly intended to protect those designated victims.
The distinction among cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and pretended emotional empathy is an important one.