In a recent conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, whose current role in the U.S. government could charitably be described as extra-legal disruptor, opined that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy”.
The comment was, in part, aimed at explaining his opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion, particularly that empathy is a “bug in Western civilisation” which can be exploited.
Western Civilisation: A concept of contradictions
Apart from sounding like the kind of stoner philosophising offered by single men whose precocious youth is receding in a rose-tinted rear-view mirror, this comment gets a lot wrong about culture and what we may call Western civilisation. There is a deeper worry as well: as the sociologist Philip Cohen writes on his “Family Inequality” blog, Musk starts by calling empathy “suicidal”, echoing the language of Nazi eugenics that values people over individuals. On X (formerly Twitter), the writer Jon Schwarz relates Musk’s comments to a 1942 column by Joseph Goebbels entitled “Don’t Be Too Fair”, which suggests that an advanced sense of justice “benefits our worst enemies and harms our own interests”.
Let us start with what Musk gets wrong about culture. No culture has any single belief or programming (to stick to Musk’s feature/bug metaphor). Cultures are dynamic and changing entities over time that contain contradictions within overall trends.
There may be general ideas or values that appear intrinsic to a given cultural group, but ideologies often contain their own contradictions. Indeed, this is part of what makes dominant cultural elements work: they acknowledge and transmit their critiques even while undermining them.
To go beyond propaganda, cultural values are flexible and dialogic: they invite change with the promise of neutralising it. An example I often cite is the latter half of the Homeric Odyssey.
Scholars have long puzzled over the political ideology of a returning king struggling with a wastrel aristocracy. Do we understand Odysseus’ murder of the suitors when he returns home as an affirmation of monarchy over oligarchy or a critique of tyranny? The answer is that it depends on who (and when) you are. The Odyssey transmits a critique of a political organisation that embeds multiple perspectives, both as a feature of its development and its need to appeal to different audiences.
Culture is an artificial concept, a catch-all that obscures differences both over and within time. Cultural artefacts offer evidence of tension and dialogue.
Empathy is not weakness
When Musk claims any one thing about “Western civilisation”, he is picking at one thread among many and isolating it in a way that makes it senseless. Western civilisation is a rhetorical concept, foremost. And assertions about its identity are meant to separate one from “the other”.
It is the assertion about empathy, however, that gives me the most pause.
First, one could pick from countless examples in the history of European civilisation and its expanses for the absence or failure of empathy through the dehumanisation of others, whether we are talking about indigenous peoples in the ‘New World’, the transatlantic slave trade, or the horrors of genocide committed in the 20th century. One must search hard to find examples of where empathy has actually caused any Western government to act against its own self-interest.
The cultural artefacts so often held dear by people like Musk also challenge his claims. Greek literature and religious texts show us just how hard empathy is to come by.
In my reading, Plato’s ruminations on justice, culminating in Socrates’ assertion that it is “better to suffer wrong than do wrong”, build essentially against the archaic idea that justice is to harm enemies and help friends, striving instead for a higher goal for the human soul: to be good in part by not doing evil. To pick another oft-cited figure, Jesus of the Gospels repeatedly espouses values that are grounded deeply in empathy. But he does so against a crueler system of values. If empathy were intrinsic to Plato or the Bible, neither text would have to work so hard to defend it.
The greatest sign to me, however, that empathy is not fundamental to Western civilisation comes not from religion or philosophy but from Greek literature. If we are to trust Aristotle, the primary thrust of Greek tragedy is to inspire emotions of fear and pity to help audience members reach recognition and identification, to see themselves in others and others’ suffering in themselves. I can play word games with English empathy to show how rooted it is etymologically in the same concepts, but at this point, it seems redundant to do so.
Lessons Musk misses in Ancient Greek literature
Musk has tweeted before about how important it is to read Homer, something I highly doubt he has done well. If he understood the Iliad, he would see that one of the primary messages of its central plot is how terribly hard and costly it is to see one another’s suffering as real as your own. The entire story around the rage of Achilles hinges on his inability to comprehend that his actions have consequences for others.
If he were not so enraged at a slight to his honour at the epic’s beginning, he would not pray to Zeus for his own people to die. At that final moment in Book 24 when he and Priam weep together over their losses and see each other as human beings, the message is not about how empathy made them flawed: it is about how hard it is for the powerful to see others’ pain, and how much better it would be if they could do so.
When Musk complains about empathy as a weakness, he is missing both the point of ancient literature and some of the central lessons of history itself: a lack of empathy and ruthless self-interest bring everyone suffering and pain. Empathy is hard work, but it is the very ‘weakness’ we need to see how individuals come together to make a people.
*Joel Christensen is a professor of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University where he serves as Senior Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. He has recently published Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things with Yale University Press.
