There has been substantial research into patients who have suffered damage to the part of the brain that processes emotion. One might expect that these individuals would be more rational, liberated from the distortions of feeling, real-life versions of Data from Star Trek, perfectly logical because emotion does not interfere with their judgment. But the results show these patients to be consistently among the most irrational people that scientists have ever studied. Why? Because, as one famous study concluded, it is emotion that attributes value to things, and only when things have value can they be weighed and chosen properly. Emotion isn’t just feeling, it’s valuing, and it is therefore essential to decision making.
I mention this because Elon Musk, he of the recent 1 trillion dollar compensation package, has considered the decline of the West and has determined that the problem is that we are too kind, that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” a suicidal indulgence dragging society toward collapse. He is far from alone in believing this. An article in The Atlantic describes how many on the right have begun to advance the idea that “people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests.” It is echoed by scholars like Gad Saad, and others in the blogosphere and on podcasts, who argue that empathy has been weaponized to the detriment of the civilized world, promoting poor policy choices, in particular in immigration and welfare.
What nonsense. If anything, it is not empathy, but this sort of thinking which represents an existential threat to civilization, as it undermines and reshapes our understanding of virtue, power, and the role of government in a just and free society.
Let us state emphatically: empathy is not the disease of the West; it is its defining and central characteristic, the singular quality from which all others derive their moral character. It is what elevated us from tribes to moral communities, what taught us to see the image of God in the face of a stranger, what transformed law into justice and power into stewardship. The idea that empathy is a flaw misunderstands not only civilization, but humanity itself.
Reason too is essential, yes, but by itself, it is an engine without a steering wheel. It tells us how to achieve what we want, but not what we should want. Emotion, and above all empathy, is what guides it toward the good. The human brain has two hemispheres for a reason. The best decisions occur when we both think and feel, calculate and care. Civilization should not reject empathy from public policy any more so than we should ever handicap ourselves by lobotomizing half our brain.
Critics like Musk see something real but draw the wrong conclusion. They look at reckless immigration policies that invite those who neither share nor respect Western values, and burden society with financial and political costs. They see criminals going free in the name of compassion, only to continue terrorizing their neighborhoods. They see governments taking away our hard-earned money to give to others, while burying us in debt. They see American autonomy ceded, and jobs gone overseas, in the name of globalism. From this, the cynical infer that empathy itself is the culprit, that the heart must be silenced for the mind to rule.
The problem with cynicism is that it is sometimes right. But not in this case. These failures are not born of empathy, they are born of stupidity. The problem is not that we have felt too deeply, but that we have felt without thinking. A civilization does not collapse because its heart is too large, but because it forgets that love requires discipline.
True empathy does not demand that we open our borders or our wallets without restraint. It asks only that we act humanely while exercising discernment, that we care for the stranger while protecting the home, that we offer mercy without abandoning judgment. Compassion and caution are not enemies. The greatest civilizations have always known how to hold them in balance, and to use each to inform the other.
Christianity, the foundation of the West, expresses that same truth in divine terms. Empathy is not sentimentality; it is sacrifice. It is not weakness; it is will. It is the logic of the Cross, the moral revolution that transformed the world. “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for Me.” That single commandment reshaped human history, and the West. It is the reason the weak are protected, the sick are cared for, and the poor are treated as brothers instead of burdens. The abolition of slavery, the defense of the accused, the sanctity of life, the very notion that every person possesses inherent dignity and should therefore be free and treated equally, these central tenets of Western civilization are not bureaucratic inventions but theological revelations, born from empathy.
When we speak of the West, then, we are not describing a place on a map. Geography has never defined civilization. The West is not a location; it is a lineage. It is called Western Christendom, after all, emphasis not on the adjective but on the noun, from which comes a moral tradition formed not by terrain or trade, but by the teachings of Christ, which saw every human being as a bearer of divine worth. That is the essential characteristic that distinguishes the civilized world from everywhere else: not its science, not its armies, but its belief that compassion is divine, that mercy ennobles strength, and that love is law.
Empathy, in short, is not what weakens the West, it is what defines it and what informs it. From the parable of the Good Samaritan to the promise of equal protection, from the abolition of slavery to the care of the sick, our civilization is the story of empathy refined through reason and expressed through justice. To discard it now, in the name of survival, would be to abandon the very thing that has caused us to escape mere survival and to thrive.
This, properly understood, is the conservative ideal: not the rejection of empathy, but its advancement through refinement. If conservatism is an intellectual pursuit, then empathy and compassion must always be our North Star, the beacon that guides us, the thing at which we aim our minds and efforts. We don’t just think for the sake of thinking, we think for the sake of building. And what should we aim to build, if not a society that is compassionate, just, merciful, and kind?
I’m not sure where we got the idea that conservatism needs to be cold and calculating, but the sooner we abandon that, the better. Conservatism is not a fortress against feeling. What awful results would come of that! Ben Shapiro’s clever quip that “facts do not care about your feelings”, while true, misses the point. Conservatism at its best is the discipline of love, because without love it is not moral. And if conservatism is not moral, then it cannot be morally superior. And if it is not morally superior, then it is no meaningful way superior at all. What makes conservatism noble is not that it resists empathy, but that it embraces it.
The founding fathers of conservatism understood this. It was David Hume, who wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), that “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” He meant that reason alone cannot motivate moral action; it can tell us what is, but not what ought to be. Moral judgment, for Hume, arose from sentiment, the emotional response of sympathy toward others. Reason analyzes, but sentiment directs.
Adam Smith (surely you’ve heard of him) echoed this in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), arguing that empathy is the foundation of moral life. Like Hume, he saw moral reasoning as the outgrowth of human feeling, not its suppression.
Edmund Burke absorbed both Hume’s skepticism and Smith’s moral psychology. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), he wrote that our moral and aesthetic judgments depend upon feeling, saying: “The passions are the chief sources of our activity.” And in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke argued that emotion and inherited affection are what bind a nation together, and that cold reason alone would dissolve society.
Conservatism is nothing if not an ideology rooted in responsibility, and there is no greater responsibility, to ourselves and to humanity, than to be thoughtfully compassionate. This has been the great strength of Western civilization, that it has always been able to feel deeply and govern wisely. The same civilization that built constitutions and balanced budgets also founded orphanages and abolished slavery. Its compassion was never separate from its order; its empathy was never divorced from its reason. If anything, they amplified and have always been essential to each other.
If we as conservatives claim to be a movement grounded in reason, if we aspire to use reason to build a better society, then we must also recognize that empathy is indispensable to that mission.
So let the prophets of hardness preach that empathy is weakness, as the Romans did while their once great world was felled by the Cross. Let them call mercy naive and compassion decadent. Let Elon build his companies and his fortune. But let us not forget that it was compassion that built the West. Corporations do not require a heart, but civilization does. And if conservatism is to save the civilized world, it must rediscover its own.
