In Waterloo, Illinois a man stands accused of
strangling to death his wife and two small children. The
accused, Chris Coleman, worked
as a bodyguard for the
televangelist Joyce
Meyer. After work, he was diddling his
wife’s best friend. Prosecutors say rather than filing for divorce
and risk losing his job, Coleman murdered his wife and two
sons.
Entered into evidence was a selection of animal
strangulation videos Coleman enjoyed watching. (I suppose the
“Tootin’ Bathtub Baby Cousins” YouTube
sensation just didn’t do it for him anymore.)
For an expert witness, the defense could do worse
than recruit Simon Baron-Cohen, author of
Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty.
While the casual observer would insist that Chris Coleman is merely
evil, Baron-Cohen would contend that the sick videos prove Coleman
suffers from a disability, i.e., a severe lack of empathy.
Naturally, a man with “eroded empathy” cannot be found guilty of
homicide. He may, however, be treated. Perhaps with a combination
of hormone injections, gene
therapy, and
counseling.
In fact, Baron-Cohen would like us to do away with
the concept of evil altogether.
The Cambridge don finds the whole idea of evil
unhelpful. What’s more, it is simplistic and unscientific. It
smacks of the Bible and ancient superstitions. And it tells us
nothing. Why is one evil? Again, it comes down to the
inability to empathize or to identify with
others.
To this end, Baron-Cohen has devised six degrees of
empathy. His empathy spectrum would award a six to someone like
Bill Clinton, who claimed to be able to feel the pain of an entire
nation, and a zero to the husband who honestly answers his wife’s
query about whether her jeans makes her butt look big. At the peak
of the bell curve stands your Average Empathy Joe who tears up at
Schindler’s List, but remains dry-eyed if not slightly
nauseous during
the Titanic.
Baron-Cohen has also devised a questionnaire to test
our empathy quotient (EQ). Shockingly, I scored at the lower end
(31 out of 80), which means either I am a fervent individualist or
a menace to society.
BARON-COHEN BEGAN his research trying to “understand
the Holocaust.” In the main, he agrees with
Hannah Arendt’s idea about
the Banality of
Evil (though he would object to the term evil). Arendt
found the Nazis to be bland, passionless bureaucrats, who were
unable to empathize with their victims. She noted that Germans
traditionally had been taught to embrace conformity and
unquestioningly follow orders. (“I was just following orders,” was
the war criminal’s standard defense.) However, both Baron-Cohen and
Arendt give short shrift to the German’s deep ingrained feeling of
national superiority, his bitter resentment, his desire for
revenge, his anti-Semitism, and the perceived rightness of his
actions. Combined these made for a thick stew that fed the flames
of the Holocaust. (Actually, the real lesson to be learned from the
Holocaust is not that your average German lacked empathy, but
rather that he should have been more distrustful of government and
his political leaders.)
Baron-Cohen fingers our hormones, genes, and
neglectful mothers as causes for empathy deficiency. One example:
his research indicates the more testosterone you are exposed to in
the womb, the less empathy you will have. (I suppose that explains
the Bitch
of Belsen. She had too much testosterone, poor
dear.)
Naturally, if the problem is largely genetic and
hormonal, as Baron-Cohen argues, it can be eradicated through
gene/hormone therapy, thus setting the stage for an edenic future
where Israelis and Palestinians group hug and your co-workers do
not steal your bologna sandwiches from the lunchroom
fridge.
Baron-Cohen’s agenda is plain. Close the prisons and
admit criminals to hospitals where ObamaCare can work its magic.
After all, “no one is responsible for his own genes.” (Now that we
have done away with the concepts of evil and personal
responsibility, anything else we can get rid of?)
Just one problem. What we have traditionally
identified as evil is not a lack of empathy, but its opposite: the
ability to keenly imagine your victim’s pain, and relishing in it.
I imagine Osama
bin Laden understood pretty well
what those Americans in the World Trade Center would go through.
That was the whole point. Fortunately America didn’t swallow
Baron-Cohen’s snake oil and sic headshrinkers on the Al Qaeda
leader. Fortunately we sent in the Navy SEALS.
