Corruption of the best is the worst. Ancient Roman maxim.
The worst is when the very most precious and worthy is corrupted: as when mercy is cheapened and empathy turns toxic.
The Mutuality of the Masculine and the Feminine
The female psyche is inherently compassionate. The ego boundaries of the woman are porous, open, fluid, receptive, generous. The masculine ego is defined, rigid, inflexible, abstract, intellectual, detached, and oriented by law, authority, and principles. In a good marriage, husband and wife love each other; are receptive and affirming of each others strengths, and corrective of defects. The woman interiorizes order, authority, and justice; the man receives compassion, generosity, receptivity. The defective male spirit, unleavened by the feminine, becomes violent, lustful, manipulative, greedy. The female spirit, unleavened by the masculine, becomes toxically empathetic.
Effete Feminism
The word "effete" derives from the Latin "ex" (out) and "fetus" (fruit). Ex-fetus would mean "having brought forth" or "exhausted from childbirth." It would refer to an animal or field now gone infertile, incapable of bearing fruit. We see immediately the connection to our world: an entire culture built upon sterile sex, contraception, abortion, and the abolition of gender (along with generativity and generosity). It frequently is used derogatively to describe a man lacking in virility. It came to apply to social circles who are over-refined, detached, weak, and unmanly.
The defective feminism that pervaded our society in the sixty's was essentially effete: lacking in wholesome vitality, fertility, generosity. It was anti-maternity and therefore anti-feminine at its core. From this came obsessions with abortion, contraception, careerism and free sex. This "flight from woman" sprang more deeply from a lack of the Marian spirituality that receives the love of the Father, the eternal, merciful, generous, just and true Father. Authentic femininity is receptive of the masculine as authentic masculinity is donative, generously and selflessly, to the feminine. At the same time, the male is receptive of the female as the woman is donative to the man in a mysterious, enchanting dance that is at once complementary, asymmetric, and synergistic.
Mother of Seven Sons in Maccabees, Mary Mother of Sorrows, and the 8th Station of the Cross
Contrast toxic empathy with the mother in Maccabees: the devout Jewish woman who, loving her God and religion, exhorts her sons to heroically suffer burning and severance of hands in loyalty to God. She addresses her seventh and last son as he followed his brothers into torture and death: "My son, have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years, and have reared you and brought you up to this point in your life, and have taken care of you. I beg you, my child to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. Thus also mankind comes into being. Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God's mercy I may get you back again with your brothers." (2 Mac 7:28-9)
This mother of sorrows is a premonition of our Blessed Mother Mary who surrendered her son to far greater torment. Here we see the polar opposite of toxic empathy.
Also contradictory of this distortion is Jesus' strange rebuke to the women of Jerusalem which we remember in the 8th station of the cross, often misleadingly entitled "Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem." The women are weeping for Jesus in his suffering. He harshly rejects their compassion them: "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, "Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never nursed! Then they will say to the mountains, 'Fall on us,' and to the hills 'Cover us.' For if thy do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?" Luke 23:28-31. This is among the most troubling, puzzling and mysterious lines in Scripture. I do not understand it. But for sure it is a repudiation of an empathy that is on the face of it admirable. And can be extended more forcefully to toxic empathy.
Some concrete examples of toxic empathy.
Black Lives Matter. The video of George Floyd being strangled to death sent much of our society into paroxysms of toxic empathy. The sight, which we all saw over and over again, was graphic and horrific. The reaction was hysteria in a cosmic dimension: obsessions with systemic racism, CRT, defund the police. Floyd became, for the Left, an icon of innocent, passive victimhood. He was in fact a career criminal, father of many children by many women, with a history of violence to women, a drug addict in the act of a crime in a state of intoxication, and a powerful man resistant to restrain even by several officers. His death was tragic but indeliberate. In my own view, most pathological was the pervasive construction of the black male as defenseless, passive, basically effete in the hands of the police now configured as overwhelmingly white, powerful, and evil. The black male became seen as pitiful, passive, weak, effete, unmanly and void of agency or strength. This stereotype of "anti-racism" is insulting and deeply corrosive of black culture.
Here we might consider pity, a synonym of empathy or compassion. The word, derived from the Latin pietas, meaning loyalty/piety/compassion, is itself rich and wholesome. But consider a related word pitiful. This refers to that which evokes pity, but it carries a heavy negative connotation: weak, contemptable, deplorable. So, we might say: That is a pitiful excuse. With the Black Lives Matters movement the black male was construed by a handful of angry, black women and a legion of bourgeois white suburbanites as exactly pitiable: weak, pathetic, passive.
Does anyone want to be pitied in this way? No. That is toxic empathy.
Abortion
Here we find the compulsion to flee pain along with obliviousness to the value of sacrifice, in spiritual and eternal terms. The woman with an unwanted pregnancy is viewed as victim. She is detached from her own agency, her identity and destiny as mother, the realm of the supernatural, her inherent connections with the father, the broader family including grandparents, ancestors, siblings and the generations to come.
Immigration
If the current Trump policy of deporting even non-criminal immigrants is toxic masculinity in its lack of compassion, the root cause of the problem is the toxic empathy of Biden/Harris, a concern for immigrants unbalanced by valid concerns about national security, boundaries, rule of law, the protective responsibility of the state, and our cultural identity.
Minnesota Deaths of anti-ICE protestors Good and Pretti were good instances of toxic empathy. They were of course motivated by compassion for the immigrants. But this was unleavened by respect for the rule of law/authority, prudence, and common sense. It was infected with indignation and self-righteousness. Such unbalanced compassion tends to become intoxicating and smoother the capacity to look at a reality from other perspectives or see the entire picture. It is a kind of insobriety
Codependency. Every addict (of whatever variety) is normally surrounded by a web of codependents or enablers who are drawn into the chaos out of imprudent kindness. Such support the addiction as they themselves become dysfunctional and disordered through a variety of destructive patterns of protection, rescue, overcompensation and others. The enabler suffers from insufficient personal boundaries and interior psychological/moral integrity and so becomes infected by the core addiction and perpetuates it into close communities. Here we find the prototype of the empathizer adrift, unmoored from sound boundaries, integrity of character, truth, accountability, justice and tough love. Happily, we have Alanon and similar groups which help such people to "detach with love."
Smothering Mothers. There seems to be an inexorable drive, over the last 80 years, starting with us Boomers, to parenting that is overprotective, indulgent, and emotionally smothering. By nature, the mother is more sympathetic and the father more demanding. Ideally, the two complement each other. In organizational behavior we learn that even in more complex communities (businesses, politics, Church) a heathy system sets a high status figure as supportive and affirming (union shop steward, guidance counselor, HR department) in tension with one that is demanding (boss, dean of discipline, drill sergeant). With the crisis in masculinity, parenting in our prosperous, privileged, pampered society has overwhelming favored effete, indulgent mothering to the detriment of the masculine, the disciplined, the heroic.
LGBTQ Affirmation. Here more clearly than anywhere we see the hegemony of toxic empathy. The homosexual, suddenly "born that way" (without scientific evidence), is pitied: Poor guy! He can't help what he is! Everyone picks on him! The Church especially is SO mean and judgmental! We affirm, welcome and celebrate him just as he is! Ancient traditions of chastity are casually dismissed as hateful and ignorant. The sublimity of femininity and valor of virility are both deconstructed. The "gay" is elevated in status and honor as the recipient of "pity."
Personal Anecdote
Just recently I was considering a retreat with my wife in Florida so I researched opportunities. One Catholic retreat house is committed to identification with "the suffering Christ." I instantaneously discarded that option. I am close to perhaps 8-10 people suffering deeply in depression, anxiety, addictions, and mental illness. For me to be helpful to them I must myself be wholesome, joyful, resilient, strong, and hopeful. So I am solicitous of my health, especially the spiritual. We can become vulnerable to the suffering around us, so overwhelming is it. I strengthen my prayer life, especially around the Eucharist and with my wife...for my own sake but also for those I affect. Jesus was with us 33 years, he suffered on the cross for 3 hours, he abides in Joy eternal now...and beckons us to join him, and draw others with us.
Contemporary Catholicism
Even beyond the priest homosexual abuse scandal, the Church since the Council has suffered a severe masculinity crisis and surrendered, especially at the elite levels of the academy and the hierarchy, to an effete, toxic empathy. The program of Pope Francis is illustrative in its priorities: the absolute prohibition of capital punishment and his aversion to justice as retribution, his blessing of gay unions and dismissal of chastity, his advocacy for immigrants but indifference to legitimate populist concerns with borders and protection of their civilization.
The Jeffrey Epstein Hysteria
Why the obsession? The guy is now getting exactly what he deserves: in God's mercy and retribution (a very good word!) he is at best deep in purgatory or at worst eternally in hell. His partner is in prison. Yet, every day we hear more about the guy. The narrative driving this preoccupation is: a cabal of wicked, powerful, wealthy, white men conspired to seduce and abuse young women. There is no evidence of such a cabal or conspiracy. It seems to be stronger, strangely, in MAGA than on the Left. It is clear that Epstein was himself a raging sex addict. No doubt he was eager to share his perverse hobby with those with similar vile propensities. More important is the construction of the "victims" as passive, pitiable, innocent of complicity. The underlying fantasy is masochistic and paranoid: the helpless child violated by powerful, vicious men.
The victims were in fact not children, but young adults. As post-pubescent females they were adult, not only biologically as capable of conceiving a child, but emotionally/intellectually/morally/spiritually. Socially, they were adolescents. But adolescence is itself a social construct of a complex, industrial society. It is unknown to ancient, simple societies which recognize a natural, simple binary: child/adult.
The canon law of the Catholic law allows marriage of a female at the age of 14 but the male at 16. This recognizes the faster maturation of the woman. It grants that at this age she is capable of adult consent and moral responsibility, of spousal vows and maternity. In the eyes of the Church the 14 year old is a young woman, not a child and not an adolescent.
As a group the victims are strikingly attractive, competent, confident, aggressive, persistent and accomplished. They were that way at the time of the abuse. These were not insecure, rejected "losers." They were the cool girls, the pretty girls, the winners. They were chosen because they were beautiful, confident, interesting, and full of life.
They were not compelled or pressured to return to the island. They came of their own free will because they wanted the money, the glamour, the promise of a future of such. They recruited classmates and even younger sisters.
The real injustice to them was that they were unprepared to face this temptation: their culture, families and Churches did not teach them their dignity as women, and the values of chastity, virginity and spousal union. And so, they really were adult (if young and unprepared) collaborators in the abuse.
Construing themselves as pitiful victims, keeps them and vicariously the society obsessed with this) in a limbo state of passivity, irresponsibility, and incompetence. They would be better off to confess their sin, forgive their abusers, and move forward freely with their lives.
Contrast: Simone Weil and Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross) on Empathy
Contemporaries, converts from secular Judaism to Christianity, mystics, and easily the two most significant, profound female philosophers of the 20th century, these two are fascinating contrasts on empathy, toxic and wholesome.
Weil's thought dealt profoundly with "attention" as the reception of the other, and particularly attention to the afflicted, empathy, as loss of self and really miraculous. This included what she called "decreation." This is a puzzling concept: a mysticism of nothingness, a transcendence of the bodied self, in a deep renunciation of the same. It is the path of suffering and affliction and identification with those who suffer. For Weil, this was not speculative; she lived a mysticism of empathy. She identified so deeply, during WWII, with the suffering, that she basically starved herself to death. This was form of anorexia, but extremely deep and spiritual. It was not the anorexia nerviosa familiar to our psychologists, but anorexia mysterioso, the realm of saints and mystics. Monsignor John Oesterreicher, in The Bridge (1955) traced some of the psychology of Weil. As an adolescent, she felt negative about herself by comparison with an older brother who went on to become a world class mathematician. She seemed to have interiorized a negativity about herself as well as her femininity and specifically her womanly body. This may have been the psychic basis for her later anorexia, however spiritual. And so, her mysticism of identification with the suffering included an extraordinary negativity towards herself, her body and her femininity. She deeply experienced Christ, largely in his love for the suffering, but refused to be baptized into the Church. She shows here a strange "sacramental anorexia" in that she deprived herself of the nourishment, comfort and strength of the sacraments. Elon Musk, along these lines, has spoken of "suicidal empathy." Weil is an exemplar of empathy in the extreme, unbalanced, and eventually self destructive.
Stein is by contrast feminine in a most wholesome way. She was the most respected student of the great Husserl the phenomenologist. High positions in academia were not open to women at that time in Germany (1920s) so she became a renowned speaker/thinker in women's circles. In anticipation of St. John Paul (another phenomenologist) she developed a positive philosophy of the unique genius of women. For example, in her thought about the education of women she saw that women, as more emotional and empathetic, need deliberate education of the intellect and will in order to be whole and good, in their femininity. She specifically treated empathy as the pathway by which phenomenology might move beyond the subjectivity and solipsism of phenomenology (attention to the experience without metaphysical declaration on what is real) into contact with the real, the true, the objective beyond the self-enclosure of the solitary self. In this she resembles Weil. Additionally, she developed a profound spirituality of the Cross which attended to the realities of suffering, renunciation and sacrifice. But her treatment of empathy led her to contact with reality and so into the classic Thomistic metaphysics of Being and epistemology of realism. As a cloistered nun, she embraced the masculine realism of St. Thomas. She herself died in Auscwitz, a martyr for her Jewishness. In the days preceding, she joyously, generously, heroically cared for those around her. She is the epitome of a radiant femininity, open to and expressive of truth, heroism, prudence, and wisdom.
Conclusion
Let us together give thanks and praise for our masculinity and femininity!
Let us open our hearts to a holy compassion, leavened by truth, justice, and purity
as we tenderly esteem each other, man and woman, in our contrasting strengths and weaknesses,
Let us open our hearts to graces from heaven!
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