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Right-wing extremist ways of bringing religion and ethics into politics seem to be gaining ground. Reform’s recent attempt to redefine empathy is a further example. They are all interlinked so this gambit is particularly dangerous. If they weren’t connected, Catholic Social Teaching would be all good intentions and no action.
Gad Saad invented the term ‘suicidal empathy’. He spent a decade in Concordia - formerly a Canadian Jesuit University – becoming Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioural Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (be reassured Darwinian Consumption is not the fittest eating the unfit). Saad’s expertise is in consumer behaviour and marketing, food for Reform. His book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind was published in May this year and provided the main fodder for attacking the value of empathy. Lebanese born, Jewish, atheist, and polemicist, he recently left Canada. He felt threatened by, and had himself experienced, antisemitism (6,800 incidents in 2025 up 9% on 2024). He didn’t like their immigration policy, ‘wokeism’ and the tax system. Saad currently does research in one of the most conservative US States, at the University of Mississippi. Politics, Religion and Morality together are about how we live together as societies. As a section of the American evangelicals demonstrate, Christianity is not immune to Saad’s type of manipulation. Islam and Judaism suffer in the same way. The recent Reform ploy, picking up on Saad’s argument that ‘infectious ideas are killing common sense’, is an attempt to rubbish an understanding of empathy that is politically inconvenient. In a 16 August Press Conference, former Tory Minister Robert Jenrick, now Treasury spokesman for Reform, set out policy changes to save £50 billion on disability and immigration, describing it as countering ‘suicidal empathy’. The wording seems to have some resonance. ‘Suicidal empathy’ was given another airing as the theme in last week’s Channel’s 4’s Moral Maze. Empathy is not a word that features much in Catholic writing. But it fits well as a secular version of compassion, or at least a hyphenated version com-passion, with/for someone who is suffering. Here is Pope Francis’ Angelus sermon on 3 August 2014: “compassion — which Jesus feels — it is not simply feeling pity; it’s more! It means to suffer with, in other words to empathize with the suffering of another, to the point of taking it upon oneself. Jesus is like this: he suffers together with us, he suffers with us, he suffers for us. And the sign of this compassion is the healing of countless people he performed. Jesus teaches us to place the needs of the poor before our own”. The striking image of the Church as field hospital. By way of contrast, Reform is also picking up on a MAGA theme promoted by Vice-President Vance of ‘concentric circles’ of moral responsibility, family nation and, outermost, overseas aid. This spatial ranking is used to justify drastic cuts in international development aid in times of financial austerity. The parable of the Good Samaritan, of course, specifically and deliberately counters this for Christians. As Pope Francis responded to Vance: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” This rejection of a ranking in the focus of Christian love, agape, has also been re-iterated by Pope Leo. Though empathy isn’t one of the Catholic virtues, it is clearly important in our ability to ‘activate’ the theological, God-given, virtue of charity. Emotional and cognitive empathy, feeling for and understanding someone else’s pain, could also be seen as a necessary component of the natural, cardinal virtue of justice, the will to do good. Alistair McIntyre, following Aristotle, insists in his 1981 Virtue Ethics the virtues involve practice and a sense of direction in life, a purpose, a teleology or meaningful end. Nor is empathy a kind of super-virtue. Prudence, the ability to choose the right virtue in a particular moral situation, has more claim to be called that. I first bumped into the importance of empathy whilst working with an insightful psychologist countering religious and right-wing extremism in a non-governmental initiative. There had been much US government emphasis on websites countering the misuse of Qu’ranic verses but, of course, jihadist recruits weren’t looking at them. Our focus was on the way the extremist mind worked. In sessions with young people at risk, a numerical scale put together through complex monitoring of the frequency of certain phrases and words, indicated levels of extremist risk. Of course a critical question was at what level of risk was violent action ‘triggered’. Rather like the chance of a vehicle killing someone – it suddenly increases sharply above 30mph – there is a steep curve into a danger zone to a ‘tipping point’ past which terrorism is on the cards. But, as part of a psychologist’s tool kit, there is in existence another scale which maps almost exactly, though inversely, onto the extremism template: for empathy. The extremist mind has a number of features but the most obvious is an absence of emotional and cognitive empathy. This was associated with a ‘them and us’ binary view of the world and an inability to perform a process of integrating conflicting ideas and moral values, part of cognitive empathy. Instead, over time or sometimes suddenly, this sequence can take place. “They do not see the world as we see the world”. They are ‘the other’. They are wrong and bad. They must be rejected. They have to be eliminated”. This descent into violence responds to emotional needs found in both extremes, Islamic jihadists and right-wing terrorists. Jihadist grooming was a process of providing a sense of belonging, justifying the anger in angry young men, and getting rid of any empathy that might influence their attitude to ‘the enemy’. And sadly some 40% of jihadists, in jail, at large, on trial, have experienced some degree of mental illness. ‘Suicidal empathy’ would be a good description of the relationship between an extremist suicide bomber and their community of jihadists. So Saad and Reform might stop to think about how their story about ‘suicidal empathy’, motivated by a wish to cling to a pure belonging, to an imaginary identity and group, results in a de facto rejection of ‘the other’. Comparisons can indeed be odious. I hope this isn’t unfair and shows some understanding of Professor Saad. He would have some good advice on increasing the market for, say, rosary beads, or hot-cross buns. But I’ll take a rain-check, as the Americans say, on his particular purée of religion, morality and politics. Reform’s embrace of Gad Saad’s ideas is designed to increase dislike and fear of Muslims and to use his polemics for their own political ends. Empathy with Muslims – our contemporary religious version of Samaritans – needed curtailing. Enter Gad Saad, culture warrior, to direct the traffic by on the other side.
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The case of Professor Jason Arday, featuring in the media last week, seemed almost surreal. It appears Cambridge University had driven a cart-and-horses through normative academic standards, probably hoping to counter opprobrium over its lack of diversity in their senior appointments. As a result it has been dragged into a conflict about race drawing angry attention to continuing racial discrimination in society. And in consequence there has been a serious knock to Cambridge’s academic status.
As a lapsed academic specializing in African studies, having spent several years in the 1970s university teaching in Nigeria, Malawi and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, I was accustomed to a range of academic cultures. In societies with an expectation of enrichment from the pursuit of senior positions in institutions, and kick-backs from different levels of power, the universities did relatively well on retaining standards. It was the day before examinations at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Northern Nigeria. There was a knock on the door and a mature Igbo student was standing there presenting me with a six-pack of Nigerian Guinness. He was a school teacher with seven children; two of them could not go to school because of his university costs. A degree was a good investment for the family though; it would raise his standing and salary for the duration. I shouldn’t have, but I did, accept the Guinness, not wishing to upset him. An residue of ethical purity was regained by my pouring my bribe down the toilet; it tasted to me in the heat like brown Windsor soup gone wrong because of added alcohol. In the North of Nigeria, Igbos and Whites shared a feeling of being the foreigners. Sure enough my tempter came 2-3 marks below fail. The Examination Board pushed him over to pass with my full support. This is by way of noting there can be some modest fluidity in standards without the lecture-hall roof caving in. But the Arday story is, as they say, something else. A sense of outrage at the case is not naïvety about the way standards can vie unequally with the desire to counter inequalities, or more venal needs. It comes from Cambridge University’s assumption it could get away with it. The Cambridge I remember in the early 1960s had a very privileged ambience and rewarded big ideas when combined by the necessary, demanding standards of scholarship. You had to illustrate appreciation of the former and some application of the latter to get a place from a Grammar School. And the University has since retained a certain arrogance associated with its academic excellence. How Jason Arday got through the gates of Jesus College in March 2023, as a 37 year-old Professor, is a remarkable feature of the 2020s. He admits ‘mistakes’ in his doctoral dissertation contained plagiarism. His own meteoric academic career would make an interesting study itself in his chosen field of study, the sociology of education. In my experience, UK universities are supportive of those experiencing what today is called neurodiversity, dyslexia for example, and Arday’s condition, a form of autism. They may even tolerate staff promoting a fantasist autobiography provided it does not impinge on their professional work and the university’s reputation. They are certainly aware of the need to promote suitable candidates from ethnic minorities. But there is a difference between making allowances for diversity and undermining a university’s standards and reputation. The question of suitability should be the paramount consideration in this case. And it is no easy job sorting out the facts. This is because the entire story from the beginning has been locked in a Black and White mould : two dystopian clashes, racism versus was gets called ‘wokeism’. Or more accurately, ill-judged and inappropriate attempts by an employer at applying legal provisions, aimed at protecting those with disability and ensuring equality in diversity and inclusion. The Arday saga turned into an inglorious exercise for both sides. For a start, white working class boys have the greatest claim on institutional support to counter their exclusion, and this appeared irrelevant to the outcry. Secondly, a White academic with Arday’s alleged prodigious record of plagiarism wouldn’t have survived much longer than he did in such a prominent, prestigious position. Thirdly something needs to be done to advance promotion of black academics in most of university disciplines, and this isn’t it. But no less important, this is a story of a man with several disabilities, not all of which could he overcome, becoming his own worst enemy with the help of a University administration. Plagiarism itself is not that precise a term. It broadly means taking another writer’s ideas or work and pretending it is your own without giving them credit. So it can range in gravity from copying whole chunks of texts , word-for-word – seemingly very many examples in Arday’s thesis - to changing a few words in a sentence and, for a variety of reasons, failing to name the source. As an external examiner of a Ph.D. thesis, you are invited by the graduate’s supervisor, in Arday’s case the John Moore University in Liverpool. You have three options, pass, fail or rewrite. You keep a careful eye out for plagiarism. Or not. A couple of suspect sentences are not necessarily a deliberate attempt to deceive the examiner. Sometimes you can forget where an idea has come from. Or as for Karl Marx in the 1960s, simply take it for granted. Though, sometimes you can deliberately hide it. I learned anthropology from a respected Dutch researcher whom I credited with particular brilliance only to discover he was deploying the theories of the father of social anthropology, Evans Pritchard, in discussion with me - without attributing them. In African universities, plagiarism was often easy to detect by the sudden change in the quality of the written English. And sometimes you encountered prodigies, with beautiful English, who came out of an impoverished Malawian village but went on to be awarded a doctorate on Heidegger. There are now guides available and AI methods making detection easier, certainly enough to make that aspect of the Arday mystery an open-and-shut case. In short, an argument involving highly-charged self-righteous rhetoric is not the best grounds for understanding what actually happened. It is no way to tackle racial discrimination in employment and arguably damages the cause. Moreover, you need something like legal expertise to wade through the different interviews given by those clustered in combat on the moral high-ground, leaving little room for balanced opinion. Arday resigned on Wednesday. There are grounds for an independent investigation, as some of the dons are calling for, not a damage control exercise by the University. And for a touch of schadenfreude as members of the University administration descend from their thrones. Fire in the Bible indicates the presence of God, purifying humanity or as a symbol of divine judgement motivating change and conversion. In many States of the USA, wildfires now occur perennially growing in number. Trump’s gleeful denial of, and contribution to, climate change has an impact not just on America’s future but on the rest of the world, on what Pope Francis in Laudato Si calls memorably “our common home”. The secular term applicable to Trump’s energy policies might be a ‘crime against humanity’ – or against the future of humanity – and in the language of faith on considering Creation in Genesis, a sin against ‘the Spirit of God moving over the waters” (the Hebrew word evokes an image of a bird hovering). A raging wildfire hit the East Anglian coast south of Dunwich last weekend. It led BBC News. Two ladies out walking found the tiny fire that started it all but had neither sand nor water to put it out. At the fire’s southern most extent, the prompt and courageous action of the fire service, drawn from all over Suffolk and beyond, saved the historic Coast Guard Cottages, a National Trust centre. The centre offered holiday accommodation, pleasant staff and a café with passable coffee, a favourite destination for walks, a serene beach below the cliffs. No-one ever imagined the cottages would feature on television, and in newspapers, overlooking some 370 acres of blackened heathland on one side and Sizewell B on the other, part National Trust nature reserve and part Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) bird sanctuary. Reading about the coastal area burning west of Bordeaux and a huge blaze heading for Madrid is one thing. Seeing a beautiful landscape turned to ashes on your doorstep, where once a swathe of purple heather led to the cliffs and a shimmering sea, home to a unique collection of flora and fauna, is another. Climate change creates hotter, drier conditions that make wildfires more likely and, spreading fast, increasingly dangerous. It isn’t only what happens to other people. But this is not a message that oil-companies and most political Parties faced with difficult choices want to hear. They needn’t worry. As the fire moved underground into the roots of the vegetation, with no more exciting pictures of billowing flames and new devastation, The Daily Telegraph published on 1 August a little divisive distraction. “Rewilding Blamed for Suffolk Wildfire” headed a rambling article based on a few off-hand comments from local inhabitants of the neighbouring village of Weselton, where evacuees had been housed, alongside interviews with sundry knowledgeable experts and commentators. The mistake of the RSPB according to the – atypical - local vox pop cited was pursuing a “green agenda” – brought on presumably by wishing to preserve a suitable habitat for its varied and rare birds, its raison d’etre. The National Trust were also accused of having ‘overlooked in the name of green projects’’ – none cited – residents’ interests. Though for many these interests included eco-tourism and catering for beach holidays, not necessarily exclusive if you enjoyed watching the terns plummet into the sea to take small fish in their sudden vertical dives. The Telegraph article does carry a response from the RSPB pointing out that it cuts firebreaks on the land, improves water retention and conducts public awareness campaigns on the dangers of barbecues and leaving rubbish. The National Trust, apart from warning people not to fall off the cliffs, and correct dog behaviour, also has large notices about fire hazards and barbecues. Only one problem: the area had not be ‘rewilded’; it was no more nor less wild than when I first walked its paths over 25 years ago. The area had been routinely managed, grazed by cattle, deer and muntjac. The Telegraph article was at best tendentious and gave a false impression of local reaction which was predominantly shock and sadness. And there were plenty of relevant follow-up stories waiting. Tucked in the past coverage is mention that the Suffolk Fire Service - surprisingly - had to rent a commercial helicopter, thereby acquiring an easily available source of water, the sea, which could be scooped up and dropped along the fire service’s frontline. It made a difference. These wildfires are a national issue and require national assets. Why can’t the UK have a dedicated helicopter at the disposal of fire-fighters ready to go just as a local fire crew is ready to go? Four, one for each nation, would be desirable but probably utopian. And is it beyond IT companies to have a number on all mobiles connecting to the local fire service, on the basis of location, rather than a generic emergency number? At this rate, we are going to need one. Like heart attacks, in a terrain that is dry, highly combustible and starting to burn, every minute counts. There is still some mileage in the old arguments about the value of rewilding but it is hardly a priority as temperatures soar, droughts occur, rivers dry up and devastating fires break out in many European countries. Wildfires are more likely to occur in nature reserves simply because they frequently have considerable human through-put. And nor does rewilding itself or the preservation of unique habitats and areas of outstanding beauty cause fires. There is need for an immediate response to the rapid onset of climate change in Europe. And this indeed should be part of a wider government strategy. There are economic implications such as prioritizing investment in renewable sources of energy and carbon capture. But wildfire prevention is also an obvious candidate for Prime Minister Burnham’s devolved approach to government. As in the example of the importance of rapid helicopter support, there is need for well-thought out ways of finding more effective ways of making national assets, innovations, means of protection such as water storage available locally, plus adequate staffing for the fire services. We hear a much about national security and the urgent need for more/ better drones, ballistic missiles, AI controlled warfare and clever IT hackers. As I passed by the Westleton to Dunwich road today, with its manned barrier ensuring unencumbered access for fire-engines, or looked again at the pictures of the new wasteland once an area of natural beauty, a question comes to mind. Shouldn’t we be asking if climate change is no less a clear and present danger to our national security than Putin? Neglecting or ignoring the environmental impact of political and personal decisions is not limited to Trump and MAGA. It seems inexplicable given the scientific evidence and obvious harm already evident. In the words of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si: “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion the very foundations of our life begin to crumble.…man sets himself up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature”. The ravaged strip of Suffolk coast illustrates in microcosm what he means. |
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