In case you’re (blissfully) unaware, there’s been a fresh online kerfuffle recently about the phrase “toxic empathy.” This dust up comes from an ongoing debate regarding conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey’s NYT-bestselling book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Stuckey is a social commentator and influencer, as well as the host of the successful podcast Relatable, whose listeners are mostly conservative Christian women.
I haven’t read her book, but I think the thesis is right there in the title. Stuckey, if my sense of the argument is correct, thinks that the corruption of "empathy” has led to all sorts of political justification for sinful behavior and wrong-headed policies. If we’re too compassionate or––perhaps better and more charitable to her argument––compassionate in the wrong way, we’ll minimize wrongdoing or make excuses for things we really shouldn’t be excusing.
Lots has already been said about this (for and against) in the year plus since the book came out, but in very recent days the phrase “toxic empathy” was compared to the phrase “toxic masculinity.”
Here’s a representative example from X:
Someone commenting on this post asked me to chime in since the phrase “toxic masculinity” was being debated alongside Stuckey’s. The rest of this article is an adapted and expanded version of how I replied.
When Masculinity Becomes “Toxic”
There’s no single agreed-upon definition of “masculinity.” Maleness is an objective reality (a controversial statement these days, but that’s my view), but it’s refracted in different ways through various historical contexts, cultural/subcultural contexts, family systems, etc. Hence masculinity studies tends to emphasize plural masculinities rather than a singular masculinity.
However, masculinity (and femininity) is not merely descriptive in the scholarly or social-scientific sense. Masculinities are also prescriptive and aspirational. Boys look at the men around them (their fathers most of all) and absorb the abstract category of “masculine” from their context. They then aspire to, or at least imitate, their developing idea of what it means to grow up from boyhood into manhood. This can and should be an intentional process guided by older men (and women) who guide these boys towards maturity. But even without this adult intentionality, it’s a passive process that will proceed nonetheless. Masculinity, then, is a helpful category for describing these ideas and concepts.
Importantly, we should allow ourselves the possibility of saying that some expressions of maleness are not good. Some versions/standards of masculinity can become “toxic” (i.e. poisonous, dehumanizing, etc.) when they are characterized by sin and form men towards vice rather than virtue. For example, a version of masculinity that describes men who are overly aggressive, angry, or sexually unfaithful is a “bad” masculinity. Hence “toxic masculinity” is definitely a thing and I don’t think an entirely unhelpful category.
The potential trouble with the phrase “toxic masculinity” is that when some (most?) people hear it, they hear “masculinity is necessarily toxic.” So, even if people don’t mean to imply that all masculinity is toxic, without qualifiers, using the phrase can be a rhetorically ineffective and distracting.
We should also note that sometimes people actually do use "toxic masculinity” to mean something like “masculinity is toxic” full stop. This use of the phrase is, in my view, especially unhelpful and kinda actually genuinely misandristic. It’s also un-Christian in the sense that Christians believe maleness and femaleness are created goods, and masculinity and femininity are the natural (and potentially good) outworking of that binary.
Masculinity is a morally neutral description of culturally-situated standards of male behavior. These standards, of course, have massive moral implications, and you can make a negative value judgment of a specific masculinity by slapping the word “toxic” on as a modifier. But you can also offer aspirational visions of masculinity when you tack on a different modifier and create a phrase like “virtuous masculinity” or talk about a “Christian” vision for masculinity. Such visions are by their very nature contestable and debatable. Someone could always say such masculinity is not really virtuous or that your vision for “biblical” masculinity is not a faithfully Christian one.
Okay, now on to so-called “toxic empathy.”
The Impossibility of “Toxic Empathy”
Masculinity and empathy are not the same in the sense that masculinity as a descriptive concept is morally neutral. The value judgment begins when you ask whether a particular version of masculinity is good, virtuous, tending towards human flourishing, healthy for boys, safe for women, etc.
Empathy, by contrast, is closer to a skill, emotion, or even a virtue. (People, of course, might mean different things when they use it.) If empathy is a virtue then the same rules I noted above about masculinity don’t quite apply. Virtues by definition are good and un-corruptable.
When virtues are “corrupted,” we don’t slap modifiers on the front of them like we can with the word masculinity. We don’t say “bad courage” or “toxic love” or “corrupt patience.” We call such things vices and have completely different words to denote them. Excessive and imbalanced courage becomes brashness. Smothering love become abuse. Unhealthy patience becomes passivity or indifference. (Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas talk a bunch about this.)
Importantly––and partially in Stuckey’s defense––Virtues do not exist in isolation and must be qualified with the other virtues. The virtues are really only virtues when held in balance with the others. Patience must be governed by love, which must be governed by justice, which must be governed by self-control, etc. etc. (Again, cf. Aristotle, Thomas, and many others.)
It’s not wrong to say that someone shooting for the virtue of empathy may misfire and instead act viciously. To give another example using courage, you try to be brave but do so in a stupid or self-aggrandizing way. Importantly, however, someone acting in this way is no longer said to be courageous. They are instead said to be rash or selfishly ambitious.
Thus––and I think this is Stuckey’s point––if you’re “empathetic” in a way that compromises the virtue of justice, for example, the empathy ceases to be empathy and becomes something else entirely. So, I get what folks like her are implying when they talk about “toxic empathy.” However, this doesn’t change the fact that the phrase itself is a category error.
(I should also point out that Stuckey is far from the first person to express skepticism about empathy. There’s stuff in the Stoics, for instance, that cautions strongly against getting emotionally sucked into others’ problems. The entire Stoic ethical system is hyper-rational (in a way that is distinct from Christian ethics) and expresses skepticism towards supposedly emotional virtues, including love/attachment. Such emotional misjudgments, says the Stoic, can lead to our passions overriding our rationality and cause us to act irrationally, contrary to nature, and thus viciously.)
Rhetorically speaking, there are similar dangers with “toxic empathy” as with “toxic masculinity.” Both invite misunderstandings and can be unhelpfully distracting. But the problems are worse with empathy because where masculinity is morally neutral, empathy is not. From a marketing perspective, Toxic Empathy is a stroke of genius because it’s the book-title equivalent of rage bait. That being said, “toxic empathy” is a category error in a way “toxic masculinity” isn’t necessarily.
Appreciate this, been thinking similarly since the Joe Rigney article came out. Typically what the promoters of this idea are talking about is either 'Fear of Man' or 'enabling'. Categorizing their concerns as "empathy" reduces clarity.
By the same logic, "toxic positivity" is also a category error. But it's widely used and genuinely useful. Worth asking why that one gets a pass while "toxic empathy" doesn't.