It’s completely bonkers. I have no opinion on whether Clancy should be found not responsible for reasons of insanity. I do think it’s abundantly clear than many of her supporters are both insane and responsible.
There is a growing narrative, not only in this case, about empathy gone wrong. One of the clearest expressions of it is this Screenwashed episode about Clancy and Darth Vader. The argument is basically that we have gone from judging the villain based on his crimes to empathizing with his humanity to such an extent that the innocent child within is believed to be his true self, and he is therefore not evil at all. Alternatively, this is the shift from Christian repentance and forgiveness to forgiveness without repentance.
Personally, this looks to me like what I would call recreational empathy. I see this everywhere. People empathize with the suffering of strangers as though feeling their pain is somehow redemptive. In the 1990s this was promoted by the consolidation of news media: to save money local journalism was cut and replaced by stories from elsewhere. The most popular stories were sensational: crimes, violence, outrages.
As I recall, common critiques of consolidation focused on what was left out (instead of stories about city council, we got the murder of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey) and the perception that crime was rampant, when what was actually happening was that audiences were bombarded with sensational crime from across the country, making it appear like an epidemic.
Social media made that look like child’s play. It is engineered to seize and hold our attention, and nothing does that better than “content” that engages our emotions like outrage, suffering and cute animals. Notice how the best cute animal stories require suffering: the poor abused dog is beaten, maybe loses an eye, before being rescued and knowing love for the first time.
I don’t think suffering for strangers is redemptive. I think it’s self-indulgent, a kind of moral masturbation. Like self-pleasure it’s not necessarily bad: but it’s not noble either, unhealthy in excess, better practised in private, and has no business erupting into the political or legal realm.
Consider whump, defined in the Urban Dictionary as:
Taking a character and putting them through physical and/or mental torment and is typically followed by the same character being treated for their traumas. To indicate the characters place in the situation they’d typically be called a whumpee (the character being hurt/comforted), the whumper (the character that causes harm and trauma), and the caretaker (the character designated the helping/healing/comforting the whumpee).
Most of the time this entails female fans who enjoy watching a male character suffer, often because they imagine comforting him afterwards. Whumpapedia can help you find instances of whump in films, books, you name it. Again, I’m not opposed, nor am I pure (but I am private). Films and stories without sex and violence would be dreadfully dull. The fact that women tend to prefer particular configurations while men tend to prefer others is not a moral criticism. Someone who is fascinated by the diversity of sex and delves into it this with massive surveys is Aella.
However, in a culture that pretends not to believe in objective morality (obviously false: killing babies might be understandable, but racism is beyond the pale), where happiness or pleasure is taken to be the standard for what is good – detailed by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue – it’s not hard to confuse the satisfaction of recreational empathy with moral virtue.
And it’s does erupt into politics. It may be tempting to think that politics is all material base, no ideological superstructure – to send culture war silliness out of the room while the adults deliberate serious issues. I think this craziness shows that ideas and feelings, even absurd ones, have real consequences, independent of material interests. Though of course they do get used that way. There overlap between Clancy Believers and Kamala’s election campaign platform is not small.
You know, as a student I was always the one in class defending the legitimacy of emotion against the rigidity of reason. About 15 years ago I commiserated with a friend that what our culture needed was more empathy. Yeeah. Be careful what you wish for.
