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Lost in the furor over the book is its common-sense prescription: demonstrate true empathy, where compassion is paired with reason, respect for freedom of expression, and awareness of consequences. Challenging the orthodoxy—empathy as a public good The CBC Ideas “Battle over Empathy” singles out the radical critique of Saad but gives relatively short shrift to more mainstream critics and, most notably, Montreal-born Yale professor Paul Bloom. It was Bloom who first raised the issue in 2016 by publishing Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion and had the courage to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Modern-day apostles of empathy, Bloom correctly pointed out, tend to equate the concept with “everything that is good” and, most notably, compassion, kindness, warmth, love, and changing the world for the better. While Bloom subscribes to those values, he sees empathy as being closer to elements of narcissism. “Putting yourself in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel,” can limit your horizons. It also tends to spark an immediate emotional response. There’s a strong tendency to “zoom-in on an individual,” usually in a crisis, and to react in a hasty, instinctive, and biased fashion. Bloom’s key point deserves amplification. We should be considerate and kind in our decision-making, he argued, but lean more into “compassion” guided by “reasonable and rational” thinking. Empathy and political persuasion One of the most valuable contributions of Bloom’s Against Empathy was that it challenged our preconceptions of the association between empathy and politics. Back then, in 2016, Bloom was spitting against the wind of conventional wisdom when he wrote that there were “conservative positions” that were “deeply grounded in empathy” and “liberal positions” that were not. The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 radically changed the political landscape. Speaking with Steve Paikin on TVO’s The Agenda in February 2017, Bloom pointed out how the Left and the Right were both appealing to empathy to win over the hearts and minds of voters. Common arguments in favour of diversity and affirmative action, he pointed out, “often try to get you to feel empathetic toward a minority,” while arguments against it, by Trump and his supporters, attempt to get you to empathize with those in the majority white population excluded or left behind by societal changes. Supporters of gun control focus almost exclusively on the suffering of innocent victims, he added, while opponents appropriate the First Amendment, arguing that someone assaulted is vulnerable and has the right to feel safe. In the Trumpian era, Bloom explained, “It’s not a matter of do you empathize or not, but rather who you empathize with.” The dominance of empathy is evident in contemporary politics on both sides of the continental border. Today’s political leaders learn to wring every ounce of emotion out of victims to the point of crude exploitation. “You can always find somebody,” Bloom told Paikin, then “pluck them out and tell a story about them” to capture people’s hearts. While it’s “a horrible way” to play politics, it tends to work with so-called low-information voters. Every one of President Trump’s public speeches is packed with conservative mindset moral examples, in most cases, victims of violent crime, usually perpetrated by illegal immigrants, black men, or individuals labelled deviants. Canada has not escaped the empathy wars. Ten years ago, in the 2015 federal election, Justin Trudeau was the “empathy candidate” adept at spinning such stories, easily besting the more cerebral and rational Stephen Harper. The flip-side of empathy The CBC Ideas series, at its best, stimulates open dialogue and deeper discussion, fostering freedom of expression. Its producers, however, have totally succumbed to the allure of empathy. In an earlier October 2025 episode on the topic, paying tribute to Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams, host Nahlah Ayed focuses on Jamison as someone who “champions the importance of empathy in today’s fractured, fractious world.” The whole debate over the current societal obsession with empathy and trauma-informed policy approaches is far more complex than depicted in the recent “Battle over Empathy” episode. It’s not really an ideological struggle because both progressives and conservatives appropriate empathy to fuel their causes. Empathy inspires instinctive and emotion-laden reactions and cuts both ways. Consider this: supporters of the military war against Russia in Ukraine, outraged by casualties from the latest drone attack, call for immediate military retaliation, while millions are moved to support refugee resettlement by scenes of a Syrian boy washed up dead on a beach—with little regard for the broader consequences either of these actions may cause. Both conservative-minded and liberal-minded people can be susceptible to the emotional impulse triggered by what might be termed “maximum empathy.” A better moral guide: rational compassion The CBC episode conveys a few unintended lessons. Teaching empathy to the exclusion of other values may not be serving everyone well. First responders, doctors, and social workers know what can happen when you “take it home with you” and burnout. Schools and playgrounds are social laboratories for what is termed “social and emotional learning,” and much of it in Canadian K-12 education and on university campuses skews in the direction of promoting empathy as a tool for advancing social activism in our peaceable kingdom. The new breed of empathy skeptics, spearheaded by Saad, is providing a much-needed wake-up call about what can happen when empathy goes too far. When the smoke clears, Bloom will be recognized for being closest to the mark. Rational compassion for the plight of others provides a better True North when it comes to moral guidance. We’ll do better if we use our heads instead of just reacting with our hearts.
