Anxiety Storms and the Empathy Wars

Introduction

The empathy wars seem to have some staying power. It was around seven years ago that Joe Rigney set the whole thing off within Reformed circles when he sat down with me for an interview on the pilot episode of Man Rampant. The reaction was not slow in coming and revealed that this was not a controversy about “nothing.” There is far more going on here than the preference of some people for the prefix em, and others for the prefix sym.

But before a clash of ideas like this happens, there usually needs to be some awareness of the issues in order for anyone to notice them and point them out. At the same time, it is also the case that the ongoing controversy can be increasingly revelatory. Once the issue is joined, despite the fog of controversy, some things can actually be clarified. Additional issues come tumbling out, or known issues click together with other known issues such that the whole picture gets a lot clearer.

Some Origin Issues

The initial statement of the problem was kicked off by Joe Rigney, in conversation with me. Joe was led to his insights as a result of years of reading the works of Rene Girard on mimetic envy, study of the observations of Edwin Friedman on lack of differentiation and the failure of nerve, and through his own pastoral observations over the years. A Catholic, a Jew, and a Protestant walked into a bar . . . And then as we talked, my questions and comments were shaped by years of reading the works of Rene Girard on mimetic envy, appreciating the observations of Edwin Friedman on said failure of nerve, and my own pastoral observations over the years. A Protestant and a Protestant had a talk about the bars they had walked into.

So there you have it.

New Information

I mentioned some new things learned. One of the items that has unfolded for us as the empathy wars have gone on was this. The size of the storm can vary wildly. The storm can be global in scope, as it was with the COVID hysteria, or it can be tiny and small—limited to a classroom, or military unit, or a family reunion.

The subject matter can also vary wildly. Anxiety storms can happen anywhere, and the topic can be anything—whether a coronavirus is everything they were saying, whether medieval Jews were poisoning the wells again, or whether Suzy’s mom bribed the prom queen selection committee.

People are like water droplets in the sky. When the requisite number of them are gathered together, an electrical charge will at some point develop. When that happens, the resultant thunderhead can be called an anxiety storm. And that electrical charge is going to go somewhere. What Girard calls a sacrificial crisis is when the older methods of trying to manage this—all the antique lightning rods, say—are proving to be ineffectual.

Now when this state of affairs arrives, something drastic is going to happen. Either there is going to be some convulsive scapegoating, and there will be a cathartic frenzy of some sort, or God will raise up preachers of the cross, who will declare the inscrutable wisdom of God in providing us with the ultimate scapegoat through the cross of Christ.

Either way, there will be blood—either shed in the streets or shed before the foundation of the world and outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago. But there is no bloodless answer . . . just a bloody lie or the bloody truth.

Who Is Susceptible?

To answer that question—who is susceptible to anxiety storms?—we have to resort to a gospel paradox. Those who simply assume their own immunity are extremely susceptible to this kind of thing. But those who know how susceptible they are should be considered as at least being among the better protected. The great hazard is any attitude of “that’s not possible here, not with us.”

The only real set of guardrails is a deep, down-in-the-bones understanding of the vicarious death of Christ on the cross. And it is not possible to understand the cross without also knowing our own desperate need for it. To understand the cross is to understand where we would be without it We are the sinners; He is the Savior.

An academic understanding of Girard, for example, or of Friedman, for that matter, won’t cut it at all. There are people who, as long as there is no storm, can discourse learnedly on what Friedman meant by this or that, or on the dangers of empathy, or about Girardian envy. But when the storm hits, they are just one more water droplet in the thunderhead. A water droplet with peer-reviewed articles to his name, to be sure, but still a water droplet.

We all know what it is like to have a particular passion overcome our better judgment. That is where a lot of sin happens, right? But when lust, or anger, or fear overwhelm us, we generally know that it is happening. We know the lust, we feel the anger, and we can taste the fear. We know that what is going on inside our hearts and heads is our own personal possession.

But we go wrong with anxiety storms because it also seems to be happening to everyone we know, or everyone we respect, thus making it seem like something else. The anxiety storm doesn’t seem like a temptation to sin (although it is). It seems more like “best practices,” or “what everybody knows,” or “the obvious course of action.” Remember back when the whole world was double-masking and booster-shotting, and it was self-evident that any reluctant souls hanging back were murderous covidiots? Who deserved to die an agonizing death? For their science denial and worship of Ivermectin?

But the great masses in this were not obeying the science like they thought they were. They were obeying the television. They were obeying the anxiety storm. And this is the central thing to realize about anxiety storms . . . they are largely invisible to those who are being blown about by them.

To be sure, these people certainly knew that something dire was happening, but they thought it was being caused by those who are somehow not cooperating with the program. They thought the problem was the VIRUS and any and all SCIENCE DENIERS who denied the VIRUS. What was completely invisible to them was the PANIC.

The actual way out is actual gospel. And gospel nouns without the referent are worthless. With their lips they honor God, but their hearts are far from Him. Remember that the greatest blasphemy ever committed was the conviction of Christ on a blasphemy charge. What was actually happening was invisible to the perpetrators.

So when empathy wars break out, one of the first things we should notice is how precious little empathy is displayed by those defending empathy. Not only do they not display the thing that their banners stand for, they also display a real-time embodiment of the concerns expressed by their opponents. It is like watching berserkers storm your ramparts, with banners unfurled above them—felt banners that have inspirational messages on them, like Try a Little Tenderness, or God Don’t Make No Junk.

Say, for example, that a critic of untethered empathy says that it amounts to a feminist-coded word that provides a way of surrounding a particular emotional maneuver with certain feminine virtues, such that to strike a blow against empathy, you have to be willing to hit a girl. And so the retort comes that this argument amounts to a misogynist attack on all women. To which the critic might simply reply, with a smile, Q.E.D.

Selection of the Scapegoat

This phenomenon doesn’t care at all about right wing and left wing, incidentally. Revolutionaries have done it to reactionaries, and reactionaries have done it to revolutionaries. Whites have done it to blacks, and blacks have done it to fellow blacks for some reason, in the name of sticking it to whites. Jews have done it to Gentiles and Gentiles have done it to Jews. Welcome to earth, kid.

So this is a people thing, and not a left wing thing. There are plenty of right wing rage farmers out there also, and their problem is not that they have adopted the friend/enemy distinction. Every biblical Christian knows that light has no fellowship with darkness, and that Christ and Belial are forever opposed. The issue is not the fact of enemies—we are not being faithful if we have no enemies. We must have them. The issue is how they are to be identified. Are they identified on the basis of Scripture and ancient moral verities, or are they identified in the flashes of lightning in an anxiety storm?

Now in the early part of the storm, it can appear that one side of the thunderhead is battling the other side, but this is an optical illusion. The “resolution” comes when the bolt selects its target, down on the ground, outside the thunderhead, and which has frequently been a tall Jewish tree. A lot of the conflict that is generated during such a time has to do with the selection of the scapegoat, and during the time of selection it looks like the battle is between (for example), the left and the right—up there in the sky, but somebody needs to give a heads up to the tree.

So has anyone found it curious—as I most certainly have—that virulent Jew-hate is manifesting itself on the hard left and on the dank right, and all simultaneously? Spontaneously? Remember that Herod and Pilate, political adversaries, made friends when they had a part in killing a Jew together. There is only one thing that can prevent these two sides coming together in a perverted and black alliance, and that one thing would be if God raised up a regiment of preachers, comprised of the kind of men who would be willing to charge Hell with a bucket of water. But what would enable them to overcome is not anything like raw animal courage, but rather that they have the words of gospel life in their mouths. That water is the water of baptism, the death of Christ for sinful and wicked men. I almost wrote everlasting life in a bucket, and then hesitated because it sounded disrespectful. But it is not disrespectful at all . . . we have this treasure in earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4:7).

And what is that word of life? The serpent, in the person of Christ, was impaled on the tree. The wrath of God against all of our vindictive and irrational hatreds was poured over His head and shoulders, and He took all of it to Himself, and then died. He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf. And why? So that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21). The moment He died, His arms were free and so He gathered up all the sin that had been poured over them, took it to His chest, and sank into the grave. And when He rose, three days later, all the sin was gone.

The Only Safe Harbor

So it must be remembered that those on the right do have a port that they can resort to in an anxiety storm. There is a strand of conservative thought, deeply Christian, that goes back at least to Edmund Burke. This strand is profoundly opposed to the ideological mind, to the revolutionary mind that always has a head full of crackle. Rootless right wingers are only going to contribute to the problems because it really is Christ or chaos. Grounded conservatives, grounded in the permanent things, have to take a stand. And no, it is not Keller’s third way, but is an actual third way. It is true gospel, all of Christ for all of life.

Because Jesus was executed in the middle of the greatest anxiety storm in history, we have somewhere to turn, somewhere to go. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:1). Propitiation means that God poured out His holy wrath, and Christ absorbed the blow of it. That means that God has given us the true offer of a full satisfaction for all of our sin. When we turn to Him, we are looking at the death, burial and resurrection of the true man, with all the sins of all His people left behind Him in the grave, not unlike His grave clothes.

And when He rose, He did so in a way that put Him forever beyond the reach of any number of rioters. “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9). We can yell all we want to, but Christ is still on His throne. We can launch decades of cultural turmoil, but Christ is still going to come back to judge the quick and the dead. We can announce that we have conquered the gender binary, but the Bridegroom is still going to welcome His Bride, without any spot or blemish.

So instead of hating on Jews, we should call them to repentance, together with all their co-sinning Gentiles—“testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21, ESV). So who needs to repent? Well, the Christian answer to that question is “pretty much everybody.” That means Jews for Jewish sins, Scythians for Scythian sins, Scots for Scottish sins, Zambians for Zambian sins, and everybody for everybody’s sins. Try to find somebody it doesn’t apply to.

As I look around, I do see a very dark generation. And so it seems to me to be an ideal time for the appointed ministers to start shining a light—the only light possible.