Introduction
As I write these words, the trial of Lindsay Clancy in Massachusetts is wrapping up. She killed her three kids a few years ago, and the trial is over whether she did so in the grip of post partum psychosis, and so not guilty by reason of insanity, or whether she was responsible for three counts of criminal murder. If the former, she will go into a mental institution, and if the latter, she will go to prison.
The story in this case is not so much about Lindsay Clancy as it is about the astonishing outpouring of public support for her among liberal white women. The money raised for her family has topped $1M to date, and rallies for her have taken place around the country. The most obvious place that support for her has shown up has been, naturally enough, online. Inexplicably it has become a dividing line issue.
Now the world has always been a broken place, and awful stories like what happened to Clancy’s kids have taken place with disturbing regularity. That does not diminish the wickedness and horror of such crimes, but family murders scarcely an unknown phenomenon.
The disturbing irregularity in all this is the outpouring of psychotic empathy. That should be looked into. We need to see somebody about that. The issue is not the nature of the fit that seized Lindsay, but rather the nature of the fit that is seizing her empathizers.
The Necessity of Tribal Empathy
To review, empathy is when you identify with someone completely, doing so without judgment. I have used the illustration before of someone drowning in the river—sympathy throws him a rope, always keeping a footing on the bank of objective reality. With empathy, however, the requirement of “no judgment” means that you have to take a header into the river yourself in order to drown alongside the person you are identifying with.
But as I said a moment ago, the world is a messed up place, which means that there are a lot of people drowning in various rivers—and some of these rivers contradict one another. What this means is that the empath must choose—in order to maintain “no judgment” with regard to the situation in this river, he must steel himself with an attitude of “no mercy” toward that second river. And because the lack of judgment here has nothing to do with the presence or absence of objective evidence, it follows that the lack of mercy over there cannot afford to deal with any evidence either.
This is what I mean. If you empathize with a woman who says that her stepfather molested her when she was a child, you must accept her account without judgment, which means that you must accept it without evidence. You must not budget for the possibility that her account might be false. It also means that you must reject, without mercy, any attempt on the part of the stepfather to produce exculpatory evidence.
Now the issue here is not whether his evidence would be good or bad, or whether he is innocent or guilty. It is that any attempt to bring any kind of evidence into it at all represents an existential threat to the total commitment you have already made. You don’t get to switch rivers after you have drowned in one of them.
Once you see that this is what is going on with this sort of issue, it is not possible to unsee it.
Total commitment means total allegiance, and the nature of the different rivers requires contradictory allegiances. So if you have opted into this world, you just need to pick one side and then go.
Contradictions Are to be Expected
Let me illustrate this. The liberal white women at the Lindsay Clancy rallies have very strong opinions about what they claim the Israelis are doing to the children of Gaza. What is happening to them is horrific, and any attempt at explanation or contextualization just adds insult to injury.
And what happened to Lindsay Clancy’s children was horrific also, and you are adding insult to injury if you reject the proffered explanations.
In other words, if you are trapped in this hellscape of a worldview, you have picked a side, and that is all you need to know. You know all the allegations about Gaza, and couldn’t care less about October 7. This means that the issue actually has nothing whatever to do with “children dying.” That is just the rock to throw at the other side when you have a clear opportunity to do so.
If the issue were actually the children, then Israeli children would be included, as well as the millions executed by abortion in this country—and our respected pro-choice establishment is far, far worse than Lindsay Clancy ever thought of being.
Another way of saying this is that when your moral fervor arises from your partisan allegiances, and not from the bloody crime itself, this means that your moral compass is, as the French say, le busted. When that happens, you lose all sense of moral proportion. It reminds me of Norm Macdonald’s bit about Bill Cosby. “The worst part was the hypocrisy.” “I thought it was the raping.”
And Mobs Can Go Both Ways
This grievous sin—and it is a grievous sin—becomes much easier to rationalize when a lot of people are committing it at the same time. Crowds, masses, mobs, are a lubricant for the conscience.
If there were rallies all over the country demanding the execution of Lindsay Chancy, I wouldn’t like it any more than I like the current set up. Mobs outside courtrooms are generally not a good sign at all. That’s how you wind up with Derek Chauvin serving time in prison to pay for George Floyd’s drug problem.
But the whole empathy thing began when the stakes were not so high. A counselee felt that her father was a harsh abuser, and not simply a strict disciplinarian—as the rest of the family thought. The counselor, trained to be empathetic, detached from the evidence, and he argued that the strong feelings of having been abused were “her truth.”
But once you have “detached” from the airplane, you are in free fall, whether you are ten feet below the plane or a thousand feet below it. Once you have detached from evidence and objective realities, the crimes that you are overlooking can get worse and worse, and there is nothing that can be done about it. In fact, given the nature of sin and our fallen world, the crimes you are overlooking are going to get worse and worse.
Once you have detached from objective standards, not only do you have trouble distinguishing one crime from another, at the end of the day you have trouble distinguishing one kind of empathy from another. Empathy, toxic empathy, suicidal empathy, psychotic empathy . . . it’s all one.
So what is being sold to us as a liberation of the conscience, with the promise that we will have the sensation of flying, is actually something else. Scripture describes it as the “searing of the conscience” (1 Tim. 4:2).