If you’ve ever tried to debate leftists, you’ve no doubt got the feeling that you’re talking to someone from an entirely different planet. And you’re metaphorically right.
It goes far beyond the sentiment expressed in a popular meme, that ‘It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.’ Firstly, they’re not even pretending: as Douglas Murray points out, specifically in relation to Israel, the left are almost entirely “passionately ignorant”. On issues like climate change, as well, leftists will simply refuse to believe such well-established facts as the past quarter-century of global greening or the staggering cost and inefficiency of ‘renewables’.
Then there’s the completely different planets left-wingers and conservatives inhabit. When the left were gobsmacked and infuriated at Margaret Thatcher’s commonsense observation that “society” is in fact, individual men and women, their families, and, rippling outward with ever-diminishing intensity, their neighbours, their communities, their nation, they weren’t pretending. The left inhabit ‘planet Planet’. They are intensely invested in ‘the planet’, much less so in the people on it. By comparison, they couldn’t care less about the people closest to them.
Karl Marx was fond of boasting, in a quote lifted from Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer, “Nothing human is alien to me”. Except, as his lifelong conduct showed, basic humanity. Marx was a bully and a demagogue. Worse, he was a shiftless cad who let his family struggle in penury while he frittered what should have been a respectable lower-middle-class income (albeit, one entirely cadged from others) on trying to ape the lifestyle of the upper-classes, including rooting the maid (who, being unpaid, might better be called a slave) and then letting his best friend take the rap for the resulting bastard child.
In that respect, Marx was the quintessential left-winger: endlessly furrowing his brow about the state of humanity, whilst being a monster to the actual humans around him.
This isn’t just some grumpy conservative fever-dream. It is, to use a phrase the left love so much, ‘the science’. The famous left-right “heatmap” study by Waytz, Iyer, Young, Haidt and Graham, published in Nature Communications in 2019, consisted of seven experiments involving thousands of participants. Its central distinction was between two modes of moral attention: the parochial, which directs concern towards those nearest to us, and the universalist, which directs it towards humanity at large.
The conservative focuses their compassion on their close circles. The progressive focuses it on distant and abstract circles.
And this difference explains why one talks about the world while the other talks about their own.
The experiment offered a particularly revealing choice. Respondents were asked to distribute a fixed number of “moral units” across 16 concentric circles, beginning with immediate family and ending with humanity, or even all existing things. The total remained constant. Whatever attention one bestowed upon distant humanity had to be taken from somebody closer to home.
This ought to trouble the progressive position considerably. Compassion is not a supernatural substance that expands when it is spoken about in the right terms. It has an opportunity cost, precisely like money or time. The socialist who demands that we devote our concern to the globe, to the environment, to workers in distant factories and to species with no vote is simultaneously demanding that we have rather less concern for the pensioner being evicted next door.
Concern and attachment are exclusive; they don’t share. They necessarily exclude, therefore. That’s why the progressive assigns their units toward the distant.
Indeed, when researchers increased the available units of attachment, they did not become better distributed. The overall quantity of concern stayed the same. Consequently, the supposedly broader empathy of the progressive is often less concentrated, less practicable and less capable of producing any good at all. It is concern expressed in the abstract, directed towards entities so remote that no identifiable person need ever benefit from it.
Humanity with a capital H is precisely such an abstraction. It cannot be helped, visited, befriended or taught. ‘Love of humanity’ then becomes an excellent substitute for love of particular human beings, rather than its prerequisite.
The conservative, by contrast, tends to locate moral responsibility where action is possible. One cares for one’s family, then for neighbours, colleagues, fellow citizens and the institutions that protect them. This is less glamorous than fighting for the rights of humanity, but considerably more useful to the actual humans concerned.
The contrast was obvious in American politics before the current quarrel over whether globalism is a conspiracy.
In 2006, then Democratic Senator Barack Obama bemoaned the country’s “empathy deficit,” telling college graduates, “I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern.” In 2012, Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney said, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”
The same divide has shaped continental Europe. Marine Le Pen described the real cleavage as being “between globalists and patriots”, with the latter seeking to make France a protective space for French people. Here, then, is the paradox. Moral concern for humanity conveniently evaporates when inconvenient human beings require attention. Which is why, as one study showed, “political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level”. Other studies further show that when leftists do part with their own money (instead of demanding other peoples’ taxes do the heavy lifting), they tend to give it to grand, global activist groups, while conservatives are more likely to fund more humble charitable causes, on their home ground.
Douglas Murray’s “passionately ignorant” is therefore kinder than it might be. Ignorance is at least innocent. What we encounter here is a system of attention in which the good of the particular is always sacrificed to the good of the general, and the general is never required to prove that it can perform the smallest practical good for anybody at all.
