Who Needs Empathy? Why Some White Nationalists Condemn Western Civilization

This post is part of a series on Elon Musk’s interest in Greco-Roman antiquity. Read part one: “When the Richest Man in the World Loves Classics.”

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk took a break from dismantling social security, violating the privacy of millions of Americans, firing veterans, and increasing, not decreasing, the cost of government. He spent his day off giving an interview to the popular podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan has promoted COVID vaccine denialism and transphobia, and more than anyone else in media, helped Musk’s boss get elected president. Or is Musk the boss? In any case, during their interview Musk remarked that “the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.” It’s not a terribly surprising thing to hear from the man who has shown contempt for people suffering from cancer or HIV/AIDS and who described the poor as “the parasite class.” But at the same time, it might be surprising to hear Musk criticize Western Civilization, given the fact that ancient Greece and Rome are often considered its “foundation.” Why would a man who plainly admires the ancient world so much have anything bad to say about Western Civ?

The answer should remind us that men like Musk don’t base their political positions on the ancient world any more than they do on smart economic policy: they create an ancient world that conforms to their political positions. And when Musk calls empathy a flaw in Western Civilization, it’s not only a sign that he doesn’t really understand the role empathy has played in the cultures most people consider foundational to “the West,” ancient Greece and Rome. It’s a reminder of the extent to which Musk’s political convictions resemble those promoted by white nationalist intellectuals.

Yes, praise for “Western Civilization” is often a coded way of asserting the racial superiority of white people, both among avowed white nationalist activists and in mainstream contexts. But not all white nationalists praise it. In fact, those who criticize it tend to consider the same qualities that many people think are the best parts of Western Civilization to be its fatal flaws. And these white nationalist critics of Western Civ cite Greco-Roman antiquity as the source for these flaws with as much conviction as those who who cite the ancient world as proof of Western Civilization’s grandeur.

When Musk describes empathy as "suicidal," it’s hard not to hear an echo of the eugenic rhetoric of "race suicide"

The similarities between Musk’s attitude toward Western Civilization and white nationalist critiques of it will emerge from an examination of some of the work of Kevin MacDonald, who, over his career as a professor of psychology at Cal State Long Beach established himself as one of the most notorious antisemites in the world. He’s best known in white nationalist circles as the editor of two influential publications that Pharos has documented, but he got those jobs because of a three volume treatise he published in the 1990s in which he uses his status as a scholar of evolutionary psychology to promote antisemitic canards and conspiracy theories. This was no fringe manifesto available only on the dark web: it was published by a mainstream press that still exists as part of Bloomsbury, and there’s a decent chance a university library near you has at least the first volume in its collection. As recently as 2018 it was still being taken seriously by other scholars. All this has made him “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic.” And he doesn’t admire Western Civilization as much as you might expect.

Before MacDonald started promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people have employed what he calls “group evolutionary strategy” to improve their ability to infiltrate and undermine white societies, he wrote about Classical Sparta as an example of a society focused on making itself as strong as possible. He emphasized the harsh upbringing that Spartan boys endured, which ancient sources claim was designed to ensure the physical strength of Spartan citizens, and Spartan xenophobia and isolationism, which ancient sources say was intended to protect Spartan citizens from decadence.

It’s a run-of-the-mill, if unsophisticated and credulous, reading of ancient evidence for Sparta. But lurking in the background is the idea that cultural practices like those MacDonald highlights in Sparta actually have an evolutionary effect, one that made the Spartans, as a group, genetically different from other ancient peoples. But evolution of this type takes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, not the mere centuries (max) between the establishment of the Spartan constitution and the period of Spartan history in which MacDonald believes the Spartan “group evolutionary strategy” produced the much praised (but actually not very successful) Spartan military machine. The primary proponents of the belief that meaningful evolution can happen so quickly are academic white supremacists like MacDonald, whose work — thanks to the academic credentials of its authors — has been promoted and popularized by mainstream journalists.

It is unclear whether MacDonald is aware of the ancient tradition that the Spartans were, like Jewish people, descendants of Abraham, but he certainly sees both cultures through the same pseudoscientific lens. When an interviewer for a white nationalist publication that Pharos has documented asked MacDonald about Sparta, he responded that “the parallel with Judaism is obvious.” This conversation makes clear that MacDonald’s primary interest in Sparta is how such alleged parallels can help him spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes. Both groups, he claims, avoid contact with outsiders; such claims of Jewish “ethnocentrism” are central to many racist theories about Jews. And where Spartans tried to make themselves physically superior to other Greeks, Jewish people, MacDonald claims, have made themselves intellectually superior. This might look like praise for Jewish people but it’s a stereotype that originates in racist pseudo-science and that feeds antisemitic conspiracy theories about the alleged threat that Jewish people pose to the societies in which they live.

MacDonald’s critique of Western Civilization begins with his attempt to explain why Sparta disappeared

But for all the similarities that MacDonald claims can be found between Spartan and Jewish customs and social practices, he is most obsessed with one difference: that Jewish people have succeeded, he believes, where the Spartans failed. He doesn’t just mean that Jewish people still exist whereas the Spartans are gone; this is a full-on “Jews control the world” conspiracy theory that MacDonald explains in terms of the evolutionary advantages he claims Jewish culture provided for Jewish people. And it is with MacDonald’s attempt to explain why Spartans didn’t succeed that his critique of Western Civilization begins.

MacDonald basically thinks that Sparta’s evolutionary experiment worked for a while, until it didn’t. Like many historians, he accepts Aristotle’s claim that Sparta declined because of “the smallness of its population.” But unlike historians, who explain this decline in various ways (primarily economic), MacDonald proposes a pseudoscientific evolutionary explanation. According to MacDonald, Spartan culture, even as it attempted to cultivate physically strong warriors among its citizens, also cultivated what Musk might call a “fundamental weakness:” egalitarianism. And this, MacDonald claims, led to the city’s downfall.

He doesn’t mean that Sparta overall was egalitarian: it’s hard to claim that for an economy dependent on enslaved labor. He’s referring to various practices that ancient sources describe among the citizen population: the city was ruled by a mix of kings and magistrates, so political power was distributed. Lycurgus, the figure who was said to have established the Spartan constitution, supposedly distributed land equally to all citizens. Education, military training, and even meals (at least for men) were, according to ancient sources, provided by the city. Such egalitarianism is valuable, MacDonald claims, for building the kind of solidarity between citizens that MacDonald, like many white nationalists, believe white people need to develop to survive against the alleged threats of multiculturalism and immigration. But it also poses a problem, to this way of thinking, in that egalitarianism encourages monogamy (polygyny, MacDonald claims, requires the inegalitarian concentration of wealth in the hands of a very small number of men) and so “prevent[s] males from maximizing their reproduction potential.” That is, it undermines the Spartan “evolutionary strategy” that MacDonald thought had so much potential. Somewhat bizarrely, MacDonald does not think that Xenophon’s and Plutarch’s description of Spartan wife-sharing complicates this picture: he sees this as an egalitarian effort to “discourage sexual jealousy.” “Perhaps pervasive egalitarianism proved maladaptive in the end,” he writes.

MacDonald seems to think that the Greeks were too exclusionary in their attitudes toward others

MacDonald published his analysis of Sparta in 1988 and over the next decade devoted himself to promoting his antisemitic belief that the Jews succeeded where Sparta failed, making them, he claims, the preeminent threat to the survival of “white” civilization. But he never stopped thinking about the example of Sparta, it seems, because almost thirty years later he returned to it in a self-published book in which he attempts to answer “the critical questions” of “why the West became so successful…and, in recent decades, why it is so bent on self-destruction.”

This book makes an argument about Western Civilization similar to that which Musk shared with Joe Rogan, just with a more explicitly white supremacist grounding. MacDonald’s basic idea is that the same qualities that make white people different from and (surprise!) superior to other people are the same qualities that threaten the very survival of the white race. There’s no point in getting into the details of the pseudoscientific, racist line of thought, which cites, for example, the Nazi eugenicist Fritz Lenz as a source alongside more modern figures such the sociologist Ricardo Duchesne, who published a book on the “Uniqueness of Western Civilization” with the oldest academic press in the world before becoming a fixture in explicitly white nationalist publications. What is of interest here is how MacDonald cites the “foundations of Western Civilization,” ancient Greece and Rome, as evidence for his claim.

The book begins with an enumeration of the aspects of ancient Greek culture that we would expect white nationalists to praise, particularly the near total exclusion of even Greek-speaking outsiders from civic rights in many Greek city states (especially Athens and Sparta), and the hostility expressed in ancient sources toward non-Greek speaking “Barbarians.” But whereas other white nationalists see these aspects of Greek culture as models that contemporary governments should imitate, MacDonald is more circumspect: noting that the Greeks “displayed a greater tendency toward exclusionary (ethnocentric) attitudes than the Romans or the Germanic groups that came to dominate Europe after the fall of the Western Empire,” MacDonald acknowledges that such attitudes did not necessarily serve the Greeks well. He turns at this point to the ancient historian Gary Forsythe’s Critical History of Early Rome to illustrate this, with a quote arguing that the Greeks “never overcame the exclusionary nature of their institutions to form a lasting union” and observing that “Greek unity was achieved only when imposed by the superior force of a foreign power such as Macedon or Rome” (Forsythe, p.368). Forsythe does not make a judgment about whether this is a good or a bad thing, but in MacDonald’s worldview it’s a fatal flaw that left them weak and susceptible to conquest by outsiders. Strange as it might be to say, MacDonald seems to think that the Greeks were too exclusionary in their attitudes toward others.

MacDonald on the Roman Republic: "possibly like the contemporary West, [it] carried the seeds of its own destruction."

MacDonald then turns to ancient Rome, quoting the contrast that Forsythe draws: “Even though Roman society was very hierarchical and not at all democratic, it was far more open than the city-states of Greece…this social and political receptivity was chiefly responsible for Rome’s lasting success as an imperial power.” MacDonald finds a lot to admire in Rome. He admires the system of patronage, which he believes bound “people from different social classes into relations of mutual obligation and reciprocity.” He admires the “non-despotic, aristocratic” government of the Republic. He admires how “talented plebeians” could achieve upward mobility. And he even recognizes that “incorporating new peoples into the power structure” was essential to Rome’s military might. Most neofascists admire the Roman military without recognizing the role that citizenship grants played in building this military.

This comparison of Greece and Rome highlights a white nationalist dilemma. Is it better, if you’re worried about the survival of the white race, to go hard on xenophobia and isolationism to maintain a fantasy of purity among citizens? Or is it better to let outsiders join a society in order to strengthen it at the “cost” (as white nationalists see it) of diversity. MacDonald even allows (albeit grudgingly) that the emperor Claudius’ advocacy for allowing certain aristocratic Gauls to obtain membership in the Roman senate reflected a “long history of non-Romans assuming position and power at Rome.” But any surprise at this apparently cosmopolitan view should evaporate when we see what MacDonald actually says about Claudius: “The question was incorporating other European-based groups,” MacDonald writes, arguing that Claudius’ action “could be considered analogous in today’s world to advocating a pan-European union…restrict[ed] to people who are already part of the European gene pool.”

A citation of the racist pseudoscientist Richard Lynn allows MacDonald to add some misogyny to his theory of civilizational decline

And this is how MacDonald reconciles his belief that white people need to be more ethnocentric to survive with the historical fact that openness to outsiders strengthened Rome. In MacDonald’s view, the Romans got it “right” where the Greeks did not (itself an unusual view among white nationalists, who usually praise the ethnocentric Greeks over the more cosmopolitan Romans). But even the Romans didn’t get it right enough because, in MacDonald’s view, they went too far in the direction of openness. They were willing to grant freedom to enslaved war captives from faraway lands who then intermarried with Roman citizens and, he alleges, diluted the racial purity of the empire, leading to its weakening and downfall.

And with that, we’re right back into familiar territory for white nationalist theories of the “Fall of the Roman Empire,” theories that find their origin not in fringe conspiracy theories but in mainstream scholarship (MacDonald cites the Johns Hopkins professor Tenney Frank, for example). Modern historians may have debunked this scholarship a hundred times over, but it retains its influence as white nationalists continue to cite and circulate it.

“The Roman Republic began as a unique and fascinating Indo-European culture,” concludes MacDonald, “but one which, possibly like the contemporary West, carried the seeds of its own destruction.” Here MacDonald has in mind Rome’s openness to outsiders, but over the course of his book MacDonald treats all the aspects of Western Civilization that its most ardent defenders admire as potential “seeds of destruction.” In short, he claims, Western Civilization has always been too progressive. Too committed to human rights. Too egalitarian. All of which, he claims, makes it too anti-white.

Elon Musk’s condemnation of empathy on Joe Rogan’s show belongs in the same intellectual tradition as MacDonald’s grand theory of civilizational decline. Unlike MacDonald, Musk, who grew up in South Africa amid the collapse of the racist apartheid regime, doesn’t make the racial dimension of his argument explicit. But when he describes empathy as “suicidal” and complains that “we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” it’s hard not to hear an echo of the rhetoric of “race suicide” that another American president, Theodore Roosevelt, employed to convince Americans that policies allowing immigration (in this case, from Europe!) should be considered “suicidal” for the threat these immigrants allegedly posed to the racial purity of the nation. And Rogan, at least, understood that Musk is talking about the same thing that MacDonald believes brought about the fall of Rome. Both seem to feel that welcoming outsiders — whether these are foreigners or marginalized people within — and valuing the contributions they can make to a society necessarily leads to the dilution of that society’s identity and, ultimately, its collapse. “Don’t let someone use your empathy against you,” Rogan reflected back at Musk, “so that they can completely control your state.”

Paradoxically, when MacDonald and Musk worry about the threat that the supposed egalitarianism or empathy of “Western Civilization” poses to its survival, they are propagating the same lie as those who celebrate Western Civilization for supposedly bringing egalitarianism and human rights to the world. Both groups take at face value the claim that these lofty ideals are in fact characteristic of Western Civilization. In fact, these ideals were first theorized and celebrated in the same period — the “Enlightenment” — in which European nations undertook the most brutal expansion of colonial domination and perpetrated the mass enslavement and extermination of millions of black and brown people around the world. This may be, however, a case where white nationalists see history more clearly than the general population does: MacDonald has no problem with the violent legacy of Western Civilization. He just worries that too many white people might believe the lie, that it was egalitarianism and not violence that got them where they are.

When MacDonald and Musk worry about the threat that the supposed egalitarianism of "Western Civilization" poses to its survival, they are propagating the same lie as those who celebrate it

Which brings us to Musk’s condemnation of empathy as “suicidal,” because empathy is one of the qualities of openness that MacDonald argues has made Europe and the United States vulnerable to infiltration and weakening by outsiders. MacDonald even cites a paper by racist pseudo-scientist Richard Lynn, whose invocations of antiquity Pharos has documented, claiming that white people are more empathic than other people. No claims of white superiority here: to MacDonald, Lynn, and apparently, to Musk, empathy and openness to outsiders is a dangerous and suicidal trait, one that destroyed the Roman Empire and is on its way to destroying our civilization as well.

Lynn’s paper, in fact, allows MacDonald to add some misogyny to his theory of civilizational decline since Lynn claimed that white women possess even more empathy than white men, making them, as MacDonald puts it, “more susceptible to appeals from suffering non-Whites, refugees, immigrants, etc.” The supposedly greater empathy of women, then, becomes justification for depriving them of civic rights and limiting their access to reproductive care. White nationalists want them to stop voting for progressive causes and to start having more white babies to save the race from the (non-existent) threat of extinction.

Let’s not put too much energy into trying to find logical consistency in white nationalist claims about history. They can’t decide if ancient Greek ethnocentrism was beautiful or suicidal. Same for Roman openness to outsiders. And they can’t decide if Western Civilization is the best thing ever to happen to humanity or the worst thing ever to happen to white people. White supremacy has never been a coherent, logically consistent system: it can never be, because it’s founded on a lie that racial identities reflect biological reality. But just because a belief is incoherent doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. Not too long ago, you had to seek out a self-published book by a notorious antisemite to be told that the admirable parts of Western Civilization threaten its destruction. Now, thanks to Elon Musk, you just have to tune into Joe Rogan.