"The fundamental weakness of... empathy"... ?

An excoriation

I have weaknesses that I am bound to repeat every time I make my confession to the priest. One is irascibility, another is the tendency to impatience that leads to my irascibility and general grouchiness. I view these besetting weaknesses of mine as, overall, a failure of empathy. I don’t doubt that my irritability can and sometimes does create an atmosphere that affects others negatively. We are, after all, warned against spreading such contagions of the spirit, “lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled” (Heb. 12:15). The desert fathers, certainly, had no qualms about associating them with evil spirits – “evil breaths” that we exhale and inhale like the flu – that contaminate our thoughts. If I were more empathetic than I am, I would — I’m sure — restrain my irascibility much better than I do. Not to belabor the point, I can say that, at least, I’m nowhere near as bad as I used to be, and with God’s grace, I have a smattering of hope that I’ll continue to improve. But I don’t bring this up simply to make a public admission or dwell on the subject of my cantankerousness; instead, I wish to focus on empathy – ἐμπάθεια (empatheia) – and discuss why it’s a weakness for a Christian not to possess it. It should be obvious that I’m picking up on Elon Musk’s contrary assertion, made recently in discussion with what, I guess, for many passes for America’s voice of intellectual depth and reason these days, The Joe Rogan Experience (a far cry from Firing Line, I must say, the talk program I viewed in my teens). Musk remarked, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” The claim we can extract from that repetitive ramble tells us what Musk’s main concern is: the plight of “Western civilization,” which is worsened by appeals to empathy. To be fair, he says that he’s bothered by the “exploitation” of “empathy,” a thing detrimental to our civilization (perhaps he means something like Uriah Heep’s exploitation of the virtue of humility in David Copperfield). And yet, curiously, he refers to empathy as a “a bug” – like Coronavirus, maybe? Or something like a computer virus? – “in Western civilization.” It seems that he looks at empathy like those desert fathers looked at “evil breaths” – as a contamination of thought.