Last year, I read the book Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey and reviewed it here. As I was reading it, there was something familiar in everything that she was talking about, but I couldn’t quite place it. Then I recently was re-reading some of the works of C.S. Lewis and came across this passage in the Screwtape Letters:
“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
For those unfamiliar with the book, the letters are from higher demons to lower demons and talk about how to lead humans away from God and down the path to their own destruction. The quote above is an illustration of what Lewis called in another essay, “Deceptive Compassion,” and it is not the same as Toxic Empathy, but they are at least related.
This isn’t about grand, sweeping acts of evil, but rather the slow, almost imperceptible erosion of love in our daily interactions. The goal is to divert genuine, sacrificial love – the kind that takes effort and humility – towards abstract causes or distant suffering, while allowing petty irritations and self-righteousness to fester in our immediate relationships.
Let me give a few examples:
- The Modern Global News Cycle – It allows us to feel a deep, visceral “empathy” for a tragedy 5,000 miles away while we ignore the cry of a lonely neighbor next door. We spend our limited emotional energy on events we have zero power to change. By the time we finish our “morning scroll,” we are so emotionally drained that we have nothing left for our spouse or children. Feeling “informed” or “outraged” about a global event feels like a good work. It creates a “vicarious virtue” that masks our failure to perform the quiet, unglamorous duties of local service.
- Social Media: The Digital Altar of Self-Righteousness – Social media is the ultimate tool for “distant compassion.” It allows us to curate a persona of deep concern through hashtags and black squares, while simultaneously engaging in “cancel culture” or vitriolic debates with people we actually know. We post about “Global Hunger” (the remote), but we snap at the waiter who gets our order wrong (the immediate). We find it easy to love “the marginalized” in our feed, but we find it impossible to offer a kind word to the “marginalized” person in our own community who happens to have annoying personality traits or different values.
- Loving “Public Health,” Loathing the Person – The pandemic provided a perfect laboratory for Screwtape’s experiment. We saw a massive surge in “compassion” for the abstract collective: the elderly as a demographic, the healthcare system as a concept, or the “vulnerable” as a category. People felt a sense of moral superiority by following mandates (or resisting them), using that “righteousness” as a license to treat neighbors, grocery clerks, or family members with utter contempt. We were encouraged to see our neighbor not as an image-bearer of God, but as a “vector of disease.”
The antidote is simple but painful: Prioritize the Proximity. God placed you in a specific home, on a specific street, in a specific church. Your primary spiritual obligation is to the people whose faces you can actually see and whose hands you can actually hold. These are the people we need to engage with our “good works” in tangible ways.
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
James 2:14-17
When we move our benevolence to the “remote circumference,” we are essentially making our faith “dead” because we cannot actually act on that benevolence in a sacrificial, life-altering way. We can post a status or feel a pang of guilt, but we don’t have to do the hard work of:
- Forgiving a debt.
- Listening to a boring story.
- Helping a neighbor move.
- Showing patience to a crying child.
Think of the “Modern News Cycle” example we discussed. When we see a tragedy on our phone, we are thrust into the “remote circumference.” We feel a rush of “imaginary benevolence.” But if, in that same moment, our child asks for help with homework and we snap at them for “interrupting our important reading,” we have fulfilled Screwtape’s goal perfectly. The benevolence was a vapor; the malice was a reality.
This is another reminder that the future is local. If you want to show real compassion, build connections to people in your community. That is where you can make a meaningful contribution with your service and compassion, with real people who may or may not always appreciate it.
Seeing God 