When Empathy Erodes: An Anthropological Warning
Anthropology reminds us that societies rarely collapse overnight. Civilizational decline is usually quiet, incremental, and easily overlooked. It unfolds not through dramatic events, but through subtle changes in how people speak, think, and relate to one another. One of the earliest and most reliable signs of this process is the erosion of empathy—the ability to recognize oneself in the life of another.
Hannah Arendt cautioned that barbarism does not announce its arrival. It enters gradually, through a moral numbness that allows certain lives to be ranked as less valuable, less deserving of protection, or less worthy of grief. From an anthropological perspective, this is a decisive moment: society ceases to be imagined as a shared ethical space and is redefined instead as a territory of entitlement.
Political projects that emphasize exclusion are therefore not merely policy choices. They signal a deeper anthropological shift in how belonging is defined. Citizenship becomes conditional. Identity is narrowed and essentialized. The social bond, once based on reciprocity and mutual obligation, gives way to suspicion and moral distancing.
We see this pattern repeatedly across cultures and historical periods. Those who arrive from elsewhere—the migrant, the refugee, the exile—are first tolerated, then scrutinized, and eventually framed as threats. The poor and unemployed are moralized rather than understood. Minorities are reduced to categories. At this point, the “other” is no longer encountered as a person with a biography, but as a problem requiring management.
Language plays a central role in this transformation. When suffering is minimized, deaths at borders are rendered abstract, and inequality is framed as individual failure, empathy is not destroyed outright—it is slowly anesthetized. Over time, injustice becomes acceptable, provided it is selectively applied.
History teaches us that societies do not slide toward barbarity because laws disappear, but because ethical recognition erodes. Fear becomes a method of governance. Categories harden. Moral imagination contracts. People continue to live side by side, but no longer truly together.
Rejecting this trajectory does not mean denying economic hardship, social anger, or political fragmentation. It means refusing the idea that dehumanization is a solution. Anthropology—and medicine—both remind us that human systems remain viable only when care, dignity, and solidarity are preserved, especially under stress.
Empathy is not a weakness, nor a luxury. It is a social skill that must be practiced and protected. It is one of the few mechanisms capable of sustaining plural societies without violence. When empathy withers, barbarity does not immediately arrive—but its conditions are already in place.
The essential question we face, then, is not only political or economic. It is anthropological and ethical: what kind of humanity are we willing to sustain, and what kind are we prepared to abandon
Hannah Arendt (French translation commonly cited)
« La mort de l’empathie humaine est l’un des premiers et des plus révélateurs signes d’une culture en voie de basculer dans la barbarie. »
Claude Lévi-Strauss (original French)
« Le barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie. »
— Race et histoire (1952)
Didier Fassin (original French)
« La politique est aussi une économie morale : elle décide quelles vies comptent et quelles souffrances peuvent être ignorées. »
This mornig i received a post by Alain Callede, sent to me by family in Quiberon. While in the West, the enemy is the Other, the barbarians across the seas and the frontiers. I had been thinking a lot about Iran, where the perceived enemy are those very citizens of the country who are asking for justice and sustenance. Whether a right wing dictatorship or Theocracy, the tools used are very similar.
