Kate Manne, Himpathy, and some Adam Smith, Part 1.

[H]impathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior. Given that misogyny often involves punishing and blaming a woman for her “bad” behavior—bad by the lights of patriarchal norms and expectations, that is—you can understand himpathy as the flip side of misogyny; its understudied mirror image; its natural (albeit highly unjust) complement. Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as “good guys.”

Himpathy goes hand in hand with blaming or erasing the victims and targets of misogyny. When the sympathetic focus is on the perpetrator, she will often be subject to suspicion and aggression for drawing attention to his misdeeds. Her testimony may hence fail to gain the proper uptake. Instead, those who are himpathetic find endless excuses for the perpetrator.--Kate Manne (2020) Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

Early in her (2018) Down Girl: the Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne introduces himpathy as "the flow of sympathy away from female victims toward their male victimizers." (p. 23; see also this (2016) Huffington Post essay). According to Manne himpathy is itself an instance of injustice, but also a mechanism of maintaining an unjust, hierarchical social structure (patriarchy).

I like how Manne puts it in the sentence I quoted from Down Girl because attention is essentially a scarce, zero-sum phenomenon. And while some attention can be shared to some degree, this itself requires great art and often is imperfect. (Think of how celebrities try to generate attention for their favored social causes.) So attention challenges many of our most refined moral sensibilities not just because it is often bestowed on frivolous objects, but especially because it tends to rest on unworthy ones; when this happens it quite often, as Manne suggests, reinforces, worsens, or enables existing injustice. 

In her work, Manne understandably tends to treat himpathy as gendered. And nothing I say challenges that. But it's worth exploring the mechanisms that generate and stabilize himpathy. In reflection on this, I returned to a number of passages in Adam Smith's (1759/1790) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS).* Smith wrote in an age of great patriarchal social hierarchy. 

As an aside, while Smith's work was very useful to Wollstonecraft and Grouchy, and not characterized by gratuitous sexism (as one can find, say, in Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Kant), I don't think of him as an early male feminist (in the manner of, say, Poullain de la Barre or Toland) nor was he especially interested in the construction of gender (as Mandeville was) or a gendered critique of law (as one can find in Hobbes and Mary Astell). So, in coupling Smith with Manne, I do not intend to turn him into some kind of proto-feminist. 

Okay, with that in place, I quote and then comment.

The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different, yet as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature. The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Those humble cares and painful attentions which occupy those in his situation, afford no amusement to the dissipated and the gay. They, turn away their eyes from him, or if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them. The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness. The man of rank and distinction, on the contrary, is observed by all the world. Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him. His actions are the objects of the public care. Scarce a word, scarce a gesture, can fall from him that is altogether neglected. In a great assembly he is the person upon whom all direct their eyes; it is upon him that their passions seem all to wait with expectation, in order to receive that movement and direction which he shall impress upon them; and if his behaviour is not altogether absurd, he has, every moment, an opportunity of interesting mankind, and of rendering himself the object of the observation and fellow-feeling of every body about him. (TMS 1.3.2.1, p. 51 in the Glasgow edition)

Smith here diagnoses an especially calamitous feature of social life: [I] in a society characterized by inequality, the flow of sympathy tends greatly upward and monopolizes it ("every moment"). This is so even when evaluating analogous behavior: "In equal degrees of merit there is scarce any man who does not respect more the rich and the great, than the poor and the humble." (TMS 1.3.3.4, p. 62)**

And, so this produces, [I*] in an unequal society, the effect that those at the bottom of a social hierarchy naturally have a great deficit in sympathetic attention. This creates all kinds of emotional and social harms to the those at the bottom (including shame, lack of self-respect, and mortification). We are reminded that recognition is a human need. But [II] this deficit gets worse when they are in distress, because [IIA] their suffering does not receive the sympathetic engagement it might merit ("scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers") or [IIB] it actually generates antipathy ("if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them.") [IIA&B]  are both instances in which the lack of sympathy actually compounds injury. Because for Smith "we desire both to be respectable and to be respected" (TMS 1.3.3.2, p. 61) and the unfair flow of sympathy undermines both desires in a hierarchical society.

It's worth noting (a propos [IIA&B]) that for Smith the sympathetic resentment with the fury of an injured party is merited: because that fury is aimed at making the perpetrator  "repent of that conduct, and to make him sensible, that the person whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner. What chiefly enrages us against the man who injures or insults us, is the little account which he seems to make of us, the unreasonable preference which he gives to himself above us, and that absurd self-love, by which he seems to imagine, that other people may be sacrificed at any time, to his conveniency or his humour." (TMS 2.3.1.5, p. 96) And so on Smith's view, as Darwall (1999) emphasized, [III] when we withhold sympathy from a victim, or those in need, we withhold recognition of their (equal) dignity. And this, in turn, can reinforce the sense of shame and lack of self-worth, etc. For a recent excellent treatment, I warmly recommend Michelle Schwarze's monograph, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Though.

Now, above I have emphasized that these malfunctioning mechanisms of sympathy are the effect of social inequality (of status, of wealth, and of rank/honor). But, as we have seen, it is pretty clear that it also reinforces such inequality (at least of attention) and helps generate it. In fact, Smith himself is elsewhere also explicit that the unequal flow of sympathy is a motive for many to try to grow rich and famous (including the 'poor man's son'). And, as I show in my book (p. 14o), Smith is also explicit that this mechanism is a source of some social stability in a hierarchical society, even though we ourselves do not necessarily benefit from our "obsequiousness" to social superiors (TMS 1.3.2.3, p. 52).

At one point, Smith notes a particularly egregious example of [I]: when [IV] the inequality of the flow of sympathy is orders of magnitude larger when misfortune occurs to the rich and powerful than to ordinary folk: "Every calamity that befalls them, every injury that is done them, excites in the breast of the spectator ten times more compassion and resentment than he would have felt, had the same things happened to other men." (TMS 1.3.2.2, p. 52)+ As Grouchy notes critically (see her fourth Letter in Letters on Sympathy) Smith thinks we commiserate more with the fall from grace of the powerful because we already have an enhanced sympathetic identification with them (that is [I]). Grouchy, by contrast, thinks we have a natural tendency to envy the powerful, and rather thinks our inordinate sympathy with the rich and powerful when they encounter misfortune is [IV*] caused by our imagining that the mighty are ordinarily preserved from misfortune, and so when they fall they experience it worse conjoined with the fact that we sympathize more with such emotional pain (than either physical pain or any pleasure].

Now, Smith treats all of this as a "corruption," in fact, the disposition to "admire, almost to worship the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition," is "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." So, it is evident that Smith is by no means endorsing the mechanisms here he is describing, and actually finds fault for our inability to correct these corruptions. 

It's pretty clear that the social hierarchy Smith is describing is gendered (the actual examples of "The man of rank and distinction" are nearly always a man in Smith's account). But Smith himself pays too little attention to the fact. And as I show in a follow up post this lack of sensitivity to gendered nature of these mechanism creates problems in his account of chastity and rape (although these passages are also a bit tricky because they occur in a critique of casuistry).

But since I have gone on quite a bit already, I will close today's post with the observation that it is fair to say that if we take Smith's moral psychology seriously, himpathy piggy-backs on the kind of corrupted mechanisms that Smith has diagnosed exist in hierarchical societies and -- this is very much in line with Manne's position -- that it reinforces these hierarchies.  

*Credit where credit is due, Paul Cider links Smith's moral psychology to himpathy here.

**Smith continues: "With most men the presumption and vanity of the former are much more admired, than the real and solid merit of the latter."

+ And, connecting it to the problem of tragedy, he thinks this is why "the misfortunes of Kings only which afford the proper subjects for tragedy." 

Comments

[ajkreider]

This is all quite intuitively plausible, but what is lacking from both Manne and Smith is the requisite social science. As far as I'm aware, both engage in armchair speculation on the matter.

Manne's key case, for instance, that of the "Stanford Swimmer", seems the exception, not the rule. The judge in question has been removed from office. The plaintiff has, rightly, been sympathetically featured on national platforms like "60 Minutes", while there is no widespread (or even narrow-spread) support for the rapist.

It's easy to cherry pick cases that support a theory. Should we conclude from the "afluenza" case, that there is widespread sympathy for rich kids - when that decision was widely lampooned? Just the opposite, it would seem.

Isolated cases do not a summer make.

[Zena]

I like this! Great passage from Smith. Thanks Eric.

[LK McPherson]

The better term would be "whimpathy" -- but that would involve recognizing the inconvenient reality of Black males in the U.S.