Empathy vs Compassion: What Game of Thrones Gets Wrong

(Among Other Things)

Back in 2020, I was collaborating on a screenplay for the life of St. Olga of Kiev, the first female ruler of what eventually became Russia. My co-writer and I got the chance to work with two prominent Hollywood screenwriters, Gregg Helvey and Bart Gaffigan. 

They began by teaching us how to introduce characters: the most important thing, they said, regardless of genre, is winning audience empathy. They used the example of “Rambo”; even though the main character is not particularly positive or uplifting, the screenwriters used something like thirty-five specific touch-points to make him empathetic as soon as he was introduced. 

Likewise, when we read, we employ our mirror neurons, which allow our brain to experience what the character experiences. This is especially powerful in fiction, which is why I argue that writing good stories is a much more important endeavor than most people admit. It’s also why I argue that bad stories can be destructive.

Part of why I strongly believe there are objectively good stories and objectively bad stories has to do with the nature of empathy. Empathy, it turns out, has a dark side. And this is nowhere more apparent than in the stories we’re telling today. 

“Silence” by Martin Scorsese

To understand the power of empathy in storytelling, I started to read about the difference between empathy and compassion from multiple perspectives, including philosophical, psychological, apologetic, etc. As I was reading, the movie “Silence” was mentioned repeatedly, especially as I researched storytelling devices and how modern people tell modern stories even when couched in historical time periods. (I’ll get to Game of Thrones later, I promise!)

“Silence” stars Andrew Garfield and Liam Nieson and follows Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan who apostatize from the Christian faith after watching their flock being tortured in absolutely inhuman ways. It’s a very powerful film, though not an uplifting one. “Silence” really bothered me, but before I had nailed down the difference between empathy and compassion, I couldn’t articulate why. 

Historical Inaccuracy

There’s something wrong in the priest's reaction to seeing his flock being tortured. His reaction doesn’t make any sense based on historical accounts of martyrdom, especially in the early church. It was almost always the case, both in hagiographical accounts and in pagan historical records, that Christians who saw their family and friends being tortured and martyred reacted not by apostatizing, but by encouraging their relations to endure with an eye toward eternity. The focus was never on the suffering, never on empathy with the sufferer. On the contrary, martyrs produced even more martyrs. There are very interesting early accounts of people throwing themselves into the fire, not to try to end their suffering, but to try to reach the embrace of Christ more quickly.

There are even some quite humorous letters from pastors of the early church discouraging their flock from doing this too frequently! 

Why is it, then, that the writers of the film “Silence” seem absolutely assured that the priest would react in a way that is consistent with the historical record, at least of the early Christian Church?

“Empathy is Not Charity”

I found an interesting article by Patricia Snow in First Things Magazine called “Empathy is Not Charity.” Snow says the whole set up of the novel and the movie is a lie. From what we can tell from historical records of this missionary effort, there was not a cruel persecution that specifically attacked the flock to get the priest to apostatize. Rather, the priest apostatized after being tortured himself. So this was a case of not being able to endure actual suffering, not empathetic suffering.

In fact, Snow points out that the torturer himself would never even have thought of making the flock suffer in front of the priest, because, being a lapsed Catholic, he would have known that the priest would only encourage his flock that if they could endure, they would be guaranteed Paradise. The premise of the film is just silly! Both the novel and the film betray a very modern way of thinking that equates empathy with co-suffering love. 

If we look to Dostoevsky, we see the contrast: Dostoevsky allows for the possibility of co-suffering love, but this love doesn’t fixate on suffering; rather, it atones for and redeems both the person who voluntarily assumes the suffering and the person for whom they are suffering. This highlights the difference between compassion and empathy. If Dostoevsky’s characters feel charity and compassion, the priest in “Silence” feels empathy. 

Postmodernism and the Dark Side of Empathy

What’s the problem here? Isn’t empathy a good thing?

Snow says that, as secularization has advanced and man has learned to live without God, the solution to our missing communion with God is to draw closer to one another. This would seem to be a good and normal thing, but it is actually untenable. 

One bizarre manifestation of postmodern reality is that we’re expected to let others have the full expression of their truth and identity, because that “lived experience” is completely alien to us, something we’re not able to participate in at all. This is a tenet of postmodern philosophy, and it’s something that a lot of people simply assume as fact. It shows up, for example, when we talk about “no cultural appropriation” or when we say people cannot write a book from the perspective of another gender or race. 

So on the one hand, we’re told that we cannot associate ourselves with the reality of the “other”, but on the other hand, we feel the need for communion very strongly. 

This situation has led to the dark side of empathy. I’m not suggesting empathy—the ability to feel someone else’s emotional state of being—is a bad thing. But postmodern solipsism has led to the opposite striving, a kind of conviction that we all should be feeling the experience of others. But in practice—and this is the key—this turns out to be their suffering more often than their joy. Empathy is almost always invoked in the context of suffering. We put on each other a type of moral obligation that we must feel one another’s pain if we are to be fully human. 

So we’re morally obligated not to culturally appropriate, but we’re also morally obligated to feel everyone else’s pain as if it is our own. This is a problem, a problem that comes from mixing up empathy and compassion. 

Compassion vs. Empathy

Compassion is the ability to have a little bit of emotional distance, to feel sorry for someone’s suffering but to maintain your own connection to a source of joy that you might actually be able to use to pull someone else out of despair. Whereas if you empathize fully with someone else in the way we’re implicitly expected to by modern society, you’re descending into the darkness with them to such a degree that neither of you can get out. 

This leads to unmitigated communion, communion without the mediation of Someone who can pull you out of the horror. In your desire to be one with the person who is suffering, you lose yourself and your ability to redirect that suffering to healing. You’ve lost the plot. In fact, you’ve made the situation worse. You’re perpetuating an almost unlimited culture of victimhood: if you empathize with a victim, you also become, emotionally and psychologically speaking, a victim yourself. And any needy or unscrupulous individual can use this to manipulate pretty much anyone they want merely by getting them to feel guilty. 

As an Orthodox clergyman, I would say that if you want to have communion with another human being and you don’t have the God who created us as an intermediary, then there is no fishing line to pull you out.

Bad Storytelling

This dark side of empathy is causing us to tell bad stories that perpetuate this culture of victimhood.

The crucial scene in “Silence” is awful: the priest is reaching his limit and is told that all he has to do is step on an icon of the crucified Christ. In the movie, the priest hears the voice of Christ say, “I am here to be stepped on; it is My job on earth to be stepped on, so go ahead.” A prominent Catholic priest who was an apologist for the movie said that this was not only justified but that it was, in fact, a moment of holy self-sacrifice on the part of the priest because, in some sense, he embodies Christ. 

This mindset is only possible if you employ empathy at the expense of compassion, if you think there is no way out of a situation except to capitulate. So the priest steps on the icon, apostatized, and becomes an anti-Christian officially employed by the Japanese government to root out Christian propaganda. 

What the Game of Thrones Gets Wrong

This modern mindset doesn’t seem to think there is a way out of suffering. The only way to deal with it is to feel it together with the person who is suffering, and this is what made Game of Thrones so disappointing. 

I actually liked the first book because it shows the author’s profound compassion and empathy for the downtrodden. There’s a wonderful scene in the first book where John Snow meets Tyrion Lannister. Both are marginalized, fringe figures. When these two men find a tenuous moment of connection at the end of a war, the author allows for the possibility that they can transcend their current reality and become successful. 

But starting in book two, there’s a shift in tone, in the kind of violence that starts to happen to the characters, and in how the author relates to the characters. All of this is apparent in a mass rape scene involving a girl who is mentally disabled. Even more horrifying, after she becomes pregnant, the people around her begin to marginalize her and make fun of her because they have a failure of compassion. 

George R. R. Martin wrote his books in a way that forces the reader to enter completely into the reality of his characters’ suffering, but he’s essentially a nihilist. So as we read beyond book one, in which the author’s compassion for his characters allowed them to have fully formed arcs of their own, we’re cut off from this compassion and shown what Martin sees as “real” history—peasants who suffer without the possibility of redemption. 

Empathy, in its purest and most unmitigated form, doesn’t allow you to retain your selfhood because you’re absorbed fully into the reality of the other. This is what happens when we read: we almost “become” the main character. And this is a good thing—empathy is why we tell stories; it’s why we read. But unless you, as the author, are really trying to make a point about the state of society (e.g. “1984” or “Brave New World”), writing a novel that focuses on suffering within a nihilistic worldview can perpetuate a hopeless, victim mentality that is unable to see beyond a desire for immediate retribution.

Real-Life Repercussions of Untempered Empathy

I hate to say this, but this is something that kept appearing to me during that awful media frenzy involving the Syrian refugees washing up on the shores of European countries when the war in Syria was at its worst. There was this widespread, screeching call for nations to open their borders immediately. 

My own immediate reaction, as it should be, was “This is awful! We need to help them now!” But that reaction was tempered by my knowledge of history and politics and my understanding that, whatever short-term solution might be effected by opening borders without discretion, there could be horrible long-term repercussions: what if some of those people were radicalized down the line and had access to an entire new arsenal of propaganda and terrorism, all because my empathetic reaction to their suffering, while good in itself, was not tempered by the proper emotional distance that would allow me to make the best decision for everyone?

An article written by Katherine Baker for Mercator.net makes the point that this is how traditional families work well: the mother is the empathetic one, while the father provides the emotional distance not to react with the “I must save you now” instinct. Both are needed, in balance. Psychologists actually say that the absence of an empathetic mother figure is shown to result in sociopathic children who don’t have the ability to empathize. 

Ultimately, this is why Game of Thrones fails. It isn’t the excessive violence or even the graphic sex (which I skip anyway) that turned me away. On a deeper level, it’s the unremitting bleakness that twists what empathy should be—feeling the suffering of another so that you can pull that person out of suffering. That’s the point of love. That’s the point of The Lord of the Rings. That’s the point of Dostoevsky.  

And it’s also why “Silence” fails. Ostensibly in the name of love, it cannot bear temporary suffering that leads to ultimate joy.

We Need Better Stories

Speculative fiction should be the vehicle for truth about the human condition. But our postmodern culture has confused empathy with compassion, and the result is devastating. It’s time to reclaim storytelling that depicts co-suffering love without descending into nihilistic horror. It’s time to tell more stories like those written by Dostoevsky and Tolkien.