Heart-Breaking Deportation Stories and “Hysterical Empathy”

With increasing regularity – almost as though it had been planned! – stories are appearing in the Irish press of families being torn apart by deportations. The cases involve children; the deportees have spent a decade or two in the country and have one or more non-Irish parents or in the case of an adult an Irish spouse. They either arrived here illegally or their stay became illegal, now their appeals are at an end and they’re being removed. The cases are accompanied by organised campaigns to resist deportation. Often they are coordinated by individual activists. Some appear to be organised by schools, often they are endorsed by celebrities. Plenty of this is sincere – why wouldn’t it be? However as with every issue in Irish life where there’s money to be made, votes to be corralled, or an institution to be long-marched through, the fingerprints of NGOs are on everything.

I’m not going to go in depth on any of the live cases of them because it’s not about the merits of one over other, but about the idea and how it is presented. However, here is the one that is in the headlines right now.

In terms of popular opinion there is a natural amount of sympathy with the child, or with the person being deported (where they have an Irish family). That said, it’s very common to hear people ask “why were they in the country so long?” although, inevitably, this tends not to make it to press coverage. At the extremes, there is a contingent that supports wider deportations, but this view is mainly expressed on social media. Irish people think of themselves as, and are, big-hearted people. These cases are an emotional wrench and people would like to solve them. That soft-heartedness and unwillingness to be seen making or contemplating a heartless decision is the key factor that is exploited by activists for larger political ends.

Logically, the best way of solving this problem would be to more aggressively police illegal entry into the country and remove people long before they are settled; and to ensure that at no point could anyone believe they are in the country legally and. permanently when they are not. In principle no one should every be in the country for a decade or without that clarity. In legal terms, the system of appeals should be tailored so that the outcome is definitely known within a brief period. If that sounds like a difficult thing to do, remember – as many anti-deportation campaigners would remind us – a family’s future is often at stake. There is an onus on the government not to create a system whereby someone can be allowed to grow up with the threat of deportation hanging over their heads only for it to crystallise when they have begun to make friends, create a social life, become part of their communities.

There are a couple of things preventing this solution. There are the vested cultural/polictical interests you could call the New to the Parish – Landlord alliance. There are the emotions of Irish people, which are mostly laudable, which are described above. These cases are marked by another attitude that is becoming ubiquitous in politics, and I want to take this as a jumping-point to discuss it, because I find it fascinating and essential to understanding how political desires are expressed.

“Hysterical Empathy”

Hysterical empathy is the tendency to act with apparent empathy but only in ways that are vulgar, immediate, shallow and which respond to the most immediate and rudimentary triggers. Hysterical empathy is never quiet, restrained or considered – it is always loud, extravagant, tearful, accusatory and demanding of instant satisfaction. Hysterical empathy never talks about long-term consequences, or proposes or considers long-term solutions. The “unintended consequence” is an anathema to the Hysterical Empath, and even suggesting such a thing might exist is an act of barbaric cruelty. Where a Hysterical Empath does propose solutions to the problems they identify, they are in keeping with the sentiment itself – short-term, emotionally extravagant, careless of practical of side-effects especially where they can’t be repackaged as a simple story. One often gets the sense that hysterical empathy is what real empathy looks like when passed through a filter of vanity, social-climbing and a chronically short attention span.

This attitude has become ever-present in talk about deportations but is visible in lots of other areas. Another example of hysterical empathy at work (and being exploited) is the “dead child on the front of the newspaper” phenomenon. When military intervention in some conflict is in interests of the Powers That Be, with tidal certainty a tragic image from that conflict will appear on the front of your newspaper – but only then. You will see pictures of dead children in Syria, but never in Yemen (at least not while that nice Mr. Obama was around), or smeared all over a sidewalk in Sweden or Paris. What complicated set of circumstances and decisions created this dead child you’ve chosen to show us? Who decided we would see this child from this conflict and not any other? Are there other tragedies on another side of this conflict we’re not seeing? What are the long term consequences of addressing this part of the problem, for us and for them? If we “go in”, is our “going in” going to create other dead children, and will we get to see those? Can I be sure they will be on the front of my newspaper, and if they are, what will I be told to do for them (we can extrapolate this last one out into infinity)?

The reply: “first of all we’re not interested; secondly how can you even ask a question like that at a time like this, you monster. Stopping to think is tantamount to murder. Dead Child = we gotta go in. Those are the rules. Pass me the hankies, and the White Phosphorous. This time it’s the right thing to do; with good intentions as our impenetrable shield, this time it’s going to work out.”

It can feel like the entirety of political discussion has taken on the character of a diagnosable Histrionic Personality. The DSM describes the characteristics of this type as:

• Exhibitionism
• Need to be the centre of attention
• Low tolerance for frustration
• Making rash decisions
• “Rapidly shifting emotional states that may appear superficial or exaggerated to others”
• Being overly dramatic and emotional
• Being easily influenced by others, especially those who treat them approvingly.

I don’t know about you, but this is all very familiar to me from certain discussions.

I’m personally fascinated where this suddenly came from. Certainly this tendency existed before now. Social media, whose form and use privileges hysteria, amplified it. In the past, it was counter-balanced with other attitudes. Older styles of politics represent the worst of classically male attitudes – bellicose, pompous, belligerent, unfeeling, exclusionary, misogynistic, inflexibly hierarchical. Politics still reflects these qualities – often overwhelmingly so; it often embodies the worst of the Masculine. But as women have made in-roads into politics, some parts of politics have taken on the worst qualities of femininity. In the same way that when a band gets big it’s always with their worst album, it’s inevitable that when politics takes on a traditional female quality it would do so in a coarse, degraded and parodic form.

Linking this back to the issue of Deportations – the Hysterically Empathetic type, with its priorities, soft spots and blind spots, is on full display here. These cases are truly upsetting, and some have no good outcome. But these discussions are always about the emotions of a single case, and never the practical or moral implications of all cases. By immersing the audience in the emotional wrench of a single instance, thinking about the larger picture appears as the act of a callous bean-counter, a child-catcher or Gestapo officer.

Real feelings are being expressed, but they are also being manipulated, by people who *do* see the wider consequences – political actors, individual activists, activist groups and NGOs. For them, there is a knot of connected issues here with a single answer, which is the removal of any obstacle between Ireland and maximal inward migration. They never admit this as a central goal – refer to Sinn Fein’s disingenuous manifesto pledge against the concept of Open Borders – but for them all demographic questions lead to this answer. Nothing else is acceptable. All of the other options you might consider, other than allowing the unrestrained movement of people, are heartless. Enforcing existing laws would be heartless; so would clarifying those laws, or the creation an environment which is less congenial to illegal arrival and residency.

The apotheosis of this project (set your watch by it) will be a campaign to reverse the 2004 referendum decision on birth-right citizenship, by making it appear unworkable, unpopular and unnecessary. The leveraging of Hysterical Empathy through the intentionally restricted focus on emotionally stirring individual cases will be a central part of this approach. It’s just getting started – and not a tear will be wasted.