“Suicidal empathy” is a politically loaded term to describe a decidedly human phenomenon: a romantic belief in the power of compassion to heal all wounds. The suicidally empathetic person believes that trauma is the root of all evil, that those who hurt us can be loved into submission, that the goal of justice is to humanize rather than punish—no matter how ghastly the offense.
Which is why, when I think about suicidal empathy, I don’t first think about immigration, or criminal justice, or even the murder of an elderly man in New York City by a violent serial offender this past weekend.
Instead, I think about the NASCAR driver who, in 2005, was mauled nearly to death during a birthday party for a chimpanzee named Moe.
St. James Davis and his wife, LaDonna, adopted Moe as a baby in 1967 after his mother was killed by poachers. They raised him in their home in California as though he were their child, and they also made excuses for him, like a child, when he began biting people. He was just a baby, an orphan, a victim. “The honesty I see in Moe’s eyes is beyond anything I can compare to it,” Davis told the Los Angeles Times in 1999 after the chimp bit a houseguest, mauled a police officer, and was forcibly removed from their home and relocated to a sanctuary.
