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As Dostoevsky's "idiot" would remind us, it may be beauty that will save the world, but is it impertinent to suggest that right now a more pressing requirement for saving the world may be empathy?
Empathy is that quality that enables us - theoretically at least - to enter into the feelings of others, particularly those in trouble, pain or distress. Social psychologists suggest it may be a basic and inbuilt moral instinct within most of our human species, something for which we are hard-wired.
It is beyond sympathy which may contain some element of detachment or sentimentality. As the derivation of the two words suggest, sympathy is to be alongside the emotions of others, whereas empathy is to be totally inside those feelings.
At its best, empathy makes us grasp that another person - every other person indeed - is not an object on a landscape but a real subject, a subject of beauty and of infinite value, regardless of who or what he or she may be.It is empathy that refuses to allow us to distinguish and, in the worst sense, discriminate between those who are like us and those who are not. The Christian perspective will link all of this instinctively with the Incarnation of
Jesus Christ, but it does, of course, have a wider dimension for all of humanity, including those who do not profess religious faith.
Greatest threatAs with all moral instincts, however, empathy may be suppressed, distorted or deliberately stunted in its application. Perhaps the greatest threat to empathy in the human psyche of today is the new attitude to truth in our culture.
Comment: There is a real crisis in Western 'civilization'. This is the reality of "freedom" and "democracy": the freedom to exploit, to enslave, and to be enslaved fully by the powers of egoism, egotism, and egocentrism. Sit back and watch the world burn.