I read the other day there are  some nationalists who now consider empathy a sin. They have attached themselves to one of the world’s major religious traditions by a thread, if that. Given the times we are in, this touch of darkness bears note. The note is we live in political times where empathy is necessarily a frustration to certain strategic political agendas so even the core religious commandments associated to the concept of “love thy neighbor” are consequently subject to erasure by today’s oligarchs.  We may have scratched a new low mark in our spiritual history as a nation.  

The “Second President” said recently in an interview, “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” For all the atheists and the nihilists who, for whatever reason still care, empathy is a partially mapped neurological fact of the human body millions of years in the evolution. Empathy is not a recent foolish discovery for the weak and woke.  For the religious, empathy is the means by which people can genuinely accomplish a, if not the, central task of their religion;  “love thy neighbor” in whatever religious form and tradition that task takes. The task of empathy is terrifying to the power players of this world because it is beyond the control of those who would manipulate and control.  Empathy is the last untouchable stronghold of the inheritors of the Christian Beatitudes. Empathy is a networked form of democratic, catholic, (as in universal) power that could truly waken this world if we give it its due. If dogs turn out to be a more successful species than human beings it will probably be because their course of evolution put cognition into second place while reserving first place for empathy.

Good is empathy and empathy is inconvenient. Empathy is an agent of love that exists on its own terms and gives “not a fig” for the rantings and ravings of the rich and powerful.