In one of his best novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; Philip K Dick explores the (interesting but mistaken) idea that what make people human is empathy - which is a modern development of the term "sympathy"; and means something like resonance.
In other words; in empathy we feel the same as another person (or another non-person being, such as an animal) - we feel as they feel; much as a violin string tuned to the note of A will sympathetically resonate when impinged upon by sound on the note A from another instrument. The violin string will "passively" ring-out the note of A.
Empathy in humans has much to do with emotions; and in an empathic person, empathy is supposed to happen spontaneously, involuntarily, naturally... If we are empathic we are supposed to experiencing feel the same emotions as another person.
(This is the basis of the Voight-Kampff test in Do Android's Dream - it is intended to evoke and measure physiological correlates of empathic responses, by describing situations in which empathy is appropriate. Androids are incapable of the full range of these responses, and can only simulate them by specific programming*.)
However; there is also a cultural belief that empathy can be trained into a habit - that (by the right attitude and will) somebody may make themselves very generally empathic.
Indeed, in the modern West; empathy is so highly valued that the ideal of a Good Person - i.e. a promiscuous altruist - is supposed to feel the sufferings of everybody in the world, all of the time; and all animal's, plants and the planet earth - especially the suffering caused by a "too-high" proportion of carbon dioxide percentage in the earth's atmosphere.
This "universal empath" could be taken as implicitly a moral exemplar of this time and place - and this notion has long-since been absorbed into mainstream church-Christianity.
To convince others that one is a Universal Empath has thus become a strategy of those who seek to dominate and manipulate - it is, in a way, the justification for the global leadership class of multi-billionaires and their servants.
In sum: modern totalitarianism is rationalized by implicitly-claimed attribute of universal empathy among its bureaucracy and those who control it.
This is even the case among those spitefully destructive influencers who are increasingly dominating the global ruling classes.
Although the mask of Universal Empath is slipping with increased frequency to reveal the snake-eyed demon within, the claimed basis of whatever is the current top-down manufactured war/ economic crisis/ health crisis/ "humantitarian" crisis/ environmental crisis - is always some version of utilitarian altruism underpinned by a passionately-expressed empathy for some suffering entity, or another.
So - if not, then what? If empathy as a primary positive moral value actually leads to more and more-powerful evil; how ought empathy instead be conceptualized?
The answer is as a minor but necessary basis for virtue. The lack of empathy is characteristic of psychopathy; which is why psychopaths go to such great lengths to simulate empathy.
The true and whole virtue - of which empathy is a part - is love; and specifically Christian love: which is rooted in love of God as a person (not as an abstraction or a collection of entities) - that we can perhaps understand in terms of love of divine creation and its nature and aims.
In other words; to love one must first love God, divine creation, and its basis and goals. We must be On That Side in the spiritual war of this world.
(Those who have joined that the side that opposes God and creation, are in principle against Christian love - and this will undercut the strength and robustness of their love of actual persons, as well as enfeebling the reality of their love of "the world". They will, under worldly pressures, tend towards becoming actors of love, and of empathy - using it as a psychopathic mask.)
And love is particular - love is not universal, but between specific persons - as is well shown by the Fourth Gospel - where that which Jesus Loves is always particular, and mostly of individual persons.
So we all ought to be empathic; even while the Universal Empath is a moral monster. We should value appropriate and genuine empathy, even as we eschew its universality.
A genuine inability to be empathic is incompatible with love and with Christianity (unless it is recognized and repented).
But empathy is a partial manifestation of love; and genuine empathy is only a virtue when in a specific and Christianly loving context.
And to be real and good; empathy must be personal - like love itself.
*Simulating specific empathies - for general categories of persons and issues - is, indeed, exactly what the soul-sold and corrupted totalitarian rulers and their obedient bureaucrats are doing when they express sympathy for designated victim-groups. It is necessary to Their purposes that only certain categories be permitted this synthetic empathy; because if Their feigned-sympathy was truly universal, then they would be excessively limited in their scope for evil-motivated policies and activities.
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