Empathy has become a dangerous topic in recent conversation for various reasons (none of them good).
For some, it represents mindless tolerance and agreement. There’s even a term for it: toxic empathy. It’s the idea that too much empathy leads to a moral rolling over, an over-identification with someone else’s view to the point that we lose our own.
Too much empathy, it seems, is a bad thing. But perhaps we’ve just forgotten what the word actually means.
Empathy is simply the capacity to acknowledge that another person is having a uniquely human experience. It’s not agreement. It’s an attempt to stand in someone else’s shoes, not to take them home and put them in your closet, but to grasp what it must be like to wear them.
Perhaps that’s what we fear…
That if we walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, we might not be able to judge them as easily, or that we’ll have to reckon with the path we’ve chosen.
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