There’s an interesting question of semantics at the root of the word “empathy”. The New Yorker has an article in which the author decries the facile ways in which much popular culture misdirects resources based on individualization of tragedies and thus the identification with certain events and people but not other, objectively worse, events,or more badly-treated, people (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/05/20/130520crat_atlarge_bloom?currentPage=all).

One thing which is troubling is how “empathy” has taken over the meanings of the equally useful, but somehow maligned, words “charity” and “pity.” Empathy means the capacity to see the world through the eyes of others. For some reason, people seem to think this also means identification with others. But that’s not true at all. An FBI profiler needs an extraordinary degree of empathy to understand the thought processes of a serial killer, but that hardly means he or she wants to be a serial killer him or herself. Likewise, a general, if he’s smart, will try to see the battlefield from the vantage point of his enemy, requiring a, perhaps slightly different, form of empathy. Or, to use an example mentioned in the article, and which in a previous life working for a humanitarian NGO I wrestled with, how do you understand the thought processes of a warlord who gladly lets thousands starve as long as he retains power? You need empathy to even begin to understand such thought processes, but that doesn’t mean you want to be that other person.

Pathos, on which the word empathy rests, means “feeling”. Just because you can understand what somebody else is feeling doesn’t mean you want to feel it yourself. Empathy does not mean identification. And this is what our somewhat insipid culture of good feelings has done to the word: stripped it of usefulness in difficult situations in favor of a sanitized, half-baked attempt to use it instead of the far more accurate words charity and pity.

Neither charity or pity, properly understood, is necessarily bad. Unfounded charity or pity on the other hand, is unmitigated evil. And since there have, in fact, been so many cases of the natural human feeling of charity and/or pity being manipulated to unjust and unfair ends (Everything from crooked televangelists to email scams), we’ve become suspicious of the words themselves. Pity and charity have become shorthand for weakness, for only a fool would get burned repeatedly by indulging in such feelings when there are so many amoral scammers ready to pounce by manipulating them, right?

It’s too bad, because charity, the desire to help others when we feel able, is part of being human. A caveat: as an American I, and I assume anyone reading this, may be an outlier. Contrary to our “E Pluribus Unum” motto, much of human history has actually been spent with an inordinate amount of energy directed specifically towards preventing charity towards anyone outside the tribe, however that may be defined. In fact, genocide only becomes possible when the “other”is specifically denied humanity. No humanity means no charity, means also no empathy by definition (since who understand what an animal thinks), means mass killing. Use enough non-human descriptors of someone, and empathy, both in its true sense, or even the current definition as a stand in for pity or charity, becomes impossible in the listener’s mind.

Likewise pity can be good, not in the cloying sense of privilege looking down on the less fortunate, or even worse, the “Pity the fool” machismo of deflecting all forms of weakness, but in the sense of awakening us from our perhaps lucky, privileged or otherwise better circumstances to reflect on how life might be otherwise. This is not, strictly speaking, empathy. Feeling fortunate is useful when it’s justified. If you’re not a monster, then it will lead to consideration of life, what we do with it, and how we want to spend our time on earth (hint: the answer is, not like the person we’re pitying). This is not, however, empathy. Imagining how I would be or act were I a wino in an alleyway does not mean I understand, or see life, through those eyes. I’m just placing myself in that situation, not attempting to be that other person. Were I truly empathetic, I would be able to see life as that other person sees it, but that’s not the case, nor is it the case for the majority if not all, examples of how we use the word.

Empathy and identification are different. One is an example of how strong and accurate the imagination is, the other is a misdirection of the self towards some other, probably fanciful conception, of a different self. When our society tries to emphasize empathy, they’re not really doing it right.

Orwell was right to call a warning on how the English language, or any language for that matter, can be debased. Assassination becomes “targeted killing,” implying a reasonableness (or at least an intellectual ability to target) on the part of those doing the assassinating, rather than the older, truer, meaning of nihilistic, often random, death to pursue questionable ends. We used to take it seriously, the question of who to kill outside of a traditional battlefield. Now… meh. Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation,” implying merely a strengthening of a socially accepted means of seeking truth, rather than an amoral means of asserting authority (And incidentally, acquiring dubious information). On the other side of the spectrum we have “empathy”,which is rapidly becoming devalued of its original meaning of simply being able to imagine another’s existence, and turned into a word substitute for “charity”or “pity”, themselves weakened by misappropriation. Even worse, empathy has begun to imply identification, which, applied to some cases, is horrific.

As language reflects society, this is worrying. The ways in which the words which used to have positive connotations have become weakened or debased, and conversely, words which used to imply negative moral values have become replaced with other, more emollient ones, implies something about how we see ourselves. Land of the free and home of the brave? Maybe those words themselves are next on the block. Fifty years from now, will our children be speaking of the land of the safe and home of the secure instead? I hope not.