[Julie Steiner]

Everything we call "evil" or "monstrous" or "inhuman" relates in some way to a lack of empathy.

As someone who has struggled with empathy my entire life (and who has also closely observed a number of criminally-inclined, empathy-deficient relatives), I'm fascinated by the limits of empathy among supposedly normal people.

It seems normal to condemn the lack of empathy that allows terrorists to commit mass murder. And yet--sometimes in the same breath as condemning the terrorists' lack of empathy--apparently upstanding and patriotic citizens are exhorting each other to turn off their empathy for entire classes of human beings, because these undesirables are insufficiently like "us", and somehow deserve their fate of almost certain death if denied aid.

Aren't the victims just as dead due to a lack of empathy, whether they are gunned down or bombed or left to drown or die of exposure or starvation?

What does seem clear is that failures to empathize are not "inhuman" or "monstrous." Such failures seem all too characteristically human.

Normal, even.

I don't know how anyone else feels about it, but I feel sad and frustrated.