Get Your Smart On
What is happening with Empathy is a great case study for understanding the current ideological battle for our humanity. This is a long foot note to part one linked below.
“…part of what the Christian argument against empathy is is to say that empathy is different from that… It's not just compassion. It's not just sympathy. It's something modern and new that's slightly weird”** —Julia Carrie Wong**
There is a phenomenon in intellectual history of re-Hellenizing terms to supplement and complicate Latinate ones. This often happens when a Latinate term is too vague for the intended purposes, or too moralized or theological. Scholars return to a Greek term to establish a more precise, technical meaning in a scientific or philosophical context.
Take the word spirit, a Latinate term from spiritus meaning inspiration, specifically in a religious context. When psychology wanted to address a subject’s interiority, it needed a new term to distinguish it from the religious discourses surrounding spirit. To this end, the concept was expanded and renamed soul, returning to the Greek term psuchē, which is also the root for the discipline’s name*: *psychology, the study of the human psyche.
Similarly, the word beauty was re-Hellenized and returned to the Greek aisthēsis (perception, sensation) to describe a philosophical study of perception in aesthetics, going beyond the moral or formal connotations of beauty. Many terms have similar intellectual histories: *essence/existence *and ontology, morals and ethics, and more recently, the transliterated eudaimonia or flourishing and happiness.
This practice of retrieving Greek roots to elaborate on or refine Latinate or vernacular terms is part of a broader intellectual strategy, especially in modernity, to create a technical vocabulary for emerging disciplines, recover philosophical precision lost in common usage or through theological/moral inflection, and differentiate between mere feeling and conceptual analysis. We should not be surprised, then, that the word empathy was recovered for use in psychology and philosophy. In fact, the pair ethics/morality functions much like empathy/compassion, with a similar rich and nuanced discussion over their differences. Despite what some critics of empathy say, there is absolutely nothing strange about this.
Empathy, and what has happened to it, is actually a really great case study for how the right-wing and libertarian combined forces to mount an ideological battle on two fronts: against scientific knowledge as well as the philosophy underpinning humanism and progressive thinking. There is also a critique of empathy on the left that is displaced by the right-wing critique, and it is important to understand this operation as well. Once you see the pattern, you will begin to see the playbook in operation across the media landscape. So if you want to understand what is going on a little bit better, if you feel like we are living in a topsy-turvy reality, then stick with me. I hope this account will bring some clarity of thought, and be useful for staying grounded in reality.
To be continued…
Wong, Julia Carrie. "Loathe Thy Neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian Right Are Waging War on Empathy." The Guardian, 8 Apr. 2025, www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump.