By Ernest Partridge
1946, Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist fluent in German, was assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. The following year, his Nuremberg Diary was published, containing transcripts of his conversations with the prisoners. (
Excerpts here).
In words consistent with what I have read of, and about, Gustav Gilbert, he is portrayed in the 2000 TV film "Nuremberg," as telling the Head Prosecutor Robert Jackson (Alex Baldwin), "I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
"Absence of empathy" is likewise, I submit, "the one characteristic that connects" most of the immoral and misbegotten tenets of Bushism: that dogmatic mix of market absolutism, libertarianism, corporatism and simple greed that falsely describes itself as "conservatism," and which I choose to call "regressivism." "Absence of empathy" is the essence of evil which, if unchecked and unreversed, is certain to bring about the demise of the American republic as we know it, just as it led to the fall of the Third Reich.
In contrast, empathy, the capacity to recognize and cherish in other persons, the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself, is the moral cornerstone of progressive politics. It is a principle recognized and taught in
all the great world religions, reiterated by numerous moral philosophers, and
validated by the scientific study of human personality.
Empathy is the foundation of the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In that most-quoted New Testament verse, the golden rule, Jesus said: "as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." (Luke 6:31, also Matthew 7:2). Also, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." (Matthew 22:39, also Leviticus 19;18). Both commandments imply recognition in others of the human dignity and worth that one recognizes in oneself. In a word, empathy.
The golden rule is echoed in the moral teachings of Islam: "None of you (truly) believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." And as Mohamed taught in his last sermon, "Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you." (
Mohamed, last sermon). And Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, taught "What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary."
And yet, how much empathy is to be found among self-proclaimed "Christian" end-times preachers, such as James Hagee and Tim LeHaye, who eagerly anticipate "the rapture" and the eternal torment and damnation that awaits virtually all of humanity, as punishment for the sin of failing to agree with the preachers' theology? How much empathy is evident in the late
Jerry Falwell's on-air remark to Wolf Blitzer, about Islamic militants, "If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord," and Ann Coulter's infamous outburst, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." Because they explicitly renounce Jesus' injunction to "love thy enemies" these hate-mongers are, in a literal and moral sense, "anti-Christs."
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