Peace, Love...

Empathy is a powerful faculty (and by far my favourite of the pathos derivatives), but it does not come effortlessly to a lot of people. Indeed, the effort involved in empathising with another human being, or even animal - depending on its perceived cognitive aptitude - is often considered too great for the masses, unless a catastrophe manages to take up enough newspaper columns to force the required levels of consideration (and, failing or in addition to that, guilt).

We certainly do not have the time or perhaps even the emotional capacity to shed a tear for every life ruined or unfairly taken, but the West has often been accused of attaching more value to the lives of its own citizens than it attaches to the inhabitants of war-torn or third-world countries. I can hardly agree more with this view, and while stories continue to be published of scores of Iraqis killed every day in bombings, gun-battles and abductions, the real headline-grabbers seem to be of the lone British soldiers killed in action. I am deliberately discounting the ulterior political motives newspapers have for prioritising their stories, for example as an emotive condemnation of war (and therefore the government), because this would only seem to strengthen my argument: people are more moved by the death of Corporal John Smith, son of Mr. and Mrs. Smith from A-small-town-near-you, than the 28-or-so Iraqi unknowns killed in a car-bomb in a suburb of Baghdad.

I was looking only recently at the BBC's obituaries to those killed in the 7/7 bombings, and was quite moved. Why? Because it was easy to imagine myself in many of the victims' situations: I live in central London, I regularly use the public transport system, and, had things have been very slightly different, I, like many others, could have been on one of those trains. I cried a little when I read some of the obituaries, partly because of the things I seemed to have in common with some of the victims. Again, the tears were not hard to muster...

Surely empathy should transcend that which is so easily imaginable? Surely the desire and intellectual capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody so far-removed from our own sickening, affluent lifestyles in order to understand what it must be like for them to have lost something they cherished is not beyond us?

Our commonalities as a species (and beyond) are far more important than our commonalities as a race, religion, nationality, or culture: do we not all laugh, cry, love, grieve and envy? It is only a disparity in our emotional triggers that differentiates us according to those societal subsections.

Without empathy, we are lost in a lonely world...