Empathy

Obama's list of criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee has brought "empathy" to the center of the political semantics battlefield -- a field also known as the "spin room." And this makes sense, when you consider that the American political landscape spans at least three memes.

A typical dictionary definition of empathy is "identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives." From a green point of view, this is a rare virtue, indicating a capability to assume the perspectives of a variety of people, particularly the oppressed or downtrodden. This ability allows the justice, and therefore the court, to function as an institution of liberation (paradoxical as that may be.) So, for green, empathy is the bees knees, and conservatives are silly for deriding it.

But from an orange point of view, the role of the court is to impartially decide what is best. Empathy is a potential hindrance to a justice's ability to act as orange's idealized rational observer. Since orange takes reason as disembodied and universal, it pictures people as rational decision makers who should all reach the same decision in a particular situation -- regardless of the context provided by our individual experiences. Empathy is the opposite of the detachment that orange associates with reason. It is therefore seen as a threat to many of orange's favorite universals, like fairness, impartiality, and justice.

And from a blue point of view, the role of the court is even more limited. The court exists solely to decide how to apply and resolve conflicts between the existing rules. (It is from this viewpoint that the phrases "judicial activism" and "legislate from the bench" originate.) For blue, it doesn't matter if you can identify with the parties in conflict, or even if your decision is the best or fairest, so long as our laws are applied consistently and with an appreciation for their hierarchy of importance. Empathy is therefore seen as a threat to consistency and uniform enforcement of the rules.

Like all words, empathy will always mean different things to different people, but I'm struck by the ways that particular meanings infect our political discourse. For one of the first times I remember, it seems that a liberal-leaning definition of a term is taking hold, despite conservative opposition.