Last night for just under three hours, I watched the film made in around 2000 about the Nuremberg Trials of the leading war criminals in 1945-46. I found the acting brilliant, especially the psychopathic manipulation and evil “aura” of Herman Goering.
The American Army appointed a psychologist, Dr Gustav M. Gilbert, to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants. As he was portrayed in the film I saw, Gilbert told the Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson:
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.
Empathy is the capacity to recognise and venerate the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself in other persons. This principle features in all religions and in the works of many philosophers and scientists. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself – as Jesus said.
Empathy implies recognition of human dignity and worth in others that one recognises in oneself. This is often what lacks in comments written, less so in this blog than certain others, by some people otherwise claiming to be Christians.
Empathy is surely the yardstick by which we can judge all morality, goodness or evil.
