Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts.
In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any moment to be taken by a giant raptor.
‘Are you like this all the time?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Since when?’
‘Since I was young.’
‘Why?’
‘You know how you feel when you’re stealing a car?’ he said.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ Then I thought this sounded rather priggish and unempathic. ‘But I can imagine,’ I added.
And the strange thing was, I really could — all too easily, in fact.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I feel like that all the time, even after I stopped twocking cars.’
The patient went down on his haunches and mimed breaking into a car, while looking around him for witnesses. When he had finished his dramatic reconstruction of his earlier career, he stood up and said, ‘That’s how I am, all the time.’
I asked him whether he had any genuine enemies. I suppose it would have been more to the point to ask him whether he had any genuine friends.
‘You’ve got to have enemies, haven’t you, where I live,’ he said. ‘That’s why I never walk, I always creep.’
‘Do you ever get into fights?’ I asked.
‘I’m up for assault,’ he said, ‘because I get these violent mood swings.’
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in