THE FORGOTTEN VIRTUE

The Forgotten Virtue: Empathy

In the long arc of evolution, our survival has depended on far more than strength or cunning. We have endured and flourished not because we were the fastest or fiercest but because we could understand one another. Empathy, our intuitive ability to feel the world through another’s eyes, is embedded in our DNA. It is not just a moral ideal; it is a biological imperative.

Had we not evolved the ability to care, share, defer, and cooperate, we would have destroyed each other millennia ago. The capacity to avoid unnecessary harm to choose understanding over violence, restraint over theft, and compassion over cruelty is the bedrock of civilization. It is what allowed our ancestors to build tribes, then towns, then nations. And yet, in modern America and much of the developed world, empathy has gone missing.

We now live in an age where self-interest is elevated to virtue, greed is mistaken for strength, cruelty is cheered as honesty, and compassion is dismissed as weakness. In this distorted worldview, empathy is no longer a shared instinct  but a foreign concept rarely practiced and almost never taught. No institution in America treats empathy as essential, from our schools to our boardrooms to our houses of worship. And yet, it is the one virtue that could save us all.

We must correct this course urgently.

Empathy must no longer be left to chance or childhood whim. It must become an intellectual discipline, a civic requirement, and a cultural cornerstone. We must teach it in classrooms, practice it in politics, reinforce it in business, and live it in our daily lives because empathy is not just about being nice. It is about being wise. It is about recognizing that my survival depends on yours, that my dignity is bound up in yours.

If we hope to preserve democracy, we must first rediscover our moral compass, and morality begins with empathy. Without it, capitalism runs riot, religion becomes a tool of judgment rather than love, and the fragile bonds of civil society dissolve into tribal chaos. But with empathy, we can temper our markets, humanize our policies, and reconnect our fractured communities.

Empathy is not a soft skill. It is a survival skill. And it must be treated with the urgency of a nation on the brink because that is where we are. The ancient wisdom of the Golden Rule Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is not a quaint saying. It is a strategic imperative. It is time to breathe life back into it.

Because without empathy, there is no morality.
Without morality, there is no society.
And without society, there is no future.

William James Spriggs