“Tenderness cut off from its source ends in terror“

“In 1961, Flannery O’Connor warned that tenderness cut off from truth ends in the gas chamber. Sixty years later we call that untethered feeling ’empathy’ — and we call it a virtue. It isn’t. Drawing on Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, Aquinas on the passions, and the Good Samaritan, this episode draws the line between empathy (a passion) and mercy (a virtue), and shows why a culture that confuses the two will always sacrifice the silent to the loud.