When I read the news sometimes, I think of Thomas Merton’s definition of Hell: “Hell is where no one has anything in common with anybody else except the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves.” It sounds like cable news to me, the politics of Washington, like our political campaigns or the dark side of Facebook.

Sometimes, when I venture beyond my farm, and am drawn into one of my gadgets, I think I’m there. I’m in the Hell Merton described. I’m glad I can come and go.

Hell is the absence of empathy, mercy or compassion. In Hell, there is no escape, and the reason the poor souls there want to be free of one another is not so much that they hate what they see in others, as that they know others hate what they see in them. Each recognizes in the other what they detest in themselves: selfishness and impotence and agony and fear and despair.

Our political and media world loves labels like “left” and “right and the sheep in human beings takes these labels happily and applies them to themselves and one another. I have come to see it differently.

I have a different idea of labels. I sometimes divide the world into two different kinds of groups: those who can empathize, those who cannot.

The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Students of emotion generally define empathy as the ability to sense the emotions of other people, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. The absence of empathy is hatred and judgement – think of cable news again, or political blogs, or public comments on Facebook. If you can’t imagine the emotions or feelings of others, you are free to dismiss as them something other than human.

Then you can hate them. Empathy makes that more difficult to do.

There are two kinds of empathy. “Affective empathy” refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to the emotions of other people; this can include mirroring what the other person is feeling, or absorbing the fear and anxiety of someone else. Fear is believed to be contagious.

“Cognitive empathy” refers to our ability to understand, even identify with the emotions of others. Psychologists believe that many people who experience autism spectrum disorders have a difficult time empathizing with others. Empathy is considered essential to healthy relationships, to finding love, to relating well to most people.

I guess politics creeps in a bit when it comes to empathy, because I am struck by its disappearance in our civic and political life. To me, empathy means identifying with the poor and the sick, the refugee and the child struggling to break out of poverty. In our culture, that is seen as belief of the “left, ” not a common belief of Americans. The “right” views compassion differently as a rule: remove government and other obstacles from the poor and suffering, and they will prosper and have hope.

Political leaders without empathy attract citizens without empathy. They reinforce one another, on all sides of the political spectrum, and isolate almost everyone else. If you do not care for labels in our culture, you will be the lonely citizen, on the fringes.

For me – I am speaking only for myself – empathy means imagining what it means to be a terrified, homeless, hungry and suffering refugee, dreaming of a safe refuge for themselves and their children. I empathize very strongly with such people, perhaps because I could so easily have been one of them, my forebears were.

But if I am being honest about empathy, then I need to be cautious about denouncing the people who watch the horrific images and feel great fear. Is it possible to empathize with both? Of course. Empathy, I think, is like compassion. I easily grant it to people I like, not necessarily to the people who need it the most.

I remember feeling empathy for Dr. Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist whose macho life as a hunter was upended when he killed Cecil The Lion. I have no love of trophy hunters, but I kept thinking of his wife and children and employees and patients, many of them set upon by the raging mobs spawned by Facebook and Twitter, tearing through the lives of innocent people – even Dr. Palmer has apparently committed no crime  – in the name of loving animals.

I felt empathy for the children who slaughter people and blow themselves up before they have even lived. The young terrorists are not weaklings or cowards, wrote one journalist in Paris, they are brave in very twisted ways. How awful that they were converted by angry old men into murdering machines, the same way old men throughout human history send the young – all swept up in the virtue of their cause –  off to war to die and kill. Empathy asks us to consider that these broken people see us in precisely the same way we see them. Since they have no empathy for us, we become subhuman entities whose killing is not only permissible, but moral.

And so, they become inhuman, and must be killed themselves. The wheel turns and turns.

I can’t help when I write about empathy but think of the battered carriage drivers in New York City, persecuted and harassed for years now, exhausted and fearful for their very existence. The first thing I felt about the animal rights activists abusing and tormenting them was this: they had no empathy, they could not see the drivers as human beings worthy of compassion and moral consideration. They could not grant them a single decent or human impulse, empathy makes is so much harder for us to destroy the lives of others or judge them.

I see the lack of empathy in the persecution of the farmer Joshua Rockwood, whose investigators could only see the ice in his water bowls, they could not see the person standing in front of them. Empathy would have served justice that cold winter much more than judgment.

Empathy, like compassion, is a drug. It can make you crazy, and there are lots of people who will hate you for it. It is best taken and shared in small doses.

Ultimately, the judgement about who is truly empathetic, one political label or another,  belongs to history.  I hope my daughter or her children see a country with common purpose, hopefully an empathetic one. I believe I need to live “small,” not on a big stage but a small one. And empathy, for me, is important. It defines what it means to be a human being, it is the antithesis of Hell.

Empathy is the anti-dote to fear and argument, it makes hatred and self-righteousness impossible, when I am thinking about it. The experience of putting myself in the shoes of another has been revelatory for me, it has brought me all kinds of peace and connection and community. It is rarely easy for me, it is always worthwhile. It does much more for me than it does for them.

Making friends, for example, or being courteous to strangers, or offering help in small ways, one person at a time. The world is overwhelming if you take it as a whole. I think of Henri J. M. Nouwen’s notion of empathy in Out Of Solitude: Meditations on the Christian Life. It is a wonderful description of the spirituality and beauty of empathy:

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

That is a friend with empathy.