Empathy

Wednesday

Boyd Tonkin

Nordic dream or nightmare?: The Mark, by Frida Isberg, reviewed

Imagine a society, a high-minded psychologist tells his curmudgeonly father, ‘in which people are like cars. They have to go in for inspection once a year’ in order to assess their emotional fitness for the shared highway of life. As for the ‘psychopathic percentage’ whose ‘moral disorders’ lead them to fail this spiritual MoT, never fear: state-funded therapy will get them on the road again. And should they refuse? Surely, as we learn later in The Mark, everyone longs to stand ‘on the right side of history’. The Nordic dream of close-knit, high-trust, mutually supportive welfare societies has always had its internal critics: mavericks, naysayers and backsliders, who prize autonomy

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

Is there such a thing as too much empathy? 

Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs in a K, which would feature two women by a washing machine engaged in unlikely conversation about some wondrous new detergent. Since The Spectator is a family publication, I shall pretend that 2Cs in a K stood for two ‘consumers’ in a kitchen, although it did not. If you are still trying to puzzle this out, the male equivalent is two dicks near a fence, a routine in which one man implausibly explains to his neighbour the many virtues of a particular woodstain, say, or one of those natty electric