Response to Lisa: Identity Politics and Empathy

Lisa, thank you for your Identity Politics post.  I think you hit the nail right on the head in naming one of the roots of the underlying tensions we have been experiencing over the past month.  But what touched me most deeply about your post was your capacity to imagine the ways in which the emotions of close identification were at work in people on the “other” side.  Perhaps one way to shore up strength for the kind of conversation and cooperation that can both withstand the heat of the next few weeks and extend beyond November 4th is right here, in the practice of empathy—the capacity, as Lisa has set out, to imagine not only the thought process of the other side, but also the emotional dimension, how that thought process makes them feel.  Some may fear that the exercise of empathy may lead to loss of identity, or to a watering down of the important principles at stake in our current debates.  But I think it is exactly here that the Catholic tradition has something important to bring to how we talk with each other about politics—a confidence that this expression of love is itself a presence of God, which brings not only the capacity to recognize the dignity of our conversation partners, but also the light to see the complexity of the issues even more clearly.