The misanthrope's corner

WILL Durant said all great nations begin stoic and end epicurean. America has been on this well-traveled road to Rome for some time, but we can also measure our decline by another yardstick that is uniquely ours. We began as sympathizers and will end as empathizers.

The Nineties have blurred the original distinction between sympathy and empathy and the dictionaries have followed suit, but just for old times' sake, here it is: We sympathize with people whose troubles are different from ours; we empathize with people in the same boat. "I feel your pain" is empathy, but "I can imagine your pain" is sympathy.

That sympathy is obviously the nobler emotion explains why it has fallen out of favor with Americans. In the first place, it's too hard, demanding not only thoughtful reflection but a certain amount of serious reading. Second, it smacks of elitism. Lastly, sympathy compels us to touch the third rail of egalitarian democracy: the generalization. Once we utter the words "I can imagine" we enter the realm of broad, sweeping thought, which tends to produce broad, sweeping statements, which, as we all know, tend to hit the multi- cultural fan with a horrendous splat.

How much safer, then, to trade the wide-ranging heroics of sympathy for empathy's nonjudgmental inclusiveness and reassuring common touch. We made the switch the way we always do, by constant repetition of the word, until everybody was empathizing with everybody else and reciting "I identify with" and "I can relate to" over every conceivable foible and calamity that flesh and spirit are heir to, all in the name of a level suffering field.

The people most likely to go on an empathy jag are those who personalize every problem, reduce every experience to its most pedestrian component parts, and get so caught up in the particulars of a situation that they cannot see the universal principle.

Reading Margaret Carlson's column on Lt. Kelly Flinn is like reading half of Charles Lamb's essay on roast pig: we are left wondering whether the Chinese peasants will ever figure out fire, or will they just go on burning down their barns whenever they want cooked meat.

Painting Lt. Flinn as the victim of "a louse so low he makes George Costanza look like Sir Galahad," Miss Carlson asks: "Why wasn't she given counseling, a reprimand, or reassignment?" Reassignment? Doesn't she know that no matter where they stationed her, every wife on the base would empathize with Catherine of Aragon?

The level suffering field erupted last year when baseball star Roberto Alomar spat in the face of umpire John Hirschbeck, who flew into a violent rage and threw Alomar out of the game. In an attempt to get off the hook by feeling Hirschbeck's pain, Alomar told a press conference he understood why the umpire was so upset: Hirschbeck's son was dying of the disease that inspired the movie Lorenzo's Oil.

This is how the word "empathy" made its unprecedented appearance in the sports pages, where it remained for several weeks as Hirschbeck's defenders accused Alomar of a "lack of empathy" for raising the painful subject, while Alomar's defenders insisted that his heart was in the right place but that his being a bachelor made it hard for him to "empathize" with a father.

Empathy is a female game designed for boffo displays of intuition and finer feeling. Its greatest impact has been felt in our legal system. The difference between the empathetic female mind and the sympathetic male mind is the dif- ference between the jurisprudence of an earlier age and the juris without prudence that prevails today.

When Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, was tried for his other "Green Man" sex crimes in 1964, women could still be excused from jury duty on the grounds that they would hear things "unfit for female ears." That's sympathy.

DeSalvo consequently had an all-male jury, which returned in just three hours with a guilty verdict. By contrast, the Menendez brothers got off when the female jurors at their first trial concluded that yes, they did it, but no, they didn't, not really, not if you understand them and relate to what was going through their minds. That's empathy.

Somerset Maugham got it right when he said, "There's not much kick in the milk of human kindness." Empathizing with everybody is like sleeping with everybody: eventually it makes you frigid, at which point you decide it's a lot less trouble and just as much fun to empathize with yourself.

MANY Americans are indulging in this vice. Soccer Moms contended that because the Doles had no children, he could not govern "for families." Military men regularly call talk-radio shows to declare that anyone who has not "worn the uniform" has no right to send troops into battle. The most enthusiastic self-empathizers, however, are Congress Moms whose idea of legislating is to pass laws against their own problems.