Empathy is diminishing rapidly in our culture. We’re told that “the average person in 2009 was less empathic than 75 per cent of people in 1979”. Yet 1,500 books available through Amazon apparently have a version of the word empathy in their title. As with other things it seems the more something is talked about, the less there is. Some fear that it is talked up in such a way as to amount to a religion in itself; a belief in the power of “feeling”. Do we just need a little kindness to make everything better? Is that the same as true empathy? How should we think and act...