If you say any word and repeat it many times, it is disrespectful towards that word because by repeating it you will destroy its meaning and its personality.Sometimes I have the impression that some words are deliberately terrorized, like empathy and tolerance.
As a strong and naïve believer of the power of empathy, I used to think about the ways to guarantee it until I conducted an interview with psychiatrist Selçuk Candansayar, which you might read this coming Tuesday in Today’s Zaman.
I was hoping that he could give me an answer to the question of how to ensure empathy, but I did not expect the answer he gave.
He said it is possible to have empathy between two people, but to expect empathy between rival political parties is wrong.
After thinking about it I realized he was right. The prerequisite of empathy is good will. If you really want to understand the person you are interacting with, then it is useful. But in Turkey, unfortunately, even empathy is misused. If political groups are empathetic, it is just because they want to guess the next step of their rivals. Sometimes, even worse, some groups who are fighting for power with the aim of destroying the others use empathy to organize psychological operations and to deepen people’s fears.
Another word that is misused is tolerance. I always found it interesting that the Turkish word for tolerance, “hoşgörü,” has only one letter that is different from the word “horgörü,” which means condescending or patronizing.
Sometimes I get very suspicious and think that when some people use the word tolerance they actually mean “recognize my superiority and accept my rules, and then I might tolerate you.”
The ones who are against all the initiatives -- democratization, Alevi, Armenian -- are actually those people who are misusing empathy and want to patronize others under the name of tolerance.
All these initiatives have shortcomings that one can criticize, such as inadequate planning, inability to mange a possible crisis, giving the impression that they are being carried out not for a better life for everyone but merely for self-defined strategic reasons.
But to be against the initiatives totally is another story.
When all these shortcomings come together, the picture looks very messy. Suddenly a politician claims that a massacre in the Alevi Kurdish town of Tunceli in 1937 was a rightful counterterrorism campaign. Others are asking if what happened in 1915, when many Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were killed by the Ottomans, should be called “genocide,” and even before thinking about it, suddenly some people are jumping on the story of a Turkish secondary school student in France who wrote that if there were an Armenian genocide, it was because they deserved it.
Some are deliberately forgetting that to say a group of people “deserves genocide” is really an action that deserves punishment. They are trying to repeat the same old story that “Turks do not have any friends” and that “outside forces” want to divide Turkey. Then other voices join this awful chorus when they hear the words “foreign powers” and say that the Kurdish initiative is actually an initiative of foreign powers and means the defeat of the state.
And yes, under these circumstances, to talk about empathy and tolerance is really meaningless, but still, this messy picture is hopeful. All these discussions might be leading to tension in society and the harsh reactions of various segments of society towards each other. We hear a cacophony, but, still, it is leading us somewhere, to the point where we will develop the abilities of real empathy and tolerance.
But before this we need a new Constitution that will define the boundaries and will provide answers to the question of which principles we will need to live together. Once we get a new constitution, we can have empathy and tolerance without disrespecting their personalities.
