The 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil once said that compassion was an impossibility. She said it is “a more astounding miracle than walking on water.” The word she used for meeting the needs of the sufferer is not love or charity, but justice. Today, there is plenty of research that points to a decline in compassion.

Dealing with suffering, however, is part of the human experience, and as the American feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued compassion is “an essential bridge to justice.”

As an education researcher who examines activist efforts to educate the public, I think what we’re witnessing is not so-called “compassion fatigue” but the loss of a sense of a shared world.

When it comes to how housed citizens respond to their unhoused neighbours, I have noticed an increasing trend of describing this strained relationship as compassion fatigue. Compassion is a specific word, with a specific history, and I argue it’s the wrong word here.

The concept of compassion in ancient Greece was synonymous with pity. In those days, pity was tied to one’s capacity to expose oneself to suffering — to suffer with.

The rising narcissism in contemporary society is fuelled in part by our online lives,........

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