21st century community survival and prosperity requires recovering empathy

Research in psychology and primatology suggest that, in addition to competition, communities require the capacity for empathy to promote survival. Empathy permits us to mirror ourselves into someone else's experience. Without this capacity, we cannot build social relationships, participate in group action, or care for individuals and entities upon whom our survival depends. Intriguingly, psychologists refer to autism as a "disorder of empathy." There are five preconditions for empathy: (1) familiarity; (2) similarity; (3) learning; (4) experience; and (5) salience (or perception of relevance). The events and outcomes of September 11 arguably have caused or significantly contributed to a collective loss of empathy and windfall of antipathy and apathy in American society. There might be value in adapting psychological instruments that measure individual levels of empathy to create instruments for measuring collective empathy and its relations to social & environmental issues.