The Toxicity of Toxicity: The Too Frequently Used Qualifier is Taking our Sacred Values off of the Table After reading last week’s piece in the Atlantic, Why Empathy Is Now ‘Toxic,’it gave me pause. Now, we can add one of the most important traits and values that we hold dear, empathy, to the list of words that we have to be careful of, and that we have to qualify, before embracing. We already know that “toxic” is making its way around. There can be toxic productivity. There can be toxic positivity and there can also be toxic masculinity where each of these traits can be taken to the extreme. But this idea is not new. Long before our time, although he did not use the word toxic, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, talked about the dangers of taking things too far. He wrote: "Every virtue carried to the extreme, is a vice and "Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency.. The Rambam also echoed this concept whe...
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