Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

Kingsolver frames empathy as an ethical and imaginative discipline: the refusal to shrink one’s moral world to the boundaries of self or tribe. Calling it the opposite of “spiritual meanness” suggests that cruelty is not only behavioral but also a failure of perception—an incapacity to grant full reality to other lives. The line about war being “both won and lost” rejects triumphalist narratives and insists on the human cost borne on all sides. The final sentence universalizes suffering as morally equivalent, pressing readers toward humility, restraint, and solidarity rather than judgment or vengeance.