Hobson's Choice

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The Limits of Compassion & Outrage

December 1, 2005

It's an accident of my life that I read Michael Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, 2001) and Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom) along with Imperialism (J.A. Hobson, 1902) all at once. It was, in retrospect, an extremely profound shock to my world view. However, it took several years to assimilate the information, and much of that was immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps my lapse into excessively academic style of language occurred in response to the rain of horror that year and the next. Like Creon in Antigone, I felt as if I had at last recognized the scale of suffering ecological redemption was wreaking on the earth, and I was running to liberate Antigone, or running to join in some great benevolent struggle against it. I would be baptised, find at last the membership in the church, and be redeemed. And I felt as if I had arrived to find Antigone dead and Haemon in a fury.

Lord Frederick Leighton; this painting magnificently captures the image of Haemon, furious at the death of Antigone, hurling himself in a rage at Creon moments before taking his own life. The Choragos looks on in horror (center); except it's "technically" of a scene from Alcestis.

Or, for those of you with whom Antigone does not resonate, it was as if I was awaking from a dream of rescue, to a reality of horror and personal assault. I took it personally, and yet as a calamity: stupidity as evil, stupidity as cruelty and homicide, stupidity as suicide, stupidity as random death and pollution, stupidity as a force of nature, only ugly and filling one's mouth with polluted dirt. I saw stupidity as a pandemic. Technology, it seems, saves the body but the minds of my neighors was going. The right was determined to make itself stupid with imbecilic rage first against the terrorists, then against random peoples of the 3rd world, then against Usonians and Europeans who disagreed with them. The left was determined to match the right with stupidity, imagining that there was some unspeakable wisdom in the terrorists' choice (stupidity will not endorse your values; don't ask it to!).

A common tendency of political radicals in our society is to feel that the sufferings of the distant world are so much worse than those here in the USA that the latter don't really count; that the world abroad needs protecting from us; and that this society is so wicked that only outrage is a valid emotion. And while I can understand these responses, I cannot second them. You see, I believe outrage is a dangerous trap for several reasons. First, because it stimulates stupidity. Outraged people cannot carry others along on their outrage, when of course that is the thing they must have:

Upon some occasions sympathy may seen to arise merely from the view of a certain emotion in another person... Grief and joy, for example, strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one, at once affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion....
This, however, does not hold universally, or with regard to every passion. There are some passions of which the expressions excite no sort of sympathy, but before we are acquainted with what gave occasion to them, serve rather to disgust and provoke us against them. The furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies. As we are unacquainted with his provocation, we cannot bring his case home to ourselves, nor conceive any thing like the passions which it excites.
[Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.I.6, Adam Smith]

This has an alienating effect on the perennially outraged person:

Though your judgments in matters of speculation, though your sentiments in matters of taste, are quite opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition; and if I have any degree of temper, I may still find some entertainment in your conversation, even upon those very subjects. But if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling..
[Ibid, I.I.34]

That's one reason. Another is the importance of personal integrity. Compassion can be, as Arendt says in On Revolution, a profoundly violent craving, especially when it is unconsummated by any true feeling.

For compassion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related. Compassion, by its very nature, cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole class or a people, or, least of all, mankind as a whole. It cannot reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering. Its strength hinges on the strength of passion itself, which, in contrast to reason, can comprehend only the particular, but has no notion of the general and no capacity for generalization.

Hence the post-60's chic that "pity is horrid," which I would argue was a bromide of the thermidorian '80's.¹

"Compassion" is an emotion that will spawn violence if the brain perceives the suffering of others is the result of evil power. Compassion for the sufferings of Pinochet's victims makes me feel violent thoughts towards his defenders or wannabes. I suppress those thoughts, but I understand why Jesus warned about both the action and the reaction his message would bring:

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's enemies will be those of his household."
[Matthew 10:34-36]

That members of a ruling class might take the side of the oppressed against their own class, and call for a new ordering of society, would lead to civil war of a particularly virulent sort. But Jesus was tormented with this knowledge, that compassion as a new civil virtue was dangerous:

He said to them, "When I sent you forth without a money bag or a sack or sandals, were you in need of anything?" "No, nothing," they replied. He said to them, "But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, namely, 'He was counted among the wicked'; and indeed what is written about me is coming to fulfillment."
Then they said, "Lord, look, there are two swords here." But he replied, "It is enough!"
[Luke 22:35-38]

Jesus has some very complex emotions. I think the Demotic Greek with which He expresses Himself doesn't render into English properly the irony of "But now one who has a money bag should take it," i.e., whereas before one [such as My disciples] got by with nothing but the kindness of strangers, now one [such as a functionary of the state] is going to have to embezzle, and even the destitute will have to go naked to arm themselves. The absurdity of a man so poor he had to sell his garment to buy a sword, was the blackest of black humor.

Jesus is making an acerbic joke, but when a naive bystander took him literally ("Lord, look, there are two swords here"), he clarified for the irony-impaired. And here I stand up, and bid my readers of unrequited compassion, "It is enough--enough, to begin with the one next to you. Compassion can travel as far as a germ, but like a germ it begins with your neighbor." Revolution may be related to compassion, but compassion never precipitates revolutions, and it is seldom served by them. Destruction is another form of cruelty, a cruelty to the near on behalf of the far. If what wisdom I have is of any worth, it is this: that before you can love the world enough to save it, you must love yourself and be true to what you are. You must forgive the stupid, but be not stupid yourself. You must love your neighbor, not like yourself, but AS yourself, i.e., because and consequential to your love of self.

One of my readers commented, when I repudiated the idea of collective guilt, that there was still a need for collective responsibility as the motor for progressive social change. I think when we speak of love as αγάπη, we mean, the cherishing, or holding dear, the object; when as φιλία, we mean the state of community, of solidarity and reciprocal honor. Solidarity and holding dear, to my mind, are the two elements of love that can be directed towards a community, and they seem indelibly tied to the notion of responsibity. Supposedly, when we think of someone's job as encompassing "responsibilities," that's just the bundle of services the employee is selling on the market. Responsibility, as a commitment and acceptance of duty, is something that transcends market relations, and is indeed the foundations of society itself.

NOTES: 1 Maxmillian Robespierre was the leader of the Committee for Public Safety during the Terror of 1793-94. Robespierre pioneered the strategy of massacring opponents to the right, then left, then right. Robespierre was starting in on phase 3 when he was ousted and executed himself. The White Terror that followed killed twice as many as Robespierre's, and ushered in the Thermidorian Reaction. Since then, it's been observed, leftist revolutions have a rightwing epilogue within six years or so, which is usually referred to as the thermidorean reaction.

Arendt's essay on revolution is actually a very conservative document and spawned many of the conservative bromides of the 1980's, viz., progressive social policies are always a misguided form of compassion introduced by "limousine liberals." I can't believe Arendt herself was this dumb, and I interpret her work differently.