Monday, January 23, 2012

Sort of political Monday: Compassion

What's wrong with compassion? Well, in one sense, nothing. Like sincerity it's got its place in human life.

But it's not a virtue. Sincerity sounds like a virtue until you consider the sincere racist. Compassion, like sincerity, is an emotion. It can be misguided and wrong. It also can exist without doing any real work. Joe felt so bad about the injustice he'd seen that he sat in his room and cried all day.

The other thing about emotions is that you can't be wrong about them. You can reasonably dispute whether I should be sad but you can't convince that I am not sad.

Of course I can lie to you about my emotions. I can say I'm compassionate when I couldn't give a fig. And lies often work.

So what possible use could compassion possible have? Mostly it's a way of finding people like us. Compassion for the poor does little or nothing for the actual poor but it's a very good way for people who have similar attitudes about poverty to identify one another.

Don't sneer at that. I don't. You arrive at a  dinner party and your host has invited a bunch of other people you don't know. So you all sit around sipping your drinks before dinner trying to feel one another out. Nobody sits around discussing their life philosophy at moments like that. What we can do though is indicate our emotional responses and compassion is a good one.

Of course, as we saw with the Salvation Army ad, that compassion doesn't have to have anything to do with anything real in the world. This isn't unique to compassion. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I used to fall madly, passionately in love with women I didn't know anything about. And that was just fine so long as I never actually interacted with them.

Of course, we'd never try to talk anyone in the first place if we weren't capable of that emotion. I still remember the day The Serpentine One walked into my office and the way she looked in her skirt, white blouse and sweater and the way I couldn't breath I was so in love. And I barely knew her. But the fact that we have been together for more than twenty years had nothing to do with that initial overwhelming feeling of love but rather with the slow discovery of the shared values and interests that was slowly worked out over a long time after that.

All of which was only possible because we could actually talk to one another. And all of which is impossible when interacting with politicians.

And that is why Santorum  can't get past first base.

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