There are rules of courtesy that have nothing to do with the use of tableware: anyone who happens to hold a position of dominance (for whatever reason) should see to it that the (for whatever reason) disadvantaged get their turn. Do that, and do it even for the homely self-conscious kid on the sidelines. Show the overweight awkward passenger the same courtesy you would afford to Madame La Bourgeoise. Simply by putting yourself in the shoes of the other, you will gain respect from those around you. I’m sorry to say that it’s only since I’m an old man that I’ve spontaneously helped other, less capable, old people. When I was younger, they were too remote. Would they be offended by a form of condescension? I couldn’t put myself in their shoes and just hurried on if they didn’t signal their neediness.
This brings me to a subject I announced but failed to develop in my last blog: the role of compassion in politics. I’ve devoted some thought to this in writing about the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who believed that compassion is the only source of ethical behavior; and that compassion verges on a mystical awareness that you and the wretched beggar; you and the wounded animal; you and all living beings are essentially one, the embodiments of a single force of life. I won’t attempt here to recapitulate the cogent and fascinating metaphysics that justifies his view. He proposes an amusing hypothetical paradigm: Imagine two men, both madly in love with a woman, both losing out to a rival, both contemplating murdering the rival, yet both dissuaded by some principle of constraint. Let’s say the first guy is a Kantian who says to himself, “I couldn’t mandate that my action of murder should be elevated to a universal principle of action,” or let’s say that he’s religious (“I remembered the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill”); or let’s say he was motivated by whatever impersonal code of conduct. And let’s say that the second guy just thinks, “I looked at him and just couldn’t stand to make him suffer! He’s after all no different from me.” Now Schopenhauer asks us: Which of the two is more moral in his outlook? Schopenhauer expects us to decide against the cold-hearted Kantian pedant and against the rigid Bible thumper and in favor of the man of compassion. Those former codes of conduct stood in an arbitrary relation to one’s actions. Fellow feeling, however, is in essence always the same. It can be contextualized in various ways, ranging from worker solidarity and soldiers’ comradeship to church fellowship and Christian agape, but all these contexts have a more identifiable core; they have more in common than the Kantian ethnic shares with, say, party solidarity.
I would tend to agree with Schopenhauer. There are evidently people with a congenital inability to recognize or empathize with the suffering of others who are capable of becoming ice-cold murderers. Yet there is a limit to the moral sway of compassion. It requires psychological proximity to its object. Don’t ask me to feel anything for primordial humanoids who lived millennia in the past. Don’t expect me to empathize with beings who appear utterly remote. Conversely, the person I see and hear and know has a strong purchase on my compassion. The weakness of a compassion-based morality is that it is often most intense for those closest to us but weak for those of another tribe, nation, or species. This is well known. On the other hand, abstract or universal codes of conduct only have purchase on my sensitivity and behavior if I have some inclination to embrace them. The individual who is incapable of grasping Kant and does not take the Decalogue seriously may still empathize with human suffering. I think that both principles have to play their roles. Denouncing either as “liberal” is incredibly shallow.
Compassion as the source of principled behavior is vital now because there are few other arguments against xenophobia. The masses who seek to cross our borders to escape starvation and violence have no rights other than those granted to them by the rich countries and lawful property owners who turn them away. Rightly or not, refugees are de facto and de jure subject to the laws and political will of nation states. It’s not likely that the national borders that sustain property rights will be abolished any time soon. But for the above mentioned reasons, compassion is hardly an adequate response to mass migrations of people. It’s necessary to consider the deeper causes and extended consequences of the global changes. People have to realize that the consequences are inescapable for us all. The answer might be that we will have to feel compassion for ourselves.
Greg Afinogenov’s review of Christopher Ely’s Russian Populism and Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a fine brief account of the radical Russian intelligentsia and its alienation from the common people for which it struggled and fought actively, intellectually, and organizationally. From my pre-college youth to my recent travel across the Russian Federation and in my native Southern Illinois, I have always seen the Russian radicals as counterparts of my generation. We were equally engaged for and at the same time alienated from the people. I became interested in Kropotkin after reading an article about disaster studies that referred me to his Mutual Aid and to Solnit’s argument that the coming ecological disasters might revive the altruistic and cooperative popular reactions to earlier disasters. It’s possible but it’s like betting on our future blindness giving us a keener sense of hearing. Suffering can lead to compassion and cooperation, but perhaps too little, too late, or not at all.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 