Compassion, revisited
Someone I know has a deep emerald green scarf. It is woven of the finest wool, dense, and of high quality. Now, decades old, it frays at the ends. But he won’t exchange the scarf for another, no matter how old it is, because it is a physical reminder of what compassion looks like.
Many years ago, he was homeless, living on the streets near the Mediterranean beach. He had left a difficult home situation, and the climate there was mild all year round. Living on the street was not too exacting on the body, especially as he was a young man. But that first winter, it was exceptionally cold. Snow fell in packs where it never falls. Several old people, locals unused to this adverse weather, died in their unheated houses.
Two days into this freak winter, he sat outside, sheltered from the roughest cold against a wall. A woman walked up to him. He hoped she might give him some money. She did, but she also slowly unwound her long, emerald green wool scarf and handed it to him. “It’s going to be a rough winter. You will need this,” she said, and she turned around. He never saw her since.
Giving the scarf was an act of kindness, of compassion. Try to think of instances in your life, perhaps less dramatic, perhaps more, where you benefited from other people’s compassion. If you cannot remember such an instance, maybe you are not trying hard enough or you are deceiving yourself. Or perhaps, you have never needed to depend on others. Are you then really more fortunate than most of us, as Joseph Marshall muses? I would argue, if you have not experienced compassion, you are less fortunate. You are missing out on an essential part of what it means to be human.
To experience compassion is to experience a sense of dependency on others. We depend on others all the time anyway–few of us make our own food, or maintain our own roads, or manufacture our own tools.
We deceive ourselves into thinking this is not true dependence through some meritocratic, work ethic narrative. Sure, I did not make the car, I did not grow the cauliflower, but I bought it, with money I earned for myself. I did it myself. We value our worth as human beings through our productivity, through our ability to contribute. If I contribute, I am valuable. If I do not contribute, but beg on the streets, I am valueless. I ought to be helped to take care of myself. I ought to be incentivized to do this–hence successive governments’ ever increasing stringent tests of value, and they do not mind if people occasionally die when they fail the tests. We tolerate some false negatives, if it means other people can pull themselves up and be productive and self-sufficient.
The monetary economy hides and obscures the way we are interrelated in a big web of dependencies.
The anthropologist Annette Weiner argued that prior to the money economy, we had a gift and barter economy, where goods were never truly alienated from us. Gifts are inalienable; their identity is somehow forever wrapped up with the giver. The person in my true story does not know the woman and will never see her again, but her act of selfless giving forever links her to the scarf. Like a latter-day Saint Martin of Tours who gave away half of his robe to a beggar, the act reminds him that compassion, unmerited kindness, truly exists. When he feels weary and cynical, he has but to look at the scarf.
We are of course creatures with some freedom and some degree of self-sufficiency. Even young children express their will and have their projects. There is a tension between these two feelings, of freedom and dependence, but as the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher already noted, you can never have a feeling of absolute freedom. Whoever thinks they are absolutely free and self-sufficient is simply deluding themselves. We need our environment–at minimum, the air to breathe, the ground to stand on–and other creatures we eat and make use of.
In Matilda, Roald Dahl provides a fitting illustration of the person who does not understand this, in the figure of the headmistress Miss Trunchbull, who terrorizes schoolchildren.
‘Small people should never be seen by anybody
They should be kept out of sight in boxes like hairpins
and buttons. I cannot for the life of me see why
children have to take so long to grow up. I think they
do it on purpose.’ Another extremely brave little boy in the front row
spoke up and said, ‘But surely you were a small person
once, Miss Trunchbull, weren’t you?’ ‘I was never a small person,’ she snapped. ‘I have been
large all my life and I don’t see why others can’t be the
same way.’ ‘But you must have started out as a baby,’ the boy
said. 'Me! A baby!’ shouted the Trunchbull. ‘How dare
you suggest such a thing! What cheek! What infernal
insolence! What’s your name, boy? And stand up when
you speak to me!’
The feeling of absolute freedom is thus a delusion. On the other hand, you can, and actually always are, absolutely dependent. The feeling of absolute dependence is what Schleiermacher identified as the fundamental religious impulse. It’s the feeling we matter for what we are, and not for what we can accomplish. The Rabbi Eliot Rose Kukla details what it was like for him to suffer long-term illness following a car accident, and how hard it was to come to grips with the fact that he was dependent on others for everyday care.
“Like many people, I had once measured my worth by my capacity to produce things and experiences: to be productive at work, share responsibilities at home, “show up” equally in my friendships and rack up achievements. Being sick has been a long, slow detox from capitalist culture and its mandate that we never rest. Slowly, I found a deeper value in relationship beyond reciprocity: an unconditional love and care based in justice, and a belief that all humans deserve relationship, regardless of whether we can offer anything measurable back. In these discoveries, I’ve been led by other sick and disabled people, whose value had always been apparent to me. Amid the brilliant diversity of power wheelchairs, service dogs, canes and ice packs, it’s easy to see that we matter just as we are.”
As Kukla observes, disability and long-term illness presents a deep challenge to our ideal of self-sufficiency. It exposes this ideal for the fraud it is, and seeks us to probe deeper for meaning and for what ultimately matters. Does it matter that we are maximally productive? Does it ultimately matter the economy grows by two percent? The common narrative is that yes, it does, because it will ultimately promote happiness. At what cost?
The Chinese philosopher Mengzi (4th century BCE) proposed that we all have within us the beginnings of the virtue of humaneness. He locates this in a feeling of compassion. His child at the well thought experiment is meant to show that you have this feeling too. Imagine you see a child, teetering at the edge of a well. You would spontaneously feel distress at the prospect of the child falling in it. Your feeling of concern is not driven by ulterior motives, such as seeking praise from the parents or neighbors for (potentially) saving the child. Cultivating this feeling of compassion is the basis of virtuous conduct as adults, that most important virtue of humaneness or rén. It is indeed important to attend to those stirrings of compassion within us. But it is likewise important to be the recipient of compassionate actions.
Being compassionate makes us benevolent. But receiving compassionate actions makes us humble. To understand the human condition properly, you need both benevolence and humility.
