"You don't sound as compassionate as the other people."
That was my wife's reaction when she read yesterday's Salem Statesman Journal Rapid Response piece, which featured short responses from newspaper subscribers who have signed up to answer editorial queries.
Download Rapid Response: Short takes on two big questions
This week featured two questions. Here are my answers to each.
Q. As Americans, what should our response be to the global suffering?
A. Let's be honest: We have no idea what the suffering of people half way around the world, or even next door, is like. Our compassion is conceptual. We try to imagine how we would feel if we were in a dreadful situation we've never experienced. So I don't try to respond in any special way to suffering. There's no point.
— Brian Hines, Salem
Q. What can we do as individuals this week to make the world a safer, saner, more peaceful place?
A. The world is not our responsibility. We are responsible for what we can do close to home, which includes what good citizenship used to be about: participating in every election and making well-informed voting choices. I'm tired of being asked to do the job of elected officials.
— Brian Hines, Salem
Since Rapid Responders only get 50 words to express themselves, I'll use my blog to expound further on what I was trying to get at.
First, I faced a choice when I sat down to answer the questions. Be honest, or say something fake. I decided to write what felt true to me. I'm glad I did, partly because other people who answered these questions had similar responses.
Dissembling is a big problem that prevents humanity at every level — local, state, national, world — from solving our other problems. Our ability to sit down and honestly talk with each other has gone way downhill.
Political, religious, economic, and cultural polarizations drive us into a maze of closed-off corners where almost everybody we associate with agrees with us. We get into the habit of repeating familiar dogmas, losing the ability to discern how we really feel, and how reality outside of our closed-off corner really is.
So honesty is the first and most important policy in ameliorating suffering. Disagreements can be resolved only when we truly know what we are disagreeing about.
Like I said, I don't know what it is like to be a Syrian rebel, an Islamic extremist, a Jewish zealot, a Ukrainian nationalist, or anybody else for that matter. Heck, I don't even know what it is like to be my wife, and I've been married to her for twenty-four years.
Thus imagining what a situation of suffering is like doesn't get me, or anyone else, very far. As other Rapid Responders noted, we Americans have a habit of dashing in and trying to fix complex international problems without understanding what the hell it is we're doing.
Self-righteousness is a terrible motivation for helping other people. So is compassion, even, if an emotional feeling of "I must help" isn't accompanied by a solid grasp of what is possible, what is needed, what the situation demands.
I believe each of us has a natural wisdom in this regard.
Our conscious minds are like the small part of an iceberg that is visible, while a much larger mentality lies beneath the surface. I trust that when I'm moved to do something for someone else, this is a wise decision my brain/mind has come up with, largely unconsciously. I try not to over-think or second-guess myself.
That way lies madness, or at least intense aggravation. Every day my wife and I get lots of emails, letters, and phone calls from organizations begging for our help. Each cause is described as crucial, vital, earth-shakingly important. If we don't act now, disaster awaits.
Which, leaving aside the marketing verbiage, likely rings true for those deeply concerned about the cause. The Statesman Journal chose a few examples of global suffering to center its editorial page theme around.
Download Summer of Human Suffering
Over Ukraine, a passenger plane is shot from the sky for reasons unknown and by groups uncertain. In the Middle East, violence rocks Iraq, Syria, Israel, Gaza and elsewhere. From Africa to the Americas, violence based on religion, ethnicity, economics and politics uproots millions from their homes. Drug cartels run parts of Mexico, and their tentacles sink deep into Central America, Africa and the U.S. Parents seeking hope and a better life for their children send them on a covert, uncertain journey to the U.S. Ebola, a catastrophic disease with an exotic name, rages in Africa.
OK. But there is so much more to be concerned and compassionate about. Trying to solve every problem in the world will drain our well of concern and compassion bone-dry.
Our ability to make positive changes close to home is hugely greater than our capacity to alter events halfway around the world.
Yet it is easier to think than to act. So it is possible to feel self-righteous about our compassion for others just because we're thinking about the suffering in other parts of the globe, which takes the pressure off of us to actually act to make things better right here in Salem.
I'm disturbed by how poorly our elected officials are performing these days. This is most evident on the federal level, where Republican obstructionism has taken the notion of a "do-nothing" Congress to an unheard-of level.
However, the problem is ubiquitous. The Salem City Council, Marion County Board of Commissioners, State Legislature — they all are doing nowhere near what they should to solve pressing social, environmental, and economic problems.
Like I said in my Rapid Responder answer, things have changed. My wife and I are baby-boomers. We've reminisced about how often our parents felt the need to phone or write elected officials to get them to do something that needed to be done, or make donations to meet a pressing community need.
Not often, and my mother was a highly political person.
Back then citizens trusted, by and large with good reason, in representative democracy. Democrats and Republicans worked with each other. They compromised. Their focus was, pretty much, on what was good for the country, not for their political ambitions.
So big things were done.
The United States went to the moon, built the interstate highway system, formed Medicare and Medicaid, passed Civil Rights legislation, created environmental protection agencies. In high school my civics teacher told us our main duty was to educate ourselves about issues and candidates, then be sure to vote for our elected representatives.
They were then supposed to do the governing. Spend tax dollars wisely. Solve problems. Address pressing national and international issues.
I long for those days. Now my wife and I are met with constant communications saying that if we don't email, phone, write, contribute, whatever, those idiots in Washington aren't going to do such-and-such that is good, or will do such-and-such that is bad.
Huh? When did it become my responsibility to do the job of elected officials? Weren't they elected to make decisions, right wrongs, put this country on a positive course? I'm tired of being made to feel like the burden of governing is on my shoulders.
It isn't.
John Kerry and Barack Obama are capable of dealing with international suffering and calamitous events. I'm not. No ordinary citizen is. So I have a problem with the basic premise of the Statesman Journal's recent editorializing.
Yes, compassion is crucial. We live in an interconnected world. However, our elected officials have the primary responsibility of addressing the sorts of problems raised by our local newspaper. What we do here in Salem will have essentially zero effect on those global problems.
We can, though, work to make things better close to home.
Thus I wish more of the Statesman Journal's news and editorial attention would be placed on local issues and concerns, and less on problems beyond our ability to markedly influence.
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How does one make compassionate choices closer to home when one does not even understand his wife?
Brian, with the highest regard for you, I must agree with your wife. Compassion does not appear to be your strongest suit. It is not mine either, for what might be the same reasons.
Compassion requires an openness to others’ states of need -physical or emotional- that often runs contrary to activism’s drive to simplify to base issues and “sides.”
I did not even become aware of my own shortcomings in compassion until I made a trip to some exceedingly poor, in material terms, places in southern Africa. It was a major eye-opener about myself.
I’m not advocating for a huge change in your personality or approach to life. Hell, I LIKE what I have seen of both!
But be aware of yourself.
Best wishes, and I have no problem with you moderating this out, if you so choose. I am not talking to the world. I’m just talking to you.
TjPfau, you didn’t read my post very carefully. I didn’t say that I didn’t understand my wife. I said that I didn’t know what it was like TO BE my wife.
This is unarguable, right? You don’t know what it like to be anyone than yourself, because all of your life you have only been YOU. This is the case with everybody. We live in our own private world of individual consciousness.
Why do you say I am not compassionate?
I do a lot of volunteer work. I’ve been a vegetarian for 45 years. I donate, along with my wife, to quite a few charities. I’m active in both my neighborhood and our city at large. I’ve done my part to make the world a better place.
Like I said in the title of this post, I don’t believe that words have much to do with how compassionate someone is. Talking is different from acting. We can say the right thing and not do the right thing.
Hi Brian, apologies for not getting back to this sooner. It has been a very busy time for me.
I’ll try once more. Compassion is not an act of helping someone. Compassion is an act of understanding someone.
Actually, one CAN know what it is like to be “anyone but oneself.” Most people will tell you what it is like to be them, if you ask and listen.
And this act of asking and listening is the heart of compassion, not when it is done with those we are already in sympathy with, but when it is done with those we are NOT in sympathy with.
The first is recruiting, the bonding of like minds, this is sympathy, not compassion.
The second is reaching out to the un-like mind for the purpose of understanding the “why” of their actions and behaviors.
For example, more often than not, you and I are in complete agreement of the merits of City Government’s policy decisions. But we rarely agree on the motives of the individuals making them.
If you were serious in your concern about whether or not you appear to be compassionate, -and I responded because I assumed you were- you might find it productive to examine whether you treat those individuals as you wish to be treated yourself.
“Adversarial” on the facts does not require value judgments on the adversary. Such judgments establish a self-blinding fiction regarding the adversary’s motivation. It is a comfortable fiction, one that gives us the moral “high ground.” But it is not compassionate and can also lead to factual errors on our part.
Next time I see you at the Library, I’ll introduce myself. I’m not entirely comfortable in doing this by exchange of notes but it is a conversation I’d like to have.
If nothing else it would be good practice.
TjPfau, I hear what you’re saying. Interestingly, in discussions with fellow liberals I often argue that those we disagree with usually feel they are doing the right thing to the same degree as progressives do.
In fact, aside from sociopaths, virtually everybody feels that they are acting morally and ethically. Even, I’d say, Islamic extremist terrorists.
Since I don’t believe in free will, mine or anyone else’s (I’m a Sam Harris fan), I do my best not to judge others — since they are as helpless to do what they’re doing as I am to do what I’m doing.
I belong to a monthly Salon discussion group where this is one of my favorite subjects. I’ll say something like, “Almost certainly Bush and Cheney felt invading Iraq was the best thing to do for the good of the country and the world.”
Usually I’ll then be met with, “Oh no they didn’t! They knew this was wrong. They just wanted to feather the nest of Big Oil and their neo-con backers.” Etc.
I can understand that point of view. But even if that is true, I don’t think Bush and Cheney, or anyone, has a choice to decide what decisions and attitudes they will make and hold.
We’re all interconnected. No man or woman is an island. Thus open and honest discussion is vitally important (a purpose of libraries, obviously).
Which means, if I disagree with someone, I need to openly and honestly speak my mind. It isn’t compassionate to allow someone to get away with views or actions that, in my own mind, aren’t positive, truthful, or helpful.
This doesn’t mean that I know what is objectively positive, truthful, or helpful. I don’t. Nobody does. All I can do is do what I feel needs doing, just as everyone else does.
Yes, those words and actions do give us some insights into what another person is like on the inside. However, I know, as I am sure you do also, that how I feel as “Me” is very much different — if not totally different — from how others view me. So their ability to feel compassion for me as I am is very limited.
Their compassion is restricted to their decidedly imperfect and incomplete view of me from the outside.
The recent debate over domestic violence is a good example. A battered woman will say, “Just leave us alone. I don’t want any help.” Instead of taking that comment at face value, other women will say “She needs help in understanding what she really needs.”
Personally, I fall on both sides of this issue. I respect the battered woman’s subjectivity and knowledge of how she feels from the inside. I also respect those who feel the need to try to change her perspective.