There are those weeks when news of the world overwhelms even the most generous heart. My heart, I suspect, could use an extra wing. But, even you I know to have hearts the size of roadside attractions still can’t always house the news of the world.
Climate disaster; automatic weapons; civilian populations lost to a distant command. These are the stories when they come thick and fast that are the hardest to bear. Not only because we know that someone, not very different from us at all, has lost their life, or a great part of it. It’s when we know that this loss was preventable that we feel it very keenly.
There is no one of my acquaintance who has not thought in the middle of a bad news week, “Can we not do something about this?” Our centuries of collective achievement, surely, demonstrate that we are capable of collective good will. Mathematics took us into deep space. Medical science took us deep inside our own biology. Art takes us anywhere we care to go. Democracy—the thing that so many of us agree to be our greatest human success—should take us beyond our current despair.
Climate disaster; automatic weapons; civilian populations lost to a distant command. These are the stories when they come thick and fast that are the hardest to bear.
We can feel such a sense of paralysis in a week like this. We hear the tragic news and measure this against the weight of human history and think: how are we, a species inclined to produce such good so quickly, so slow when it comes to preventing our own mass evil?
In more bad news that you will not find very surprising, I don’t have an answer ready for that question. What I do have, perhaps, is a new way for you to think about your compassion. Your compassion for those in Puerto Rico. For those in Syria. For those suffering the effects of a current national debate. For those in Bangladesh, the Northern Territory, Las Vegas and elsewhere. This is how we might begin to use our compassion.
Compassion is a wonderful human quality. In weeks like this, we can tend to suspect that it is also very rare. While it is true that there are those who have grown to limit their compassion—they may, for example, be deluded into thinking that certain groups of people are less than human, therefore less than deserving—there are very few, if any, who have no compassion at all.
Compassion is a wonderful human quality, but it is also an inevitable one. And it is potent; so potent, sometimes it intoxicates into believing that we have acted. When I hear about a population lost to airstrikes or a little girl lost at a pop concert to an improvised device or a queer teenager lost to distress in the middle of a ridiculous national argument, the first thing I do is feel. I can’t help it. This is not because I’m good. This is just because I’m doomed to be human.
The feeling of grief, whether it is for asylum seekers or US fans of country music, can be so intense, it appears as an end in itself. I say to myself, “If only more felt as I do, then everything in the world would be better”.
Here’s the thing, though: most feel that way; or at least are capable of such strong emotion. I believe that it takes less psychological effort to be compassionate than it does to be indifferent. I cannot imagine the punishing gymnastics the heart must endure in order not to care for others. I am not suggesting, for example, that we should feel pity for the racist who believes that the deaths of brown people are less meaningful than white deaths. I am suggesting that this is a great and ongoing exertion. Not caring is hard.
I believe that it takes less psychological effort to be compassionate than it does to be indifferent. I cannot imagine the punishing gymnastics the heart must endure in order not to care for others.
It is easy to care. That’s a great thing about humans. It is also easy to think that caring a great deal can fix great problems. That’s not always such a great thing about humans. Our compassion can feel strong enough, we are positive that it alone can heal all that is ill. We say: if only others felt this way, then something would be done.
The thing is, all others do feel that way. Even politicians who appear to us as cold and deluded feel the pain of others. It’s not compassion that they lack. It’s a clear and good plan to enact it for the benefit of all.
That’s where we come in. We make a pledge to free ourselves from the heady compassion that can cause us to believe we are changing the world with our hearts. We take an hour a week to go compassion-free. We become indifferent and almost cold and we talk to leaders and each other and we read long-dead thinkers and we work our way toward hard solutions that will answer the questions our soft hearts cannot.
I cannot believe that any human lacks compassion. I do believe that every human has reason and the capacity for organised rage to stop these bad news weeks.
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