The Politics of Compassion

Michael Ure, Mervyn Frost, Michael Ure, Mervyn Frost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a critical overview of the role of the emotions in politics. Compassion is a politically charged virtue, and yet we know surprisingly little about the uses (and abuses) of compassion in political environments.

Covering sociology, political theory and psychology, and with contributions from Martha Nussbaum and Andrew Linklater amongst others, the book gives a succinct overview of the main theories of political compassion and the emotions in politics. It covers key concepts such as humanitarianism, political emotion and agency in relation to compassion as a political virtue.

The Politics of Compassion is a fascinating resource for students and scholars of political theory, international relations, political sociology and psychology.

PART I
COMPASSION AS A POLITICAL VIRTUE

1

LOVE AND ANGER AS POLITICAL VIRTUES

Maureen Whitebrook

Introduction: political compassion

To develop a model of compassion appropriate to the political sphere would require either some modification of the understanding of the virtue as it stands (that is, as it is understood in practice in personal, private or social life, and in theory as its genealogy has been established and its characteristics stipulated) or, alternatively, a different set of principles that would go beyond the personal exercise of the virtue to act as the basis of a practice that could operate as an integral part of the political process. That is, rather than trying to translate the characteristics of what has generally been understood as primarily a type of relationship between individual persons into an acceptable form for extra-individual activities, systems and processes, the concept itself needs to be looked at from a specifically political perspective.

Taking that latter approach, working from the political point of view as it were, I want to establish a clear contrast between political compassion and other accounts of the virtue, retaining the basic and essential feature of compassion, the concern for suffering, but examining what form the virtue would take as and when that concern is extended beyond purely one-to-one relationships in the private sphere into areas where group suffering becomes an issue, where a response to that suffering needs to be expressed in political terms and/or is necessarily contained within the political sphere.

Argument

Basic considerations

A serious consideration of compassion as an appropriate virtue for politics depends on moving away from familiar accounts of its characteristics, moving away from the intensity of one-to-one relationships, and strong association with ‘feelings’ conventionally understood to characterise the virtue, and away from any association with patronage, charity, benevolence and the like. Compassion has to operate beyond personal relationships, in public (as a precondition of politics), translate feeling into action, and avoid charges of sentimentality or irrationality as inappropriate for politics by way of the exercise of judgement in the course of the move from feeling to action.

I work with a basic understanding of compassion that distinguishes it from pity, whereby ‘pity’ denotes the feeling (towards suffering) whereas ‘compassion’ refers to feeling together with action.¹ Compassion is a matter of acting on the basis of feelings of pity rather than simply feeling an emotion. Where feeling does lead to action, the transition depends on judgement, reasoned consideration of the need to deal with suffering in some way. Compassion is linked to the first awareness of suffering or need, but results as a practice from the move from feeling pity to compassionate action generated by reflective judgement (‘understanding’), consideration of the best way to respond to the perceived need — including those occasions when compassion will be judged an inappropriate response to the suffering. Sight of the suffering other invokes feeling (pity), and possibly then action where judgement indicates that it is considered appropriate — and thence a form of compassion particularly relevant to politics (Whitebrook 2002; Nussbaum 1996: 28 and passim).

Love, compassion and politics

The predominance in theoretical work on compassion of reference to ‘the Greeks’ is questionable, particularly in its reliance on Greek tragedy (as for instance in the influential work of Martha Nussbaum). Drawing conclusions from references to those dramas can be misleading: how appropriate is it to draw on that tradition to define and discuss compassion in ‘a world with no gods’ and where the plight of the tragic hero has little or no relevance for the individual in a democratic age where ‘there are no heroes now’ — certainly not in the ancient sense? The Judaeo-Christian tradition offers an alternative, politically relevant, source: for example, an academic theologian, Marcus Borg, has paid specific attention to the contemporary implications of biblical understandings of compassion — including its connections to justice. His work suggests a way into the development of a viable formulation for political compassion, and thence an argument for the inclusion of compassionate agency in modern politics.

Borg's interpretation of biblical teaching and practice — as, for instance, in the Old Testament prophets and the life and teaching of Jesus — offers a politically relevant reading of the contemporary implications of compassion which corresponds, in his usage, to love, or agape. Love has been held to be a politically inappropriate emotion because of its restricted focus on intense one-to-one relationships, its association with feelings, with a tendency to irrational, unreasonable thinking — thus for example Arendt's major objection to love having any place in politics is that there is no space between people, for the ‘in-between’, the space in which politics takes place (Arendt 1958: 51–3).² However, what is commonly being judged as apolitical or anti-political is eros — erotic, or romantic, sexual or familial love — rather than agape. Agape is not solely focused on strong feelings between two people, not dependent on the qualities of the other, and not bound up with need for the other but with the other's neediness. This is love for others ‘without judging them, asking anything of them, or thinking of one's own needs’ (Tinder 1991: 21), with no power relationship between agent and recipient of compassion, concern for the welfare of all, and for justice (Greenholm 1973: 68–9, 72, 80–1). It thus takes the individual beyond the immediacy of one-to-one relationships into the public world, allowing for recognition of the unknown other and hence a certain detachment from the self appropriate to the need for political compassion to exercise reasoned judgement.

Borg's discussion of compassion based on agape moves beyond attention to individual suffering towards recognition of the causes of suffering, injustice and inequality, and thence to action to redress the effects of those causes. He initially characterised compassion simply as being associated with feeling the suffering of someone else and being moved by that suffering ‘to do something’ (Borg 1994: 47). Subsequently, he has moved on towards the development of a specific and politically relevant argument that such motivation entails attention to the cause (s) of suffering beyond concern for the single case, the individual. Attention to the needs of the sufferer alone is not sufficient: compassion should cause the ‘onlooker’ to ask ‘What caused the suffering?’, and then seek to remedy not just the plight of a particular victim but also the systemic fault involved. ‘Compassion without justice can mean caring for the victims while quietly acquiescing to a system that creates ever more victims. Justice means asking why there are so many victims and then doing something about it’ (Borg 2001: 301). This is the crux of Borg's argument for a ‘politics of compassion’ and what can be developed from it.

This view of compassion meets the requirement referred to above that for a political relevance it must extend beyond individual relationships; and it expands my fundamental contention that sight of the suffering other invokes feeling (pity), and then action (compassion) may follow, including, where appropriate and necessary, political action. Paying attention to the causes of suffering entails that compassion is accompanied by judgement: response to suffering tied to awareness of the culpability of the prevailing socio-political system constitutes an impetus to change the system where it is perceived as and judged to be unjust.

Borg's argument rests on the premise that ‘Justice is the social or systemic form of compassion’, as against ‘what is commonly called “systemic injustice”— sources of unnecessary human misery created by unjust political, economic and social systems’ (Borg and Wright 1999: 245; Borg 2003: 129). He links compassion to social justice, ‘substantive or systemic justice, concerned with the structures of society and their results’, including but not confined to procedural or restorative justice. Because social justice is results oriented, it discerns whether the structures of society — in other words, the social system as a whole — are just in their effects. ‘The test of the justice of systems is their impact on human lives. To what extent do they lead to human flourishing and to what extent to human suffering?’ (Borg 2003: 129) As Borg puts it most strongly, ‘compassion that does not see that much of the world's misery flows from systemic injustice is a compassion that is still partially blind. We are called upon to become politically aware as well as loving’ (Borg and Wright 1999: 245; see also Campbell 1986: 101–3).

Development: compassion and anger

Working from these initial considerations — the basic stipulation that a political form of compassion would be a matter of considered public action on the basis of feelings, together with Borg's insistence that compassion should extend beyond action focused on the individual and be concerned with acting against the causes of suffering, including the adverse effects of socio-political processes and systems — I suggest that there is a potential foundation here for the development of a viable conceptualisation of political compassion.

Anger as motivation of and basis for political action

As a political paradigm, what might compassion lead us to see? … It leads us to see the impact of social structures on people's lives. It leads to seeing that the economic suffering of the poor is not primarily to do with individual failure. It leads to seeing that the categories of ‘marginal’, ‘inferior’ and ‘outcast’ are human impositions. It leads to anger towards the sources of human suffering, whether individual or systemic.

(Borg 1997: 150, my italics)

While a connection to social justice does not necessarily give compassion any explicit political role, beyond a general obligation to attend to suffering and its causes, a more specific contribution of Borg's work to thinking about political compassion is to suggest the possibility that anger can be a justified element in the political as impetus to and sustaining force for political agency and action.

In arguing that compassion requires more than mere charity, Borg allows for bringing understanding of the virtue into the sphere of the political: compassionate action has a specific political focus where suffering is perceived to be a result of systemic injustice.³ As Borg has it, compassionate action will challenge existing political arrangements where the causes of suffering are systemic failures of social justice rooted in a given socio-political order (‘the dominant system’). Recognising the causes of suffering should make the compassionate agent angry; and anger might then be acceptable as strengthening political compassion inasmuch as it interacts with the process of judgement whereby feeling is transformed into action and then sustains that action thereafter.

Compassion understood as a form of agape/love generates defensible anger on the part of those who recognise suffering and injustice, make judgements as to its cause and decisions about appropriate action. Attempting a formulation of ‘political compassion’ then involves the complex inter-relationship of perceptions of injustice, feelings of compassionate anger and reasoned judgement as to the appropriate response in motivating and sustaining political action to bring about change. The distinction I draw for a political compassion between compassion as a feeling, tied to notions of sentimentality and closely linked to pity, and compassion as action following from the first sight (perception) of suffering is pivotal here. The movement from feeling to action entails understanding and assessment of the situation and consideration of the appropriate response, a process of judgement, taking the anger into account in deciding on suitable action.

This is anger which is not merely expressive, ‘emotional’ or impulsive, but purposeful, ‘controlled’ anger issuing in a reasoned response to a situation. Compassion may induce anger, but ‘however much compassion might appear to originate from, or rely on, spontaneous and impulsive reactions, it is based on thought and evaluation’ (Nussbaum 1996: 28). It is directed at the causes of suffering, and informed by knowledge of situation and context, and in that sense is objective and rational.⁴ Similarly, Amartya Sen remarks:

Resistance to injustice typically draws on both indignation and argument. Frustration and ire can help to motivate us, and yet ultimately we have to rely, for both assessment and effectiveness, on reasoned scrutiny to obtain a plausible and sustainable understanding of the basis of those complaints (if any) and what can be done to address the underlying problems.

And he goes on to say:

The role and reach of reason are not undermined by the indignation that leads us to an investigation of the ideas underlying the nature and basis of the persistent inequities which characterize … the world in which we live today.

(Sen 2009: 390, 392)

Leah Bradshaw's discussion of the passion/reason distinction includes the comment that ‘pity’ (used as synonymous with compassion in her discussion) ‘is rooted in the emotions, while indignation is a compound of emotion and judgement’, and ‘Even if we feel pity for someone, there is nothing virtuous about feeling bad about their situation. For compassion to have any substance politically, it has to be converted to virtue, which is measured by reasoned actions’ (Bradshaw 2008: 180, 182).⁵

Although political agency can take various forms, and resulting political action might have various outcomes, in this case agency— ‘compassionate political agency’— is exercised specifically in respect of the causes of suffering and vulnerability, thus distinguishing between the political agent active within the political system and the victim of systemic injustice effectively excluded from the exercise of political agency by their socio-political conditions. When vulnerable individuals or groups are prevented from joining in political dialogue by reason of incapacity resulting from the systemic causes of their vulnerable state, they lack the capacity for agency, in this case to communicate effectively within the prevailing conventions of political dialogue. That is, ‘political agency’ in this context refers to the capacity for political activity exercised by those within the political system who observe and decide on action with respect to causes of suffering consequent upon the workings of the prevailing political system, standing in contrast to the incapacity for political agency on the part of those affected by systemic injustice. Victims of systemic injustice may express and may also act upon feeli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Compassion as a political virtue
• Part II Sociology of compassion
• Part III Critical compassion
• Index