Compassion

The Culture and Politics of an Emotion

Lauren Berlant, Lauren Berlant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135231644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Dissertations en sociologie

In Compassion, ten scholars draw on literature, psychoanalysis, and social history to provide an archive of cases and genealogies of compassion. Together these essays demonstrate how "being compassionate" is shaped by historical specificity and social training, and how the idea of compassion takes place in scenes that are anxious, volatile, surprising, and even contradictory.

1
Compassion

MARJORIE GARBER

“Either out of humility or out of self–respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question,” Justice Antonin Scalia responded to the issues posed by PGA Tour Inc. v. Martin, a case of a professional golfer’s fight for permission to ride in a golf cart while competing on the PGA tour. Comparing the majority’s decision to grant Martin’s request to “misty–eyed judicial supervision,” Justice Scalia’s acerbic dissent began: “In my view today’s opinion exercises a benevolent compassion that the law does not place it within our power to impose.”¹

Since Justices (and their clerks) are conscious stylists, often attentive to the opening and closing phrases of their opinions, the phrase “benevolent compassion” caught the eye of some experienced readers. The executive editor of the now–defunct Inside.com, Noam Cohen, a former copy editor at the New York Times, wrote to his friend and former colleague at the Times, William Safire, to inquire whether Safire did not find “benevolent compassion” redundant. Could there, he asked, be such a thing as “malevolent compassion”? Safire’s subsequent correspondence on the question with Justice Scalia formed the basis of a Sunday column.

Scribal joustings between such elevated wordsmiths cannot always avoid a certain archness of tone. Here is Justice Scalia’s response to the question, posed to him by his friend Safire, about whether he was being redundant or “differentiating from some other kind of compassion”:

I shall assume that such differentiation is impossible—that compassion is always benevolent—though that may not be true. (People sometimes identify with others’ suffering, “suffer with” them—track the Latin root of compassion—not because they particularly love the others or “wish them well”—to track the Latin root of benevolence—but because they shudder at the prospect of the same things happening to themselves. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” This is arguably not benevolence, but self–love.)

But assuming the premise, is it redundancy to attribute to a noun a quality that it always possesses? Surely not. We speak of “admirable courage” (is courage ever not admirable?) [and] “a cold New England winter” (is a New England winter ever not cold?). … It seems to me perfectly acceptable to use an adjective to emphasize one of the qualities that a noun possesses, even if it always possesses it. The writer wants to stress the coldness of the New England winter, rather than its interminable length, its gloominess, its snowiness and many other qualities that it always possesses. And that is what I was doing with “benevolent compassion”—stressing the social–outreach, maternalistic, goo–goo character of the Court’s compassion.”²

Safire, transcribing this document with manifest readerly pleasure, here interrupts to footnote “goo–goo,” which, he says, “some may mistakenly take as akin to gooey.”’ Instead, he explains, it is short for “good government,” since “goo–goo” was “the derisive appellation given by the New York Sun in the 1890s to local action groups calling themselves ‘Good Government Clubs.’” The phrase, says Safire, is Theodore Roosevelt’s from the latter’s time as New York City police commissioner, when he railed at fellow reformers who voted independent as “those prize idiots, the Goo–Goos.”

I am willing to believe that this is the meaning of “goo–goo,” since it comes from a virtually unimpeachable source in the language business. But perhaps Safire will not mind if I also have recourse to one of his favorite tools, the Oxford English Dictionary^ where a researcher in diligent quest of “goo–goo” finds “goo–goo, a.” goo–goo eyes, “an amorous glance, a ‘glad–eye’ (from goggle)” and “goo–goo, int.” (echoic), “to talk in the manner of a baby,” but no “goo–goo, a” from Good Government clubs. I do not doubt that the robust Roosevelt, the legendary personification of everything that was not “social–outreach” and “maternalistic,” might have thought his contemporary Goo–Goos were guilty of excessively benevolent idealism.

Yet Justice Scalia’s list of condemnatory terms for “the Court’s compassion” fits just as well with spoony glances and baby talk as with the politics of reform. Indeed, the contiguity of “maternalistic” and “googoo” in his playful sentence suggests that he was thinking of the high chair as much as the high court. And this association of “compassion” with the ironically inflected “maternalistic” (the opposite of “paternalistic,” plainly regarded as a buzzword of liberal–speak) suggests where some of the judicial animus may lie; for “compassion” these days is a “liberal” word, damned with faint praise from both the right and the left. To see how this has come about, despite the high regard with which the concept of compassion is nominally held, is my objective here.

The suit on behalf of Casey Martin was brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Martin suffers from a rare circulatory condition in his right leg and sought to pursue his career as a professional golfer on the PGA Tour with the assistance of a cart. Justice Scalia, whose scathing dissent was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, derided the Court’s “solemn duty” to “decide What Is Golf.”³ The majority opinion was written by Justice Paul Stevens, who is one of the Court’s two members to have shot a hole in one; the other is Justice Sandra Day O’Conner.

The word compassion was, perhaps inevitably, picked up and bandied about in the wake of the Court’s 7–2 decision. Conservative columnist George Will wrote dismissively of what he called “a moral theory in vogue” in prestigious law schools, “that one virtue trumps all competing considerations. That virtue, compassion, is a feeling that confers upon the person feeling it a duty to do whatever is necessary to ameliorate distress.” Will imagined a flood of other disability suits arising from this one, like the suit against the San Francisco Ballet by a mother who charged that the ballet company’s height and weight standards discriminated against her daughter. “The work of compassionate courts never ends,” he concluded with heavy irony.⁴

Others had contrary views, like the veteran golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez, a star of the Senior PGA Tour. Rodriguez thought Martin was right to sue. “The tour is played for charity,” he noted. “It’s supposed to be a compassionate tour, but when it came to compassion everyone went against him.”⁵ A letter to the editor of the Chicago–Sun Times shared Justice Scalia’s view that it was unnecessary to spend the Court’s time on this question, but the writer saw the matter from a different perspective: if Martin needed a cart he should have the use of one. In that event, to even up the odds, all the other players should have the option of using carts: “Instead of tying up our judicial system and wasting mega–money on lawyers’ fees, this could all have been settled in 30 seconds with common sense and compassion.”⁶

Who would have thought that compassion could become a two–edged sword in national debate? When George Will and Antonin Scalia both come close to ridiculing it at the very time that the president of the United States (and the leader of the Republican Party) describes himself as a “compassionate conservative,” something interesting is happening at the level of political—and religious—rhetoric.

Indeed, both of our two most recent presidents have sought to associate themselves, at least rhetorically, with the concept of compassion. When George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” the phrase seemed to convey, in its insistent and alliterating adjective, traces of an intrinsic uneasiness. What would the alternative be, one was left to wonder: A ¿/spassionate conservative? An unfeeling conservative? A cruel conservative? Where “compassionate Uberai” seemed virtually pleonastic, the term “compassionate conservative” appeared to fend off or hold at bay intimations of oxymoron. As for Bill Clinton, his compassionate catchphrase—so celebrated that it has entered the world as a seriocomic cliché—was the affective, even bathetic, but consistently successful “I feel your pain,” an expression unsurprisingly labeled “feminine” by early media critics:

If other presidents tended to speak by lecturing the American public (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself” or “Ask not what your country can do for you”), Clinton often communicates by listening (“I feel your pain”). … Call it New Age if you wish. But the Clinton style is really a textbook example of a leader who communicates in ways often more characteristic of women than men. … A woman tends to say, “I feel your pain.” A man might say, “Let me tell you why you feel pain and what you should do about it.” And then he might look at his watch.

This is not to say that displaying a “feminine” style is bad….⁷

This debased version of Carol Gilligan or Deborah Tannen, circa 1993, is one of the first analyses of what would become a famous Clinton watchword.

A few years earlier media analysts had begun tracking what they labeled “compassion fatigue,” a term presumably coined on the model of “metal fatigue” or more likely “combat fatigue.” The combat in this case was the war against poverty and the cause of human rights. By the mid–1980s, the term was in regular use among disaster relief agencies and United Nations officials, though the U.S. media kept “rediscovering” it through the early 1990s, as donations to famine relief in Ethiopia, cyclone relief in Bangladesh, and homeless shelters in New York City began to wane. In this context, “compassion” clearly meant donations as well as volunteer aid; “compassion fatigue” was well glossed by one editorial, headed “Compassion Overload,” as: “the weariness with which Americans are reacting to suffering abroad and the unwillingness to respond to yet another disaster.”⁸

“Compassion fatigue” entered modern dictionaries such as Chambers and became an example of late–twentieth–century language innovation, with its typical compression of noun plus noun, the noun–as–adjective so familiar from headline practice. Susan Moeller’s 1999 book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death described what was in effect the commodification of compassion, its use and misuse by a journalism more concerned with celebrity culture— including its own—than committed, in–depth coverage of “unsexy news.”⁹ But in fact the fatigue had affected the word compassion itself.

Once in regular use to describe human kindness, one of the very “virtues” celebrated in William Bennett’s Book of Virtues—which contains, indeed, a section on compassion wherein Bennett offers the unexceptionable view that we should treat no one with “callous disregard”—compassion has increasingly become associated with issues like human rights, childrens rights, animal rights, and multiculturalism. Hence, for example, Herbert Kohl, an educator and writer, responds to Bennett in A Call to Character: A Family Treasury (coedited with Colin Green), suggesting that Bennett’s “family values” are too rigid and underemphasize compassion and social responsibility. Bennett’s book includes the text of the Boy Scout Oath; Kohls reprint instead includes the International Declaration of the Rights of Children.¹⁰

The problem with compassion begins with its etymology and history. From the fourteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth, the word (deriving from Latin com,, together, and pati, to suffer) was used to describe both suffering together with one another; or “fellow feeling,” and an emotion felt on behalf of another who suffers. In the second sense, compassion was felt not between equals but from a distance—in effect, from high to low: “shown towards a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this respect, his superior.” When the first sense fell out of use, which it did fairly quickly, the remaining sense hovered between charity and condescension.

Later usages, especially in a religious context, stress the emotional benefits to the nonsufferer. Here is a symptomatic example from a university sermon of 1876: “Compassion … gives the person who feels it pleasure even in the very act of ministering to and succouring pain.”¹¹ One does not have to be a card–carrying Freudian to see that pleasure and pain are intermingled here in a way that is satisfactorily both simple and complex: the pain of someone else provides an access of pleasure for the compassionate one.

The phrase “the compassionate one,” indeed, invokes one of the most familiar uses of this notion, the idea that compassion is one of the attributes of God (e.g., from the apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus 30:33: “For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy, long–suffering, and very pitiful”). By extension, compassion could be regarded as a normative and desirable prerequisite of monarchs who ruled by “divine right”—as God’s deputies—at least in theory (e.g., “By the compassioned mercy of Queene Elizabeth”; John Speed’s History of Great Britain, 1611). The aspect of fellow suffering led to some specific religious uses, notably in a term like compassivity, which described the feelings of a saint on beholding in a vision the sufferings of Christ, “whereby his soul is transpierced with the sword of a compassive pain.”¹² As was the case with compassion as a kind of emotionally gratifying condescension, this sense of the word carries with it a certain occluded erotics.

Although Samuel Johnson called the transitive verb (to) compassion “a word scarcely used,” it does appear in references from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. The use of the verb in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus gives a clear sense of its function: “Can you heare a good man grone /And not relent, or not compassion him?” (4.1.24). To compassion is to have compassion about something or someone, to pity him or them. In a letter writ...