The way of compassion is a way of living very close to what we are trying to live as a community. Compassion is a facet of love and is closely connected to other virtues: kindness, sympathy, empathy, and altruism. Each of these virtues has a different emphasis, yet each shares a core that is remarkably similar.
What is that core? I found this by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor:
... the sympathetic expansiveness linking self to other.
(Kindness, 6)
Jesus showed us that the way of true humanity is this linking of people through love.
In my work on love I suggest two ideas: 1) that love is rooted in desire for the well being of the other; and 2) love is movement from the self to the other. It is very different to selfishness, which stays locked-in to concerns no greater than “me and my own well being.”
There are always different ways of looking at life. A perennial question about life is: Are human beings basically selfish or basically cooperative? Let’s call these two positions the egoist and the connectivist. The egoist sees the self as the center. Everything resolves to the self. The connectivist sees relationships as the center, that there is something fundamental about being together.
Is the glass half full or half empty? There is no definitive answer, as both statements are true. You can provide justification for either answer. But the way you perceive the glass, your viewpoint is deeply psychologically affective: it affects your attitudes; it is a gauge for what matters to you; and what matters to us affects the kinds of decisions we take in life and the choices we make.
Whether the glass is half full or half empty is insignificant. But other issues are more significant. Take the question: Are human beings basically selfish or basically cooperative?
Philosophers have given different answers. Aristotle said we are social beings. He favored cooperation. Hobbes said that naturally all at war against all. Hobbes set the course of a very dismal view of human beings. Later, Rousseau favored cooperation. Hume said we have a hard-wired deep sympathetic nature. Nietzsche and Rand cared little for the cooperative view. Life is the brutal struggle of the individual for power, for self-aggrandizement. I fear Maslow also got it wrong in the middle of getting much right. The goal is not self-actualization, but self in loving relationship with others.
Must we choose one or the other? Egoism or connection? Logicians would have us believe the “law of the excluded middle.” It is either raining or it is not raining. It cannot be both raining and not raining at the same time. The truth of one statement proves the falsity of the other. You could say, “Well it is not raining very much.” But then it is still raining. You might wax very clever and say, “What is rain?” Is four drops a square foot of ground rain?” “What about one drop a square mile?” What about a certain percentage of precipitation in the air?” But still, when you have disambiguated the statement and have made a decision about what constitutes rain, it is still either raining or not.
Is the question, “Are human beings by nature selfish or cooperative” like that? Does one exclude the other? This becomes very complex because we have to disambiguate the words “nature,” “selfish,” and “cooperative” and in doing so we have to ask whether selfish and cooperative are opposites like raining and not raining.
You may end up by saying that people are in part selfish and in part cooperative, refusing to choose a side. The question then is, how large a part? Are people more selfish, or more cooperative? How much more, or how much less?
In a sense, it does not matter. When the conjuror says, “Pick a card … any card,” it doesn’t matter which you pick. The magician will always win anyway.
So whether people are selfish or cooperative by nature doesn’t matter. We can’t change that. Yet, in another sense it does matter. For it is a way of seeing life. It is a way of seeing whether the glass is half full or empty. It affects what matters to us. It affects what we prioritize. It affects our life choices and our actions. The egoist clings to the self; the egoist protects the self at all costs; the egoist sees compassionate impulses as sentimental, or childish, or annoying. The connectivist longs for relationship with the Other; wants the best for the Other; knows that the self is only found when the self is lost in love’s movement toward the Other.
“Jesus had compassion for her …” What draws us to Jesus? What makes us want to be like Jesus? It is not his supreme egoism. It is not his will to power. It is the vulnerability of compassionate love and kindness. Freud said:
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.
(Civilization and Its Discontents, 270)
Love is vulnerable and risks rejection.
Love risks all for love’s sake.
+Ab. Andy