Compassion: Personal/Anecdotal or Abstract/Systemic
I was chatting with someone recently and the conversation wove through a number of subject-matter. Somehow we ended up talking about the homeless people in Chicago, sometimes women with one or more children at their side.
The person I was talking to was offended by this behavior and seemed to fall for the old Ronald Reagan trope that there are “welfare queens”. The idea behind this (and a lot of conservative hyperbole) is that poor people are guilty of being poor along with the undercurrent of associated racism.
I argued with this person for a few minutes before realizing that they would never understand abstract or systemic compassion. This person was certainly intelligent, worldly, and capable of direct compassion, but they didn’t seem to understand that compassion can be view through a wider lens.
Empathy may play a part in this diagnosis, but I can theorize that even people who are empathetic may struggle with abstract compassion. It’s easy to empathize with a child or friend, but when you say “all poor people” or “all Rohingya” or “all southerners”, it may be more difficult to formulate an emotional response. It may simply be too abstract for some people to grasp all of the consequences related to helping or being kind to such a group.
I’m not sure I’d feel safe qualifying abstract compassion as a non-conservative thing because many conservatives are absolutely capable of systemic compassion. So clearly there are other variables involved. Some people are perfectly capable of going to Africa or India and helping people and yet those same people might be turned off from helping the people in their own country. Is this because America has this false promise that everyone can succeed if they just work hard. I think that’s part of it.
But I do think at their core, liberal and conservative principals divide on this point. Abstract concern for whole groups of people is a critical thinking point. When you think about African-Americans, do you understand that nearly everyone today falls from a family tree of slavery that ended only 153 years ago (legally, not in actuality)? Do you understand that systemic abuse of a population over hundreds of years is not something easily forgotten? Do you understand that cyclical poverty allows for teenage girls to have a complete lack of understanding of their bodies and how reproduction works? Do you understand that cyclical abuse prevents whole family trees from success?
It’s very true that many people do not understand any of those things and even when you frame “compassion” in such a way, their brain can’t handle it. Or worse, they simply refute it…because it just doesn’t matter to them personally. “I’m not poor. I went to school. I didn’t get pregnant at 15. I worked 4 jobs through college. I respect my parents. I don’t break the law.”
After this conversation, I feel it’s critical that we figure out, as a country and a world, how to enable abstract and systemic compassion. If we don’t, the alternative is really very tribal, brutal, and in the end, another nail in the coffin of humanity.
