Your comment reminded me tangentially of Mario Gabriele’s now-paywalled essay Compassion is the enemy, published in mid-2020 during the height of BLM, which had this passage I saved:
Do you remember Alan Kurdi? In September 2015, a harrowing photograph circulated. A three-year-old boy, Syrian, drowned and face down on a Turkish beach. He and his family had been trying to reach Greece.
For a brief moment, the world turned their full attention to the toddler and the atrocities he represented. Never mind that 250K had died already by then, now was the time to pay real attention and take action. The hashtag #RefugeesWelcome circulated, donations to the Red Cross spiked, and both the German and Austrian governments decided to open their borders.
And then? Then interest faded, donations dwindled, and governments turned their attention elsewhere. In short, our compassion was redirected or exhausted. The latter is almost the inevitable result of social media with its heightened emotion and endless feed. Meanwhile, bombs continued to fall on Aleppo, and Syrians continued to flee, and boats still floundered, and children drowned in the same sea. Just a year after his death, Alan’s father said, “My Alan died for nothing.”
Compassion is the enemy. In its vividness and high-color, in the delight it gives its exponent, in its brevity, compassion impedes enduring change. It is the least we should be able to provide as humans, the bare minimum, and as such, unworthy of celebration or mention.
The entirety of the corporate world was awash with sentiments of contrition… What meaning can be gleaned from such platitudes? Without accompanying action — enduring commitments that go beyond one-time donations or temporary offers to meet with black founders — this is rhetoric with the nutritional value of paper. The most charitable appraisal would be that these expressions are well-intentioned banalities. At worse, it is craven opportunism, marketing masquerading as conscience. Do we believe that capital allocators will make meaningful changes to their practices without additional pressure, without building systems that run without the intervention of compassion?
As we think of how we can move beyond empty sentiment, that, I would posit, is the true challenge. Not feeling more or undertaking some token, episodic deed, but constructing systems such that we don’t need to rely on the vagaries of compassion to do good. As the author, Chinua Achebe, said, “While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”
Just as technology has had a role to play in magnifying our flaws, so too should it be part of correcting them. Payment processors allow consumers to donate to charities on a recurring basis, avoiding the mental overhead required to recommit to a cause each month. Video games and virtual reality can reduce prejudice. Racist policing algorithms, like those previously used by the LAPD, can be amended or junked. Just as W.E.B Du Bois once did, data visualizations can be used to convey the scale of a problem in new, evocative ways.
Social media is a reflection of who we are, flaws included. But technology can be so much more, correcting for the bugs in our human software. My hope is that we may use it to find a road beyond compassion, eschewing the narrowness of Mother Teresa’s words. Kierkegaard described a poet as someone whose mouth was so formed that when they cried in pain, the world heard only music. We must recognize what it is to be a human: to have a pair of ears shaped such that we can hear the cries of a single person, yet be deaf to the cacophony of the many, still suffering.
Well… it’s not that any of that is exactly wrong, but… as a criticism of “compassion” (or “empathy” or whatever), this sort of thing has a “fifty Stalins” flavor. My view is that what we have (empathy-wise) is too much (specifically, too much of the wrong thing), not that it’s not enough.
Your comment reminded me tangentially of Mario Gabriele’s now-paywalled essay Compassion is the enemy, published in mid-2020 during the height of BLM, which had this passage I saved:
Well… it’s not that any of that is exactly wrong, but… as a criticism of “compassion” (or “empathy” or whatever), this sort of thing has a “fifty Stalins” flavor. My view is that what we have (empathy-wise) is too much (specifically, too much of the wrong thing), not that it’s not enough.