What is compassion?

When I first started reading this interview with a conservative writer, I thought I would object to what he said. But as I read it I am finding that at least some of what he saying is what I have been thinking.

Although it's amusing to hear this from a conservative, since George W. Bush ran against "reality based" politics.

www.salon.com/2014/11/06/right_wingers_no_compassion_crusade_conservative_writer_william_voegeli_unloads/?source=newsletter

Nov 6, 2014
Elias Isquith

Way back in 2012, during that simpler, gentler time for liberals and Democrats, President Barack Obama secured a second term in the White House by clearly defeating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote. Coming after a first term characterized by financial disaster, near-unprecedented polarization and rampant economic and social inequality, this was quite an accomplishment. Perhaps most amazing of all, he did this despite voters ranking his opponent as superior on nearly every issue.

But here’s the thing: The one issue where voters clearly preferred Obama was a big one, perhaps the biggest there is. According to an exit poll from ABC (but whose results were echoed in the polling of other organizations), voters told pollsters that they considered President Obama overwhelmingly more likely to care about “people like me.” How overwhelmingly? The point-gap between Romney and Obama on the issue was no less than 63. Most Americans, in other words, chose Obama despite being lukewarm about his record, and did so in part because they believed he had a greater capacity for empathy.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to find that the concept of empathy has lost considerable favor among conservatives since 2012 (although, to be fair, it was never their top priority). But while we’ve seen rants in Breitbart or the New York Post about the folly of empathy, we hadn’t seen the argument put forward much by a more learned member of the conservative movement. And this is where “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion,” a new book from the conservative author and Claremont Review of Books editor William Voegeli, comes in.

In order to hear why “no compassion” should be treated as a political mantra (and not just a great Talking Heads song), Salon recently spoke with Voegeli over the phone. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

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The link I attempt to make is that part of the problem is embedded right in the idea of compassion itself. It’s a word derived from Latin that means, literally, to suffer together. I think it’s that “together” that’s tricky, because in the theorizing of, say, Rousseau, compassion becomes a good basis on which to organize a modern society because it gives people an incentive to care about the well-being of others. Your suffering causes a response in me, an internal agitation, and now I have a reason to address your problems. I feel miserable about your hunger or sickness or homelessness or whatever, and because of that bad feeling I have, something must be done.

Where I think this kind of compassion lends itself to bad governance is that if the motivation for doing some thing is, “Gosh, I feel terrible about seeing you in such a bad state,” then it’s terribly, dangerously easy for the resolution of that tension to be, “Let’s do something so I don’t feel so bad anymore,” and instead of focusing on helping the person inspiring this empathy feel better, it’s all about the empathizer feeling better. That’s not so good, and I think this is why there is, in many respects, if you look at the overall liberal project in this country, a weird complacency about things not working out very well, about programs being expensive, about them being poorly targeted, etc.

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The point of the book is not that we’d be better off if we were less compassionate, but that we have to understand compassion’s limitations, one of which is that it tends to react to the evidence right in front of it and to work against the long-term liberation that more effective and wise policymaking requires.

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