This is in response to a pithy tumblr post from a libertarian/rationalist blogger
“Compassion is a brand, and I’m not in its demographic.”
Which depicts compassion as a weak sentiment, trumpeted less because it’s a powerful philosophy, but more because it’s the last man standing whenever you pare away all the crazy ideologies that don’t mind trampling over humanity in their quest for purity and righteousness. We’ve all seen people with (and felt ourselves) under this sentiment “I sure don’t know who’s right in this situation, but well, that person looks sad or cute or weak and I just don’t feel comfortable letting them get hurt.”
At the most rational, this compassion-brand could be incorporated as this attitude of “left skepticism” http://oligopsony.tumblr.com/post/134837553428/left-skepticismhttp://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/134839526851/left-skepticism . At its least rigorous, well it’s what “charismatic megafauna” is to environmentalism. It’s judgment of important moral issues not by any deep commitment to principle or reasoned thought, but by a glandular reaction to big eyes and unblemished skin that is no better than our physical attractions or our fight or flight response. At its very worst it consistently values people who superficially look or appear more vulnerable over those who don’t, while depriving of us of any urgency to consistently do something about the state of the world and the reasons behind destructive conflict.
I can see why people consider that a brand, and why they might even be proud to not be a target of it.
But one can make a much better argument for compassion.
Humans are complex. In our fundamentally meaningless universe, it is as close to a “moral fact” as anything else that there is nothing like a human - be it in the fact of our sentience, or in the numerous complex systems that sustain us, or the wonderful emergent social systems we swim in. The closest are the other megafauna who are our close cousins, and they too are basically unique in that there is nothing in the universe like them.
Most ideologies fail in just how much they get wrong about humans. Patriarchical ideology fails when it stereotypes women because so many women obviously don’t fall into the categories they set up (and neither do many complicated men.) No matter how you try to categorize humans, there will be exceptions - and not just minor exceptions, but big significant ones, ones that make the whole categorization scheme sound unfalsifiable and meaningless.
Meritocratic ideologies (like capitalism) try to categorize people into the bags of useful or unskilled. Well that depends on what skills are useful in this context, how much motivation a human has to show this skill, whether you’re talking innate talent or practiced result, how they act under pressure or just on a test or being resourceful in a field or how good at communication they are to demonstrate their skill. Meritocracy itself is just another poor attempt at mapping messy humans.
Even the most fundamental categorizations - good and bad - fail when confronted with the complexity of humans. The worst murderer cares deeply about some people and goes out of their way to be kind to them and believes in their head that their crimes were part of a greater plan. And the most lauded saint has probably been cruel and petty to people, participates in economic systems that oppress others, and has moments of anger or weakness. Even the willfully evil few have reasons that led them to this choice, and have someone who loves them.
(Some very very few people may have none of this complexity. But this is such a small number that it is unlikely to come up in any day to day interaction you have. If you have a horrible encounter with a person and reduce them to “they are just crazy” then you are almost certainly wrong.)
There are cities inside each and every person. You can find the whole story behind why they like a certain book, or the mixture of emotions they feel when a certain person’s name is mentioned, or the dreams they gave up as they got older. There is not a person out there whose story would not enrapture you for hours if it was told in the right way. And all of them have felt such strong, overwhelming emotions as they experienced this story.
No one is just a caricature, a stereotype, a good guy or bad guy, a statistic, or a pariah to dump all of the problems of our ideology on. Humanism saves us from the many times we are tempted to see people that way.
Humanist compassion is about respect for that complexity. It’s the defense of complex things. Even if this human being may be a member of a bad group, or have done bad things, they still represent a unique object with a thousand facets. If this person is destroyed, then the universe will have been robbed of something that cannot be easily replaced.
It’s also respect on an emotional level, that takes advantage of the pathos we gain from hearing their stories, or looking in their eyes, and respecting “hey, there’s another creature there. Another thinking being. Just like me.” There is so much evil in the world that takes advantage of our emotional buttons - that uses our greed or our anger or our fear - that emotional reactions dedicated to this sympathy are a rare lifeline. We should treasure that there is at least one gland that pushes us in the direction of defending complexity.
As we exercise this emotion, as we learn to pull out people’s stories and emotions, we become better and more natural at using empathy on more and more people. This causes a virtuous cycle which makes us *better humanists*, much like rationalism should cause a similar cycle that makes you better at analyzing decisions each day.
You might also feel compassion for cities, grand works of art, social networks, or anything complex enough to evoke that same emotion for you. That is okay, because those things too are unique and difficult to replace too.
Note that one of the most powerful tropes in art is “humanizing the inhuman”, when the author takes something that is monstrous and simple, and adds little complex human details. What type of tea does Darth Vader like? How does Captain America feel towards his long lost best friend? What sort of music do the agents of Heaven and Hell most enjoy on Earth? How does the Devil mourn Heaven, or feel about the aesthetics of Hell? These sort of tropes break down genuinely inhuman, simple beings into complex beings that have a multiplicity of facets. And they are *fun as hell* and people can’t stop reading about them. (See, like, the entirely of a slash fiction archive.) We like adding even more complexity to our fictional constructs.
This is humanism is not just a “what do we have left when all commitments to ideals are stripped away”, but a proactive commitment to the defense of complex beings, that willfully interprets the whole world around “humans are messy, and every human really is special.”
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