Hannah Arendt on the failure of empathy and compassion
They make real political thinking impossible
One of the major political thinkers of the last century (she died in 1975), Hannah Arendt is one of those more often quoted (especially her remark in Eichmann in Jerusalem about “the banality of evil”) and invoked than read closely. A German Jew who fled Germany in 1933 after being imprisoned by the Gestapo, she came to America in 1941 and became an American citizen in 1950. The publication of the long study The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 made her a major intellectual. Her understanding of the problem with empathy is explained by Peter Baehr in his introduction to The Portable Hannah Arendt.
When faced with immense suffering or misfortune, our most natural response to it is compassion. When Robespierre, Saint-Just, and others among the Jacobins were confronted by the "social question" in all its terrible reality, they went one step further, elevating compassion to the highest political virtue. Since no question seemed more in need of solving than immiserization, no virtue appeared more important than the emotional identification with those unhappy ones whom society had for so long cast into obscurity and squalor.
The problem with this formulation, however humanly understandable in itself, was that it encouraged a dangerously antipolitical stance. Politics, as distinct from violence, requires spaces that separate people from one another, just as a table separates those who sit around it. Without such distance and divisibility, people are unable to act as plural persons.
In contrast, compassion is an emotion that compresses the space between people the more insistently it demands that those who do not suffer join the ranks of those who do. From such a morally outraged standpoint, particular interests are considered divisive and selfish, an impediment to "unity"; similarly, differences of opinion are reckoned to be little more than perverse obstacles to the smooth operation of the general will, which as a "will" must be sovereign, not divided, if it is to act at all.
Consent must simply be assumed, not built out of plural, contending, fractious views and perspectives. All efforts must be trained on solving the social question. Moreover, the reflexes that accompany this solution "will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics" in favor of the "swift and direct action" for which violence is the most compelling instrument. If individuals have to be sacrificed in the pursuit of compassion, then this is a price worth paying for "justice" and liberation. . . .
[C]ompassion is a matter of changing mood and sensation rather than something stable like a physical artifact or visible like a human deed, even its exponents can never feel certain of whether they are paragons of empathy or just phonies in disguise. The result is an even greater desire to demonstrate their feelings as unfeigned and to continue a cycle of behavior that is at once bloody and self-destructive.
For Arendt, the opposite of compassion is not cynical indifference to the plight of those who suffer, but rather solidarity and respect, principles that may be occasioned by an emotion, but which in their generalized concern for human dignity (of the fortunate and of the unfortunate alike), their rejection of condescension and self-righteousness, their realism and sense of perspective offer superior resources for dealing with oppression and exploitation than the passions and sentiments of the heart.
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