The Pity Party (4 page)

Conservatives, by contrast, are so “blinded by their antigovernment ideology” that a “junior high school debater could rip apart the Republican [presidential] candidates and their outdated attacks on ‘socialized medicine.'” Waldman demonstrates conservatism's appalling imbecility with a hypothetical but richly imagined suffering situation, and the Right's odious refusal to mitigate it. “[L]et me tell you about Betsy Wilson,” he begins.

She's 10, and her parents both work hard—mom is a waitress, dad is trying to build a carpentry business. But like millions of Americans, they can't afford health coverage, so Betsy doesn't get the doctor visits she needs. Now we [Democrats] want to give the Wilsons the opportunity to get health coverage for Betsy, so she can stay healthy and they won't be bankrupted if she gets sick again. But you [Republicans] say no. Did I mention that Betsy had a rare form of cancer when she was 6? She's in remission now, thank heavens, but the Wilsons worry every day that it could come back. And those HMOs you like so much won't cover her because they think it might cut into their profits. . . . How can you look at Betsy and say, sorry, too bad—you can't have health coverage? What kind of a person says that to a child?
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Finally, in 2009, George Lakoff defended the nobility of empathy and its centrality to progressivism. Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, attained unusual fame for an academic when his book
Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
figured prominently in the discussions about how Democrats could improve upon their disappointing performance in the 2004 election. His article five years later defended President Obama for nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, rebutting critics who charged that both of them thought judges should rule according to how much they sympathized with each party to the case, rather than confine themselves to following the dictates of law and justice.

Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others—not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one's countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species. Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice.

Progressives care about others as well as themselves. They have a moral obligation to act on their empathy—a social responsibility in addition to personal responsibility, a responsibility to make the world better by making themselves better. This leads to a view of a government that cares about its citizens and has a moral obligation to protect and empower them. Protection includes worker, consumer, and environmental protection as well as safety nets and health care. . . .
⁹

Leo Strauss, the German professor of political philosophy whose career in America made him both influential and controversial, insisted it was a grave mistake to presume to understand important political philosophers
better
than they understood themselves unless one had already completed the exertions required to understand them
as
they understood themselves. The most common form of such misinterpretations was to reduce a philosophy to an expression or rationalization of historical circumstances, economic interests, or psychological conflicts.
¹⁰

I submit that Strauss's advice is highly useful, not just for the exegesis of classic treatises but for laymen who want to make sense of the world, and get along in it. It's a bad idea, that is, to take the position that your own reading, training, or keen intelligence equips you to see through other people's opinions, discerning the true meanings, purposes, and desires hidden even from them (or perhaps especially from them) behind the surface of their own words. Such an approach is all but guaranteed to both read and rub people the wrong way.

There's a problem, though, with attempting to understand liberal compassion exactly as its adherents do: the advocates and practitioners of this position insist there's really nothing
to
understand. Take literally President Obama's assertion that kindness covers all his political principles, and one must conclude that the philosophers and statesmen who have labored for centuries in the belief that politics is supremely difficult and important have been wasting their time. Apparently, all one really needs to know about politics can be learned in kindergarten. If, as Lakoff contends, “[e]mpathy is at the heart of progressive thought,” and the distinguishing characteristic of progressives is that they “care about others as well as themselves,” it follows that all who are neither monsters nor idiots are empathetic progressives, and all who are not progressives are either monsters or idiots. (Interviewing William F. Buckley Jr. in 2004, the
New York Times
asked brightly, “You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?” Buckley replied, “I do not advertise adversity and would certainly not talk about visits with psychiatrists or proctologists.”)
¹¹

There is one significant but also highly qualified exception to this general rule that liberal compassion is a- or even anti-theoretical. Nicholas Kristof, yet another
New York Times
columnist imploring Americans to be more empathetic—“compassion isn't a sign of weakness, but a mark of civilization”—cites
A Theory of Justice
, the 1971 book by John Rawls, the subject of numberless dissertations and colloquia. (Rawls, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, died in 2002 at the age of eighty-one.) In Kristof's summary, Rawls urges us to organize society, and in particular the distribution of wealth, as we would if forced to make our decisions “from behind a ‘veil of ignorance'—meaning we don't know whether we'll be born to an investment banker or a teenage mom, in a leafy suburb or a gang-ridden inner city, healthy or disabled, smart or struggling, privileged or disadvantaged.”
¹²
Were we to reason and govern on that basis, Rawls argued, we would be utterly risk-averse, making sure that the poorest person in our society was as un-poor as possible. That standard of justice does not mandate absolute economic equality—it may be better to have the smallest share of a larger economic pie than an equal share of a smaller one—but does require that any inequality be tolerated if, but only if, it benefits the very poor, as might financial incentives that spur inventors or medical researchers.
¹³

There is a sense, then, in which it can be said that compassionate liberals are Rawlsians.
A Theory of Justice
takes nearly six hundred pages to delineate seemingly every possible implication and application of the adage “There but for fortune go I,” the Empathizer's Credo. Every liberal I've ever met, however, was a practitioner of Rawlsianism in the same way Molière's Monsieur Jourdain was a speaker of prose: it's what both had been doing all along. It is, for example, exactly how Robert Kennedy described (years before Rawls's book was published) the social conscience his father had imparted. We, the comfortable,
are
comfortable “through no virtues and accomplishments of our own.” The realization by the fortunate that they could easily have wound up as the unfortunate is the basis for a social conscience and the social responsibility it impels.

As a social scientist might put it, the correlation between any given liberal's commitment to compassion and his familiarity with Rawls appears to be zero. If that empirical observation is correct, then Rawls has nothing like the influence on the politics of compassion that Karl Marx did on the politics of the Russian Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau did on the French Revolution, or John Locke on the American Revolution. Mathematicians and logicians worked through hundreds of pages of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's
Principia Mathematica
before getting to its declaration that 1+1=2. However important or persuasive the argument, the conclusion is not one about which either readers or nonreaders were otherwise in doubt. So, too, for
A Theory of Justice
and the politics of kindness.

Compassion, known throughout most of human history as the emotion of pity, became a virtue, in part, because of some distinctively modern ideas. Sensibilities are often more powerful than syllogisms, however, and compassion's ascendance tracks with the many ways quotidian life in advanced, prosperous societies has been altered, setting it apart from everything humans had known before. The experience and perception of suffering was, until quite recently in our history, utterly familiar and inescapable. The philosophically inclined faced it with stoic resignation, and the religiously devout beseeched God for deliverance from it, the strength to endure it, or the grace to consecrate it. We, by contrast, take for granted anesthesia, medical care that removes the deathbed from the home to the hospital, and meals served in comfortable cities and suburbs where the slaughterhouse or farmer's ax lies beyond every diner's ken. The gradual but inescapable effect of such day-to-day lives is to view suffering as an anomaly, an affront, and an outrage. Thus understood, our moral duty is to eliminate or at least mitigate suffering, rather than practice or counsel forbearance.

It does not adequately clarify the politics of compassion, however, to say it rests on our instincts, refined by life in a world where suffering is increasingly incongruous and therefore increasingly objectionable. It appears an unfortunate necessity to attempt to understand compassion better than its adherents do, rather than limit ourselves to understanding it as they do. That better understanding calls for viewing compassion in the context of Christendom's demise, which was brought about by the Reformation and Enlightenment. In the long centuries before these latter developments, European civilization possessed a moral and teleological unity. That is, men shared—or were made to share—a comprehensive, highly elaborated understanding of how to live, and what to live for.

The fact of this shared understanding was as important as its content. There was, so to speak, a shared understanding of the necessity
for
a shared understanding if a society, or civilization, was to function and be worth preserving. In this respect, Christendom was no different from any other premodern civilization. The idea that individual members of a society should be allowed to order à la carte from various beliefs, practices, and worldviews had not yet been advocated or attempted. The wars that devastated Europe through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so ferocious because all the combatants, Catholic and Protestant, took for granted the absolute necessity of a moral and teleological unity, which meant that allowing the wrong one to prevail would be worse than any amount of death and destruction.

Or maybe not, people started to think. To get past all that bloodshed to a safer—saner—historical epoch required a new political orientation, which “would no longer concern itself with God's politics,” in historian Mark Lilla's words, but concentrate instead on preventing men “from harming one another.”
¹⁴
The exhaustion and despair brought on by unrelenting savagery left Europeans receptive to a—really the—distinctively modern idea: perhaps people
could
live together without a shared understanding. Or, to be more precise, they could scale back a comprehensive shared understanding, where every aspect of human affairs was governed by a detailed conception of how God ordered the cosmos, in favor of a sharply delimited understanding. People could, in this new dispensation, live side by side while agreeing to disagree. Such modern concepts as the separation of church and state, the freedom of conscience, and inalienable human rights flow directly from this principle. All of them seem so obviously right to twenty-first-century Americans or Europeans that people around the world who never abandoned the commitment to a comprehensive shared understanding, such as Muslim jihadists, seem, as they say of the highest mountains climbed by the Tour de France cyclists, “beyond category.” Even to embark on an effort to understand these pre- or anti-moderns as they understand themselves is hopeless, since almost all moderns who try are people who have never entertained the possibility that modernity's basic precepts are anything other than self-evidently true.

In the Federalist Papers (No. 10), James Madison praises America's new Constitution as “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” We may say, in the same sense, that modern political philosophy is animated by the quest for a modern remedy for the diseases most incident to modernity. There's no going back to Christendom, in other words, or to any other cosmologically rooted civilization. We have to make modernity work.

That may not be easy, because the diseases most incident to modernity are not inconsiderable. If we're going to agree to disagree, we're going to have to get specific. What are we agreeing to, and what are we leaving aside as things we can safely disagree about? This is the subject of the social contract, examined by many of the most famous modern political philosophers. That contract needs not only to be drawn up and accepted, however, but obeyed. Such compliance, by both governors and the governed, will be difficult absent a powerful sense of rectitude: if people abuse or cheat one another whenever they think they can get away with it, the contract will either become null and void as we descend into anarchy, or its enforcement will require a government so strong and intrusive that its powers are effectively plenary, and the contract worthless.