The Pity Party (7 page)

We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions . . . as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
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As Harold Macmillan could have warned Ms. Clinton, this business of answering unanswerable questions really is best left to archbishops.

Nothing in these gaseous fatuities can be taken seriously, much less as a fighting faith any sane person would risk his life for. Schlesinger voiced the hope that the ultimate salvation for any free society lies “in the kind of men it creates.” Unfortunately, he is far more detailed and persuasive in describing how the kind of men a free society creates are likely to imperil it than they are to rescue it. Democracy

dissipates rather than concentrates its internal moral force. The thrust of the democratic faith is away from fanaticism; it is toward compromise, persuasion and consent in politics, toward tolerance and diversity in society; its economic foundation lies in the easily frightened middle class. Its love of variety discourages dogmatism, and its love of skepticism discourages hero-worship. In place of theology and ritual, or hierarchy and demonology, it sets up a belief in intellectual freedom and unrestricted inquiry.
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The incongruity of a liberal intellectual regretting, like an exiled monarchist, the spurned value of dogmatism and hero worship suggests that liberals will be the last people to fight for Schlesinger's fighting faith. Skeptics don't join crusades. As historian Michael Kazin points out, all the triumphs of “liberal modernism” encourage self-expression and -discovery, not self-sacrifice and -denial: “the unchaining of sexual pleasure from procreation, the liberation of art and literature from the didactic imperative, empathy with ethnic and racial outsiders and an identification with the rougher aspects of life, space for women to choose their work and partners, the effective use of wit to skewer all that is pompous and powerful.”
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Again, expansive souls expand in some directions, not others. Liberals prize iconoclasm, but take for granted that other people's icons are the only ones that will ever get clasmed. Andres Serrano's
Piss Christ
got financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and its artistic merit was validated when it elicited Senator Jesse Helms's wrath. No artist has ever created, and no museum displayed,
Piss Mandela
.

Third, the specific qualities of the emotion of pity, as described by Rousseau, make it a problematic guide even for individual ethics, and a more dubious one still for political decisions affecting millions. His stipulation—it is in order not to suffer myself that I care about someone else's distress—takes us back to the dictionary's: compassion is usually a perturbation occasioned by, but distinct from, the suffering of another. The exception is if I feel your pain because it also happens to be my pain. This is, for example, the compassion within a support group of cancer patients. The rule is for me to be distressed by the awareness of your distress, which I do not experience except vicariously, and to respond, emotionally and possibly through actions, because of “the desire of my well-being in whatever place I feel my existence.”

The relation between my well-being and the abatement of your suffering is complicated, however. From one perspective, humans have grown more compassionate: as the world has become more densely interconnected, we've become aware of more people and their suffering than our ancestors were. I feel my existence in more places, that is, and it may abide there to address a longer sequence of follow-on sufferings. Max Ways, a
Fortune
editor, wrote in that publication in 1971:

At the time when St. Francis impulsively gave his fine clothes to a beggar, nobody seems to have been very interested in what happened to the beggar. Was he rehabilitated? Did he open a small business? Or was he to be found the next day, naked again, in an Assisi gutter, having traded the clothes for a flagon of Orvieto? These were not the sorts of questions that engaged the medieval mind. The twentieth century has developed a more ambitious definition of what it means to help somebody.
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It is not, however, an unalloyed advance to transport our well-being to more places, ones where our expansive souls assert squatting rights rather than practice drive-by empathy. The modern, more ambitious definition of what it means to help somebody may result in empathy that is hyperactive . . . but not necessarily hypereffective. The whole point of compassion is for empathizers to feel better when awareness of others' suffering causes disquieting pangs. This ultimate purpose does not guarantee that empathizees will
fare
better, however, and may be consistent with “remedial” actions that make their situation worse. Barbara Oakley, co-editor of the volume
Pathological Altruism
, defines its subject as “altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm.”
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Accidents and unintended consequences happen, of course. The pathology of pathological altruism is not the failure to bat 1.000, but the indifference—blithe, heedless, smug, or solipsistic—to the fact and consequences of those failures, just as long as the empathizer is accruing compassion points that he and others will admire. As philosopher and economist David Schmidtz has said, “If you're trying to prove your heart is in the right place, it isn't.”
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Fourth and finally, compassion is problematic not just because of its distinguishing emotional qualities but because of its general ones
as
an emotion. For one thing, emotions are reliably unreliable. It has been long accepted, for this reason, that moral and material progress depends at least as much on governing our emotions as on being governed by them. The Woodstock Ethic—if it feels good, do it—was, long ago now, given a test drive and rejected as a faulty basis for living an individual life. “The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen said of his decision to end a romantic relationship with Mia Farrow in order to have one with her adopted daughter. But the heart (like other organs) can't always get what it wants, and often shouldn't try.

The Woodstock Ethic's deficiencies as a political rule are even more severe. “The Judge's ‘Spirited Woman,'” by Mark Twain, tells the story of a frontier court that acquitted a man accused of murder, not because they doubted that he committed the crime, but because they found him and his situation sympathetic enough to rule out any harsher decision. Upon hearing the verdict, the murdered man's widow stood up in the courtroom, took out a pistol she had concealed, and shot the exonerated defendant dead. The court, being in session, decided that the extenuating circumstances of seeing her husband's murderer set free also compelled their sympathy, and acquitted the woman then and there before taking up a collection to help care for her orphaned children.

This, clearly, is no way to run a railroad. As journalist Mickey Kaus wrote in 1986, compassion “
is
mushy-headed” because “it provides no principle to tell us when our abstract compassionate principles should stop. We have compassion for the working poor. We have compassion for the unmotivated delinquent who would rather smoke PCP than work.”

Precisely because compassion “makes few distinctions,” a “politics based on mass-produced compassion leads naturally to the indiscriminate dispensing of cash in a sort of all-purpose socialized United Way Campaign.”
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The problem is not just that compassion is an emotion, whose variability makes it inherently unsuited to be a coherent, consistent, usable political principle. It is also that compassion is
an
emotion but not
the
emotion. We have others, several of which—including romantic passion, familial love, civic pride, patriotism, religious devotion, and concrete understandings about the requirements for decent conduct and honorable lives—make
many
distinctions.

We appear to be wired more for partiality than impartiality. Liberal compassion claims to be conforming to our emotional natures, but in asking us to manifest ever more extensive, ever less discriminating empathy, it sets itself against what comes naturally to anyone you or I have ever met. Empathy “extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species,” Lakoff insists. Other champions of compassion make similar claims, calling on us to “emotionally join a global family,” or summon a “global empathic consciousness.”
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Is any such enterprise possible? And if it is, will we admire or deplore the results? I'll start to examine those questions by considering liberal compassion at work on the broadest possible canvas.

Chapter 2

H
OW
E
XAMINING
L
IBERAL
C
OMPASSION IN A
G
LOBAL
C
ONTEXT
R
EVEALS
I
TS
I
LLOGIC

R
ecall, from the previous chapter, Paul Waldman's imaginary cancer survivor, Betsy Wilson. I'll see his vignette and raise it. Let me tell you about Mpinga Bomboku. He's also ten, and lives with his family in the slums of Kinshasa, where he rarely receives adequate nutrition, sees a doctor, or attends school. Mpinga's desperate plight is tragically common. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to Mpinga and 75 million other people, per capita gross domestic product in 2012 was about $400, according to the CIA World Factbook, making it the poorest country on the planet. Life expectancy in DRC is fifty-six years, and only 6 percent of the population is older than fifty-five.
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We can use World Factbook data to conduct a rough-and-ready thought experiment. It calculates “Gross World Product,” the GDP of the entire planet, to have been $85 trillion in 2012, which works out to $12,700 per person. A total of 51 nations have a per capita GDP less than $3,175, one-fourth of the world average. The 1.35 billion inhabitants of these countries account for 19 percent of the world's population, but the collective output of their economies amounts to less than 3 percent of GWP. If those 51 countries united into one—let's call it Poorlandia—its per capita GDP would be $1,875. By contrast, just over 1 billion people live in Australia, Canada, the European Union's twenty-eight nations, Japan, and the United States. That 14 percent of the world's population accounts for 48 percent of global GDP, which works out to $40,700 per person, nearly three and a half times the world average, almost 22 times more than Poorlandia's, and more than 100 times greater than the Democratic Republic of the Congo's.

It the wealthy nations named above—“Richistan”—were to transfer $1.75 trillion to the poorest countries just identified, every one of the latter could be brought up to a per capita GDP of $3,175. For the sake of the argument assume, against abundant and bitter experience, this foreign aid package is all spent honestly and effectively. The number of lives that would be improved—the amount of suffering that would be alleviated—is extraordinarily large. For all that, the program is quite limited in important respects. Put simply, it would reduce but not end global poverty. For one thing, a per capita GDP of $3,175 goes only so far. Poorlandia's new standard of living would still be significantly below that of countries not widely considered prosperous, including Uzbekistan ($3,600 GDP per person), the Philippines ($4,500), and Guatemala ($5,200). Nor, relatedly, would the $1.75 trillion transfer from Richistan do anything for the hundreds of millions of extremely poor people who reside in nations such as India ($3,900 GDP per capita) and Egypt ($6,700). And while the eternal hope of foreign aid programs is that the donated money will have a catalytic effect, the history of such aid argues that the assisted economies are likely to need assisting for a very long time. The $1.75 trillion transfer, then, is more plausibly viewed as an ongoing program, likely to be repeated every year for decades to come, than as a onetime corrective.

How much would an annual $1.75 trillion transfer cost Richistan? Viewed in one way, as an amount slightly greater than 4 percent of its GDP, it sounds modest enough. That works out to about $1,750 from each Richistani, however, or $7,000 for a family of four, which need not be economically debilitating but sounds like a serious political challenge, given that all the member states of Richistan are democracies. They are not, moreover, equally prosperous. America's per capita GDP in 2012, $50,700, is 17 percent greater than Australia and Canada's, 37 percent more than Japan's, and 44 percent greater than the European Union's. Apportion the $1.75 trillion transfer to reflect those differences, and the United States winds up contributing $687 billion. This sum equals 19.4 percent of the federal government's actual outlays in 2012, and would have amounted to $2,170 per American.

The U.S. contribution, $687 billion, is also 31 times greater than the $21.9 billion the federal government really did spend on “international development and humanitarian assistance” in 2012, six-tenths of one percent of all federal outlays that year. Lest that sliver be construed to result from heartless cuts demanded by xenophobic congressional Republicans, it should be noted that the Obama administration's 2014 budget neither calls for nor anticipates outlays on such development and assistance programs exceeding $26 billion in any year through 2018, as far into the future as it casts its gaze.
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Alleviating suffering is central to liberalism's understanding of what politics is about—indeed, of what life is about. Given the enormity of the suffering caused by extreme poverty around the world, one might expect Democratic candidates, MSNBC hosts, and
New York Times
editorialists to devote more bandwidth to demanding massive transfers from the Global North to the Global South than to all their other crusades combined. In reality, the suffering of the wretched of the earth is material for footnotes and appendices, a subject mentioned in passing amid denunciations of those who would stifle programs intended to reduce suffering in America. A context and a purpose explain Waldman's stipulation that Betsy Wilson's parents were a waitress and a carpenter. At the time his article appeared, Congress was arguing over whether federal assistance in securing children's health insurance would continue to be restricted to families ineligible for Medicaid and with incomes no more than twice the poverty line, as Republicans wanted, or funded at a level that would permit states to enroll families with incomes that were three or in some cases 3.5 times greater than the poverty line, the Democratic position. The savagery Waldman denounced, then, was aimed at resisting the extension of a welfare state program to families who, in one of the richest nations in the world, were making more than the median income.
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