Conscious Choice: Battling Compassion Fatigue

December 2001

Battling Compassion Fatigue

The pitfalls and promise of modern altruism

by Michael Hansen

When considered briefly, compassionate behavior looks like a real gyp. I mean, when you donate to charity, your wallet is that much lighter. Donating to a food bank depletes your own food stores. In fact, any extension or sharing with strangers not only involves the expenditure of precious energy and resources on our part, it can also sometimes put us at risk — either by drawing the attention of predators to our assets, or by our own good intentions being taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. Looked at objectively, altruism seems to make no sense at all when examined in the context of a Darwinian universe.

Actually, though, it makes perfect sense in contexts that have stood the test of time long before we humans made the scene. Many species depend on parental investment of precious time and energy on their helpless young. All such species are examples of the necessity for relative selflessness in ensuring that your genetic offspring carry your genes on past your own personal demise.

Selfless behavior toward the community is also easily explainable. It’s become increasingly obvious that the human species spent the majority of its existence as pack predators — as animals to whom submersion in the consensual goals and priorities of the tribe were vital to species survival. Concepts like heroism, or charity, or community were not abstracts or ideals — they were the day-to-day necessities for the continuing survival of the pack, the tribe. If the pack died, the personal survival of one or two scatterlings was almost inconsequential (unless they could form the nucleus of a new genetic hope, a new tribal beginning — a statistically unlikely prospect if there was any competitive pressure from competing genetic groups)

Even today, look at the advantages we have accrued from the survival of a stellar intellect like Stephen Hawkings, a man who would not have survived the onset of his degenerative condition in earlier times. But undoubtedly, love was sufficient reason to those early caregivers. More than one archeological dig has revealed the remains of people with disabling injuries, who apparently lived for long periods of time after being crippled — someone had to have fed them.

Yet the fact of a quantum leap from that basal tribal level remains, as witness the passengers on September 11’s Flight 93, who knew they were doomed, who had to be intellectually aware that their actions quite probably would not avail to save them — but who furiously assailed their hijackers in a last ditch effort to save people on the ground they had never met — an effort that succeeded. Similarly, firefighters and police officers from New York and around the country entered the fray without hesitation, and many of them paid with their lives for their dedication.

We call such behavior noble, and heroic, and so it is, by every standard. How do you explain those actions within a worldview that insists upon self-interest as the only possible rational motivation for any action? The answer: you can’t. Compassion is in the heart of us. In fact, our most dangerous glitch as a species may be in our ability to short-circuit the compassionate impulse. Other pack predators have instinctive submission rituals that (usually) forestall any in-group violence; that is, the group does not prey on itself. But humans intellectualize their interactions with the world. We are capable of demonizing members of our own species. Our history is filled with examples of genocide, terrorism, war, crime, and murder — pretty overt evidence that the urge to compassion was overcome on that particular day. In part, it was overcome by identification of a person or group as a member of the "Other." Human kindness is not automatically directed at outsiders, at those not part of a given group.

In ancient times, when communities were smaller, any act of kindness usually took place face-to-face, between people who knew each other. The emotional impact of the transaction was immediate and visceral. This was life in the group, and part of our social fulfillment as humans. As tribal groups and cultures grew and spread, they came into increased contact with people outside their group. Religious tenets arose, specifying that strangers be treated as one of your own, and that all men were brothers — and they worked, to some extent. They also demonstrated that, given the opportunity, we as a species want to lay down arms, give of ourselves, and live together in harmony.

Modern civilization is alienating, however: we live among masses of total strangers, with workloads and family structures that give us less and less time for community. Our main conduits to society are passive mass media that give us little chance of human interaction. After a hard day at work, how do you overcome your fatigue enough to make the extension to others around you? How do you reach out and fulfill the needs of a nameless face on the other side of a TV screen? When one needy person after another hits that screen, how do you sidestep compassion fatigue?

It’s easy to vilify Ted Turner and company for our current detachment from each other. As dependent as they are on sponsors for staying afloat financially, TV and other media have a duty to keep us enthralled rather than informed. The convenience of digesting news in sound bites lessens our ability to make an informed reaction. The mass media’s obsession with tragedy, and their ability to feed us a nonstop loop of the same disturbing images over and over again, desensitizes us and encourages inertia.

In addition, modern corporate culture has inserted many layers in between giver and givee. Many are suspicious of the hierarchical bureaucracies of suits that hover over many charities, and we wonder just how much of our hard-earned money actually gets through. Modern mass charities come to seem like one more facet of the corporate machine, an industry rather than a true expression of human kindness.

So what do you do? How do you give of yourself in a social climate like this? Here are some suggestions:

• Avoid the desensitizing video clip feedback loop the mass media insert over any global tragedy: "Kill your TV."

• Do your homework before opening your checkbook. Examine any mass charity carefully before donating money — find out exactly how much of it actually gets through to the needy.

• Add the most essential ingredient to your life: Community. Get involved, volunteer, and meet your neighbors.

The last is probably the most effective way to overcome compassion fatigue. Grassroots action on the regional level is proving to be the most effective method of involvement available to most Americans today. It also corresponds best to the way of our ancestors — you’ll know firsthand where your efforts are going, and you’ll see the effects every day in your own neighborhood.

Of course, that’s just a start. Human troubles are worldwide, and if we’re ever to achieve true transformation our efforts have to have global reach. But that doesn’t rule out local activism. Grassroots organizations are increasingly combining their efforts into blocs to tackle larger local and global issues, with surprising effectiveness. You should research carefully how you, your community, and your local organizations can plug into these global campaigns. Then comes the best part: Imagine a nation of groups like this, pooling their efforts, growing in numbers and power, helping more and more people in more and more places. Imagine the kind of world these efforts could create. Imagine justice and peace.

Nietzsche Wept

Part of the dilemma of altruism lies in the chance that you might be taken advantage of. In his classic book Sociobiology, E.O. Wilson points out that altruism and compassion arose in bands small enough that you knew all the members of your tribe — you would remember who had helped you, and who did not reciprocate kindnesses. Your reputation within the group also affected your odds of getting help. Compassion was a personal, intimate thing.

In modern, faceless, mass urban civilization, where nobody knows everybody, E.O. Wilson projected that the survival advantages of altruism would diminish while deceit and selfishness became more successful strategies. Could that process be underway today?

Let’s examine the case of Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout his career, Nietzsche espoused the ideal of the Superman, and of overcoming humanity’s narrow-minded embrace of earlier moral suppositions. He was ambivalent about the compassionate teachings of Western religions, simultaneously admiring Christian teachings of hospitality and deriding Christianity’s calls for pity and compassion as folly, as anti-life, and as a way of preserving weakness that should be winnowed from the gene pool.

He also raised the valid question: Is compassion a true extension to others, or an instinctive knee-jerk response mainly serving the emotional needs of the "altruistic" person? To Nietzsche, compassion was only credible if it sprang naturally from an overflowing expression of personal strength, rather than through following the morals of the herd.

Nietzsche has been damned by his association with the Nazis, by the fact that Hitler’s elite used Nietzsche as justification for genocide, for world conquest, for the cynically dishonest manipulation of their own people. Yet in the end Nietzsche exposed his true feelings to world.

On a cold winter day in Turin, not long before being confined to the mental institutions where he would spend the rest of his life, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a man beating his donkey. An ass, a beast of burden, the lowest of the low. A master punishing a piece of property, a thing that happened to be alive and capable of feeling pain — a scene that has been played out a million times in the history of the world. Nietzsche’s response was immediate and dramatic: he rushed forward and embraced the ass, shielding it from its master’s blows, weeping and sobbing uncontrollably in a paroxysm of spiritual agony.

The father of the Superman, in one of his last "sane" acts, gave way to uncontrollable compassion and pity for the helpless and suffering creatures of the world, embodied in this lowly donkey. In the end, the most influential moral philosopher of modern times reaffirmed the value of compassion: Nietzsche wept.

Further reading

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power and On the Genealogy of Morals

E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology

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