Conscious Choice: Intelligent Compassion

December 2001

Intelligent Compassion

What the world needs now

by Mark Harris

But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
— George Orwell, 1943

In the dazed aftermath of September 11, watching many New Yorkers walk around or stand on corners with pictures of lost loved ones, I was reminded of the old news photos I used to see of Iranian funerals or demonstrations. They were from the days of Iran’s war with Iraq or earlier when the shah held the country in his grip. Invariably the photos would show a distraught relative, surrounded by a crowd on a Teheran or Shiraz or some other city street, as they held up photos of a martyred son, lost to a land mine in the early‘80s war; or an activist daughter tortured into oblivion by the shah’s secret police. The mourners were orphaned children, weeping mothers, or widowed spouses and they would march and cry or clasp the photos to their chests, public emblems of their family sacrifice, pride, and grief.

Now, this fall, grief and injustice came to America. Our streets became boulevards of sorrow, buckling pavements straining under the heat of our rage and anguish. Three or four days after the attacks, I saw a young woman on the news, standing quietly on a Manhattan street corner, as she held up an enlarged photo of her missing father. There she stood in silent vigil, to tell the world of the one she loved, the one now vanished. A person who lives only in cold reason might have considered her actions ludicrous. What hope could she possibly have? Yet we all understood. This must be done. Our compassion was innate.

I had to remind myself in the weeks to come how much compassion actually existed. How many sung and unsung stories of heroism, courage, and caring were played out in the chaos and fear of those mad hours. I was also fighting a more acute feeling in myself, one that spoke in a cold whisper of a voice, telling me that justice and compassion had become poorer neighbors in a human community now thoroughly dominated by brutality and madness. It was actually an old feeling in me, one I first contracted as a teenager suddenly aware of the depth of the American holocaust in Vietnam. Now that old, bleak feeling was rearing up again, like a once dormant virus now resurgent. The chief symptom was despair.

I felt better when I thought about the far away soccer game where thousands of Iranians had held a moment of silence for the Americans. Or the letter writer in China, who wrote, "Today, we are all Americans." I recalled something I had read once in historian Riane Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure, about how even in the darkest of historical times, whether it was the persecuted days of the Inquisition or the madness of Nazi Germany, there were always those human beings who resisted, who refused to let their humanity slide into the abyss. Who in the privacy of their lives, continued to laugh and to love, or to tenderly tuck a child into bed with a kiss. Somehow they held onto their compassion, even as the life around them sank into a ground zero of violence and hatred.

The limits of individual compassion

In this world individual compassion is everything. And it is also nothing. It is everything that gives us hope, everything that helps us to believe in the ultimate power of life to triumph. How many times in some solitude of despair has the compassion of others turned me around? It is not always even compassion directed toward me that does it, just evidence of compassion somewhere. The innate, everyday compassion that surrounds me is where I carve the initials of the life and the justice I believe in. It is the granite stone of my faith. Yet in the face of the systematic cruelty of an oppressive political order, or of a violent, hateful ideology, individual compassion alone is never enough.

In a sense, compassion is a form of service. But it is more than just a giving of yourself to others. It is a process at the highest level of coming to an understanding of the world. For our innate compassion to have weight in the world, I believe, it must become intelligently, socially directed, compassion threaded and woven into a mosaic of higher understanding. In today’s world that means understanding why planes are flown into buildings. It means understanding the rivers of animosity that course through Third World hearts for First World policies. It means understanding why fear and violence prevail as weapons and as policies, not only directed from remote mountain caves but from the loftiest corridors of government power.

As I write, it has been weeks since the September 11 atrocities. Last Sunday, I bought a copy of the New York Times, an occasional habit that in the weeks following our September infamy became more regular. Mostly, I wanted to read something besides the crude hyperbole of certain Chicago newspapers. Unfortunately, the Times wasn’t much better. But as I scanned the news, there they were again, those faces. They stop me cold. They are the photos and biographies of New Yorkers lost in the World Trade Center. Week after week they have run, reminding us of what we have really been talking about.

On this day I read about Courtney Wolcott, a thirty-seven-year-old financial manager, a divorced man who longed for children of his own. How Mr. Wolcott would drive twice a week to Queens to mentor young boys at his church. I read about Cindy Duel, a twenty-eight-year-old executive assistant who had made it her project to trace back her family tree. Ms. Duel was even considering starting her own genealogy research business. Such a catalogue of dreams there must have been among the thousands.

The sense of violation from September 11 will linger, I know. Like an arterial wound, it cuts deep and will have to be carefully attended as it slowly heals. I find myself thinking hard about a lot of issues. I think about the pathologies of terrorism, war, and hatred. I find myself pondering British writer Martin Amis’ recent pointed remarks on the American character. Writing in The Guardian, Amis declared that our extreme cultural self-reliance, fierce patriotism, and what he described as an insidious geographical incuriosity had left the American people with "a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away."

I also find my thoughts going back a lot to other bereaved days, to ten years ago and the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm, when our own country wreaked havoc and death upon the people of Iraq. In the Gulf War my compassion and pain were as real then as they were on September 11. But some of my friends cheered. Or they made glib, facile remarks about what a monster Saddam Hussein was, as if that alone were all the war was about.

These were kind, good-hearted people, individuals who would never knowingly inflict harm on another. Yet many of them were content then to blandly accept the mass slaughter of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi people, simply because their government and a compliant media served up a loud, monolithic, one-sided drumbeat of our virtue and their evil. The American people are a compassionate people, I believe. But their legitimate compassion was deceived then. Most Americans were not aware that the Bush administration had closed the door on any diplomatic solution, which remained a realistic (if not publicized) alternative right up to the moment of the first U.S. air strikes. And many accepted that the Gulf War was about liberation and about democratic values, despite the fact that Kuwait, before and after it was "liberated," continued to be ruled by a corrupt, dictatorial elite that denied women the right to vote and gave men nothing to vote for.

We chose to believe that our venerable ally of many years, Saddam Hussein, had to be taught a lesson. But if the class were titled the Rights of Nations 101, then this lesson was devoted to teaching small nations to do as you were told, show obsequious respect for world imperial powers, and accept our long-standing hold over the terms of sale of the region’s most precious resource, oil.

The high-minded morality justifying Operation Desert Storm also hid a more sordid foreign policy reality. The Reagan-Bush administration had long defended the monster Hussein, because he was "our" monster. That is, he was a dutiful regional ally. But like Frankenstein, this monster developed a mind of his own. He also had American weapons and money, happily supplied to him in the early 1980s by Reagan and Bush, who were then also doling out weapons, money, and training to the motley and early incarnation of the Bin Laden/Taliban elements in Afghanistan. (The "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan were only killing Russians then, or Afghanis who believed in the right of females to be educated. They must have seemed a safe bet.)

The dead then were young soldiers obliterated by bombs dropped in assembly line fashion from the elevated safety of the skies. Or teenage boys buried alive in their desert bunkers, asphyxiated by rampaging American bulldozers. Or children and women blown up as they sought shelter in Baghdad basements. Or the ill and wounded in hospitals hit by flying American missiles. The dead also included the hundreds of thousands who suffered a slow misery of deprivation caused by our own government’s calculated efforts to embargo and undermine the country’s economy. Some of them were victims of a concerted covert effort to degrade Iraq’s water treatment system, precipitating a public health disaster and a precipitous ten-year rise in infant and child mortality. Irony was not a victim. Hussein the monster survived and prospered.

Where was our American compassion then? Largely, it was buried under a mountain of media disinformation. We lived in a manufactured reality of pre-processed, fast food thought, suitable mainly for drive-through consumption. Our compassion was manipulated then until we could barely discern the anguish and fear of the ordinary people of Baghdad — an anguish and fear not unlike that of people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania.

Grief is gathering here

Earlier this year I happened to follow the story of a young Evanston woman, a popular Stanford University student who had disappeared over the summer, only to be found dead a couple of weeks later. She was apparently a very popular and intelligent young woman, a passionate environmentalist and writer for the Stanford student newspaper. Her many friends had organized a massive search for her, believing she might be lost and in trouble in the hills and mountains of the Bay Area. But this young woman had killed herself.

Even though I did not know her, I felt a jolt of pain when I read the news that her body had been discovered. Only a year before a second cousin of mine had also disappeared in the remote South Bay mountains near San Jose. Bobby, too, had been the subject of a wide search. Depressed, there was speculation that perhaps he had taken his own life. But Bobby was also epileptic and when his body was found weeks later, the police concluded he had most likely suffered a seizure.

I felt for this young woman who was a stranger to me, as I felt for my funny and gentle cousin. I thought about all the broken-heartedness surrounding their deaths. A few days later, the newspaper announced a memorial service at an Evanston church for the young woman. The church is on a street I often take on my way downtown, and a day or two later I happened to be driving by in the late afternoon. My mind was elsewhere and as I drove past I noticed people were arriving for an event. I quickly realized this must be the memorial service for the young woman.

I thought about attending the service, but felt like an outsider and didn’t want to intrude. Instead I just said a silent prayer for her spirit. Ahead, a car was moving along very slowly, the driver obviously looking for a parking space. I tend to be an impatient driver, but I let it slide. I knew the driver was attending the service.

Suddenly from behind came the blast of a horn, repeated long and again. I could feel the anger in the blast. The driver behind me was fed up and on his way somewhere fast, with no patience for someone crawling along looking for a place to park on a normally quiet street. I thought to myself, "you don’t understand. This is a street of prayer and mourning now. Grief is gathering in this place. Let it go."

Now the avenues of America have become wide with grief while missiles blast fire on a remote, terrified people a world away. The commentators declare that the terror attacks on September 11 changed forever the landscape of American culture. Perhaps they are right. Albert Einstein expressed a similar thought in 1945 when the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, the great scientist remarked that everything in the world had changed, except for one thing — the way we think. Human consciousness remained trapped in divisive mindsets of nations and classes, ensnared in the insidious mythology that war and brute force could create true, lasting justice. In addition to being a socialist, Einstein was also an optimist; he believed that true spiritual liberation would eventually help us transcend the dissonant, competitive ethics of capitalism.

Speak to me about justice

Whether Einstein will be proved right, I do not know. But I do know I am weary now of all the talk of geo-political strategies, global alliances, and military lines of attack. It is as if the whole world is entangled in an endless, mad cycle of strategic interests and retribution and threats and holier-than-thou propaganda.

If you want to speak to me now, tell me instead of your vision for humanity, of your hope for lifting up a world of impoverished, politically powerless people. Don’t talk to me about bringing back old monarchs or forming strategic fronts by allying with thugs and terrorists who oppose the thugs and terrorists we fear. Don’t tell me why we have to send tens of thousands of desperate, starving people fleeing in panic from their homes while we drop bombs on their homeland in pursuit of criminals.

Tell me, instead, what we can do to support the rights of Afghani women to organize in their own voice, to chase away their male oppressors, and to gain social, economic, and political power equal to the demands that life puts upon them. Talk to me about ways we can help the people of Afghanistan create their own vibrant democracy, organized from the ground up, and committed to ensuring the integrity of their human rights.

Speak to me now about hope, about economic prosperity and how to spread it, about a universal standard for human rights and democracy. Tell me how you support the right of every person in the world to work and live in peace, that you see the need for revolutionary changes in a global economy that leaves nearly a billion people without enough food to eat. And — please, speak to me about this: tell me you don’t want to kill children whether they are sitting in airplanes, cowering in stone homes, or languishing in refugee camps. Tell me how you despise the language of "collateral damage," how you see through political equations that leave some innocent lives worth less than others.

Tell me you believe it is possible, at least, to dream the dream that the men with the guns are mocking: the brokenhearted dream of an end to all war. Tell me you believe in genuine justice for ourselves and for every precious life on this earth. Tell me these things so I can see your compassion unfurled in humanity, in magnificence. Tell me these things and we will find a way to honor, truly, the memory of the dead.

And we will speak, together, a language we can all understand.

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