Compassion Is Difficult

"Make no judgements where you have no compassion."

In the panoply of human virtues, compassion is one of the most highly-espoused by both great religious and secular leaders. It's worth mentioning that compassion is an emotional, physical response to the suffering of others, rather than a simple intellectual knowledge about the suffering and the decision to alleviate it. As such, compassion is something you feel, rather than something you decide to have.

But as with other human emotional virtues - e.g., love - we seldom discuss its obscure psychophysiological origins, or what can prevent us from feeling it. A 24-7 state of loving compassion for one's fellow man sounds 'enlightened' and like something to which we should aspire. However, no human being can sustain prolonged bursts of any emotion without becoming, to some degree, dysfunctional. After all, the function of an emotion is to compete with/overwhelm analytical step-by-step processing in an attempt to convey important information and generate a response. You could reasonably aspire to condition yourself to have a compassionate outlook that governs your behavior, but to want to feel compassion all the time seems undesirable. Such an outlook, though, would be an intellectual response, and subject to being overridden by any other emotion that presents itself.

In order to cultivate more true compassion (the emotional, physical response) we need to understand what triggers a feeling of compassion. Perhaps more importantly though, we should ask when don't we or can't we feel compassion for others? What barriers do we have that prevent us from displaying this virtue?

I relate the following story not because I'm particularly proud of or ashamed of my reaction, but because an honest examination of ourselves and our behaviors is a necessary step in advancing our own ability to behave morally... Yesterday morning I went into the store where I normally purchase a paper and a beverage. Upon entering the store at this early hour, I noticed a man at the cash register next to the entryway. It's unusual that anyone is in this store at this hour, and perhaps my gaze lingered a bit too long. He quickly moved toward me and loudly said 'What's your problem, lady?' By this time I had observed, in addition to the man's unkempt appearance and inappropriate reaction to my presence, that there were several dollar bills lying neatly side by side on the counter. (Aberrant behavior!)

My threat assessment was now telling me that this person was likely drunk and/or mentally-ill and off his medication. His judgment was likely impaired and his reaction to me could likely become more unpredictable/irrational. Had I been safely removed from the potential (however small) of being physically harmed by this person, I probably could have viewed him with compassion. But compassion never entered my mind as a thought or an emotion while this 5-second encounter was playing itself out.

Had I not been thinking about compassion for other reasons, I probably wouldn't have given much thought to this encounter. But I was, and so it occurred to me to wonder why, in spite of my assessment that this person was suffering in some very real sense, I did not/was not able to evoke compassion for him. Is compassion something we can only feel when we ourselves feel safe? Are we so hard-wired for self-preservation that a compassionate reaction to our fellow man can only happen in the absence of a perceived threat to ourselves? This may seem obvious in light of some of the things I discussed earlier, but if it is true, then we need to overtly acknowledge it in order to begin to move beyond it.

I spent a lot of time today thinking about this idea. Sadly, I found that it fits other instances where I have failed to behave compassionately towards other, or towards myself.

So if we then argue that the perception of a threat can keep us from behaving compassionately towards each other, then would reducing the level of threat that we perceive in/from the other allow us to respond more positively/compassionately? Would we default to a compassionate reaction to suffering in the absence of a perceived threat? Or is the absence of threat simply a necessary, but not a sufficient, precursor for a compassionate response?