So says the dry-eyed Clifford Orwin, who recently slipped into Washington from the University of Toronto to deliver, at the American Enterprise Institute, a lecture titled “Moist Eyes: Political Tears from Rousseau to Clinton.” Read it and weep.
Once upon a time, political philosophers thought primarily about institutions and how to improve them. Then came Rousseau, who changed the subject. His subject was moods and feelings. Thus was born the politics of sentimentalism and the cult of compassion. Such politics requires histrionic sincerity, complete with tears, in the expression of compassion.
Orwin admires Rousseau’s genius more than the results of that genius. Rousseau’s daring project was the invention of a new morality suited, or so Rousseau thought, to a democratic age. Rousseau understood that such an age would be receptive to the egalitarian idea that standards of goodness should be relaxed.
The new standards should be less demanding than those espoused by the ancient philosophers and their followers. The less exacting standards for a democratic age would be satisfied by behavior less strenuous than fidelity to the stern old virtues, such as self-sacrifice and self-denial, virtues that require self-control. From now on, the self would overflow.
The problem with virtues as understood by the likes of Aristotle is that they require us to act against many impulses of our nature. That is difficult, so not everyone can do it as well as everyone else. It would be better, more egalitarian–more democratic–to redefine virtuousness as doing what comes naturally. So goodness can be defined as the spontaneous feeling of compassion in response to the suffering of others.
The problem with virtues as the ancient philosophers understood them is that virtues are the result of habituation. So some people - well brought up people, sometimes called ladies and gentlemen–have more of them than other people.
You see the problem: If virtues are largely the result of artifice–of nurturing–then what becomes of the most important dimension of egalitarianism, an equal entitlement to self-esteem? Surely equality must encompass the equal right of everyone to feel good about himself or herself. Hence Rousseau’s revolutionary insight: a democratic morality must be based on capacities broadly distributed across mankind–compassion and sincerity.
Compassion turns out to be a form of self-flattery. This is so because we respond to the suffering of others by being sensitized through our own experience of suffering. As our relentlessly self-referential president might put it, I feel your pain because I feel mine. And the negative experience of suffering becomes, Rousseau said, the basis of something positive–social cohesion. We are united by our shared need for therapeutic attention.
Reason divides people by leading them to competing conclusions about all sorts of things, including the goals of life and social arrangements. However, compassion is a source of social reciprocity - I feel your pain and you feel mine. Our president recently advised us that we should feel the pain his critics are putting him through, pain comparable to that of Richard Jewell, the man mistakenly suspected of the Atlanta Olympics bombing.
Social cohesion is served when everyone has a reliable supply of suffering. Fortunately, we are all victims, of society or some subparticle of it. For example, Hillary Rodham Clinton recently notified the nation that she is a victim of Webb Hubbell’s cheating of the Rose Law Firm, where she was a partner. But such emotional transactions become complicated. According to the calculus of compassion, the fact that she is a victim of Hubbell places her in his debt because the suffering he gives her enables her to exhibit goodness by identifying compassionately with his suffering.
Which, of course, she and some of her friends did by helping Hubbell. Her husband says “they were trying to help him for no other reason than just out of human compassion.” Their help consisted of getting him jobs involving compassionate ratios of compensation to toil. (By the way, Hubbell says his stock of suffering is high because he is a victim of people who question his integrity. Suffering and victimhood, and therefore compassion, are renewable resources.)
A society that places the highest value on compassion will not value reticence and reserve. Both of those attributes inhibit the sort of behavior–for example, confessional talk and public weeping–that proves sincerity. And sincerity is everything when the moral life is a compassion competition. As Orwin says, and as daytime television talk shows demonstrate, the line between pathos and bathos is thin. Or as we might say, that line becomes blurry when moistened by tears. Furthermore, when standards of public discourse are set by talk shows and tabloids, the public becomes addicted to “industrial strength sensations,” such as those the vice president offered the Democratic convention audience when he reprised his sister’s death.
“Sensitive” is the most coveted accolade for an individual in a society committed to compassion, and “therapeutic” is the summation of what government in such a society aims to be. A welfare state is, after all, compassion bureaucratized, the better to employ what are called the “caring professions.” The welfare state certainly is compassionate to those professions.
Still, some people worry. They worry about the fate of what once were considered–how anachronistic this phrase seems–the heroic virtues. Is there a place for such virtues as, say, honor and nobility in a world in which solicitude for those suffering is the only unambiguous form of goodness? Goethe worried that the world would become one large hospital where everyone is everyone else’s nurse. Such insensitivity moves one to tears.
