When did we lose our capacity for compassion?

When Katie Hopkins tweeted that she did not care that refugees were drowning in the Mediterranean, it was motivated mainly by her narcissistic desire to grab the headlines. But, in doing so, she revealed a callous indifference to the lives of other desperate individuals which, sadly, has a disturbing echo in modern British society. Whilst Hopkins received little support for her rant she remains employed by The Sun (Britain’s bestselling ‘newspaper’) and her views represent an extreme version of a culture in which compassion plays no obvious role.

Katie Hopkins tweeting without compassion

According to Nancy Snow (1991), compassion is a natural emotion which all of us are capable of feeling. It is “an altruistic concern for the other’s good”. Which prompts me to wonder how some people seem to be able to feel no compassion at all. 

I am not concerned so much with those, like Hopkins or Farage, who feign lack of compassion as part of some deluded political project, but rather the indifference that ordinary people are encouraged to show.

We are all now familiar with the phrase ‘compassion fatigue’. According to this theory we see so much suffering on our TV screens that we become desensitized to it. I’m sure there is something in this argument, but there also seems to be something else happening. Perhaps it is true, as Susan Moeller (1999) has said, that so-called ‘compassion fatigue’ has its origins in media-led ignorance.

It is tempting to over-estimate the impact of right wing tabloids. However, it is also possible to under-estimate the insidious nature of what amounts to a propaganda campaign. It is not entirely true as Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) once remarked that the media don’t tell us what to think but they do tell us what to think about. If they don’t tell us what to think they are the gatekeepers of what information we have access to. Although the internet is creating a different type of media playing field, I am not convinced that the role of the tabloid press has been significantly undermined. Television news and the tabloid press continue to set the political agenda.

What the media cannot do is override entirely our moral intuition. Compassion is linked to an altruistic concern for the well-being of others. James Griffin (1986) , in his book Well Being, makes the point that: “We all want to do something with our lives, to act in a way that gives them some point and substance.” What this means in practice is doing things that are not simply self-interested. But, does this mean that we should be concerned for the suffering of all others regardless of whether we are capable of intervening or not?

We act to help others both from altruistic impulses and from compassion. We see this idea that there is more to life than just narrow self-interest when we show concern for others and a willingness to act to help those who may be in need. How we react may be to give to charity, to write letters to the press or MPs or to simply fume at the TV. The point is that these acts are motivated by compassion and what Max Weber called verstehen often translated as empathetic understanding.

Three year old refugee Alan Kurdî died in September 2015

When the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdî was washed up on a Mediterranean beach in September 2015 it was possible to discern a serious shift in public attitudes toward refugees. The young Syrian died alongside his elder brother and mother trying to cross the Mediterranean whilst fleeing the Civil War in Syria. That picture of the young body still dressed in sneakers lying face down in the surf was so powerful that even refugee hating newspapers such as the Daily Mail could not do anything but show compassion (Daily Mail, 2015). Suddenly the human cost of the refugee crisis hit a compassionate nerve that even the Daily Mail could not ignore.

The issue here is not whether an isolated report is “sympathetic” to refugees, but rather the cumulative effect of years of media stories about immigrants “swamping” Britain or abusing our benefits system. Carlos Vargas Silva, an Oxford-based academic has exposed as 'pure, unsupported speculation' tabloid accusations that migrants are a drain on the state (New Internationalist, 2013). Unfortunately, few people read academic research but many people read tabloid newspapers. In this environment, our basic emotional impulse of compassion for those in trouble can be overwhelmed by an imagined consensus of hostility to these “others’. In such an environment defending immigration is made very difficult and for many people it is easier to ignore the arguments and their consequences and to simply keep their thoughts to themselves.

Tabloids are inherently anti-immigrant

There is a large body of opinion in Britain which is now opposed not simply to further immigration but also to those “immigrants” already here. This is not new. Since the turn of the century polls show that over three quarters of the public want immigration reduced (Duffy and Frere Smith, 2014). 

The positive contribution of migrants to our economy and our culture is overlooked. Politicians, who should set the moral agenda, find themselves unable to defend immigration and constantly cede ground to those whose agendas are to fuel hatred for the victims of political choices made by those who defend a system which causes the very conditions it condemns.

Behind the rhetoric there is a very real issue. More people are forcibly on the move currently than at any time since the Second World War ended. According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), around 65 million people have been forcibly displaced. Of this figure, 21 million are refugees which means that they cannot easily go back to where they came. The biggest number of refugees, almost 5 million, are from Syria (UNHCR, 2015). A further 3 million are from Afghanistan and around 1 million are from Somalia. In each case the wars causing the mass exodus have the support of Western governments who profit from their propagation.

The issue however is not just where refugees are from but where do they go? A 2016 study revealed that the UK public had very little understanding of either the scale of the problem worldwide or the effect locally. Most Britons estimated the number of Syrian refugees as 300,000 at a time when it was closer to 5 million. By the same token, they believed that 10,000 Syrians had settled in Britain. The actual figure was less than half of that number. To put this in plain terms the average Briton believed 1 in 30 Syrian refugees had ended up in the UK, when the true figure was closer to 1 in 1,000 (Guardian, 2016).

 Syrian refugees mostly stay close to home (http://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-syria-refugee-crisis-maps)

There is also a confusion in people’s minds between immigrants and refugees. The former tend to be younger, often skilled workers attracted by employment opportunities. The latter are victims of war who are ‘temporarily’ displaced. As Dana Sleiman, spokeswoman in Lebanon for UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency has said: "Every refugee I talked to said that they would like to go back to Syria. In the ideal world, refugees want to go back to Syria as soon as they can. They wish to stay here [in Lebanon] not because they like it, but because they are close to home." (AlJazeera News, 2016)

The tabloid press in Britain, in common with some politicians, have created an environment of hostility toward immigration generally and refugees specifically. Child refugees had their ages questioned by the press which, in contravention of their own code of practice, published photographs of boys aged under 16 claiming they were a lot older and demanding medical tests to establish their age. There was no sense that these were young boys already traumatized by the war they were trying to escape. Indeed, many commentators on social media branded them as “would be terrorists”.

The lack of compassion shown by some sections of the media shows them for what they are as much as the compassion the rest of us show says something about us. Although the tabloids and certain politicians have been successful in creating a hostile anti-immigrant culture in Britain, this does not mean that we should no longer appeal to people’s sense of compassion. It is not just a question of numbers or whether immigrants add more value economically, but something more fundamental.

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether immigration is too high, or whether it is beneficial to the country, but rather what kind of society do we want to create? Compassion is a basic human impulse in response to the suffering of others. It relies on an acknowledgement that all persons should be respected. As Aurel Kolnai (1995) has said upholding people’s dignity is “a strict moral obligation”. We do it not just because it is right, although it is, but in recognition that we belong to what Jutten (2017) has called “a community of humans” and this “brings an entitlement to expect to be treated with dignity but also a duty to reciprocate”. In other words, if we want to be treated with dignity and respect, we start by doing the same to others, all others.

Compassion is a powerful emotion and accompanied by verstehen allows us to imagine what life might be like for people in desperate situations. Those who lose their sense of compassion in pursuit of their selfish, and often discriminatory, agendas do more than just create an environment of hatred and mistrust, they also undermine our very claims to be a humane society. To feel compassion involves putting yourself in the position of the victims. Of course, if we ask people in the UK to imagine themselves in the situation of desperate Syrians it is entirely hypothetical. But we should not forget it was hypothetical for the people of Syria prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 2011.

References

AlJazeera News, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/syrian-refugees-europe-160504111600535.html

Daily Mail, (2015) "ISIS use photo of tragic Syrian toddler Aylan in a sick propaganda article warning brutally oppressed Muslims not to flee the jihadis". Daily Mail 10 September 2015

James Griffin (1986) Well Being. Its meaning, measurement and moral importance (Oxford: Clarendon)

Guardian (2016) ‘Syrian Refugee Crisis Underestimated by British Public Finds Humanitarian Study’. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/apr/22/syrian-refugee-crisis-underestimated-by-british-public-finds-humanitarian-study

Tim Jutten (2017) ‘Dignity, Esteem, and Social Contribution: A Recognition-Theoretical View’ The Journal of Political Philosophy

Aurel Kolnai (1995) ‘Dignity’ in R S Dillon (editor) Dignity, Character and Self-respect (London: Routledge)

Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) ‘The agenda setting function of mass media’ Public opinion quarterly, Vol.36(2), pp.176-187

Susan D Moeller (1999) Compassion Fatigue. How the media sell disease, famine, war and death (New York & London: Routledge)

New Internationalist (2013) Immigration untruths New Internationalist, Oct 1, 2013

Duffy and Frere Smith (2014 Perception and Reality: Public attitudes to immigration Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute https://www.ipsos-mori.com/DownloadPublication/1634_sri-perceptions-and-reality-immigration-report-2013.pdf

Nancy Snow (1991) ‘Compassion’ American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3 pp. 195-205

UNHCR, 2015 Figures at a glance http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html

THE ROLE OF MORALITY IN POLITICS

What character traits ought we to look for in our elected representatives? The question may seem odd at a time when our expectations of our representatives have never been lower. The idea that politicians should be “respectable” and that they, if not we, should aspire to some higher ideal, seems to belong to a bygone age. Political idealism is to be sneered at, and politics, it seems, no longer has any place for outmoded concepts such as truth, honesty or integrity. 

Politicians with integrity?

British politicians themselves, when asked by the Hansard Society (Sylvester, 2010), highlighted integrity as the most important characteristic that a politician can possess. 

Strangely, there is not a lot of research about what characteristics voters look for in their representatives. We do know that generally the public has a low opinion of professional politicians. One indicator is that trust in politicians is at an all-time low. To qualify that slightly it was never that high to begin with. In the latest Ipsos-MORI Veracity Index (2016) just 15% of respondents said that they trusted politicians. More people trust estate agents and journalists than politicians. Admittedly, not by much but that’s not the point.  

Being seen as generally untrustworthy is as clear an indication as we are likely to get that we so not see politicians as the embodiment of integrity. Whilst this is probably a very harsh judgement on many hard working public servants it does represent a political reality. Politicians are viewed as “self- serving and as failing in their role as representatives of their constituencies”(Gidengil & Bastedo, 2014).  The general impression is of a group of people who are in it for themselves and who therefore lack what we might call ‘moral gravitas’.

What politicians think and what motivates what they do is important. There is little clear evidence that honest politicians fare better than less honest ones at the ballot box, indeed the opposite may even be true. Even if we don’t trust them there is a clear desire we should be able to regard politicians as what the theologian Denis O’Callaghan (1967) described as moral leaders. 

If politicians do not act in ways which raise the moral capacity of society, then the vacuum will be filled by those with less secular views. The level and tone of political debate can be a reasonable indicator of the way in which a society views its members. It can also set the tone for the way in which we treat each other, but particularly sets the tone for the way we treat those regarded as outsiders.

The philosopher Richard D. Ryder has argued: 

“Governments seem prone to be motivated by mere whim and sentiment. Many of their policies appear to be undisciplined either by science or philosophy”. 

The implication is that politics is conducted for short-term electoral gain, with only a passing consideration of fact or principle. Even where facts are presented their use is often utilitarian used as much to disguise as to illuminate the truth. 

The idea that a “fact” is indisputable is itself under considerable strain. Facts are treated as if they are mere interpretations and which interpretation we accept is a personal choice. In such a scenario politicians do not make decisions based on applying their firmly held moral beliefs, but rather weigh up the pros and cons of what is in their narrow self-interest. If truth is a casualty in this war of words then so are any underlying moral principles. Ryder’s argument that politics needs to have a moral basis was well made then and appears to need remaking today.

None of this is new, of course, but without moral conviction it is difficult to see what the political class are doing beyond mirroring what they perceive as public opinion. It is important here not to become misty eyed about a time gone past when all political debate was conducted as if part of a rather refined debating society. Or, to a time when fact was more in evidence than hyperbole. Facts and hyperbole, truth and statistics have forever been uneasy bedfellows in political debate. 

Since the advent of political polling in 1938, opinion polls have had a greater and greater influence over political debate. This has exacerbated a trend whereby politicians rather than trying to shape public opinion through argument, simply try to reflect public opinion, even when this may contradict their own views or the known facts. Politicians are increasingly reluctant to express an opinion until it has been filtered through focus groups and opinion polls. Better to have no opinion at all, than one with which the public do not agree.

Public opinion is often public prejudice

The problem of relying on public opinion to inform political decision making is that too often it allows prejudice to win out over compassion, it allows a mob mentality which has only been exacerbated by social media. 

And it increases what we might call the tyranny of the majority, a phrase used by deToqueville (2010/1840). He argued that democracy, specifically American democracy, with its checks and balances guarded against such a tyranny, but he of course had never encountered Twitter or Facebook (or for that matter the Daily Mail).

We want politicians to make the right decisions, we need them to do the right thing, so somewhere in all this decision making we need something to fall back on. For politics to retain its legitimacy it has to be based on more than rhetoric, hyperbole and self-interest. In my view that something is a moral infrastructure (Middleton, 2004). Too often morality is presented as if it is a set of individual life choices, rather than a collective vision of the type of society we want to live in. As the moral philosopher Roger Trigg (2005) has argued morality cannot be just what is in the interest of individuals (especially MPs), or what is in the interest of the majority. Rather morality “should provide the context in which all affairs are conducted and nations governed.” (Trigg, 2005:10) Indeed, deToqueville made a similar point.

To say that morality should underpin our political decision-making seems almost incontrovertible. The problem is that we tend to treat morality as something separate from politics. Largely this is a consequence of living in a society that has redefined itself in terms of individual freedoms as opposed to a collective good. That is not to say that morality can only be about the collective but it is, at heart, the collective response to individual actions. What morality does, that politics often doesn’t is give meaning to particular actions. As Aristotle, no less, would say “while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime” (Vardy & Grosch, 1999:22) For Aristotle the ‘good’ was defined as eudaimonia which translates, roughly, as happiness or ‘human flourishing’.

Do we have a right to happiness?

The idea that ‘happiness’ should be the goal of human society found its most cogent expression in utilitarianism, developed by Jeremy Bentham but given its most accessible formulation by James Stuart Mill. 

But if happiness is some kind of ultimate goal, we are entitled to ask: what is it about happiness that makes it so valuable? The truth is that it is not happiness per se, but human happiness. We don’t tend to care very much whether parrots, snakes, bugs or dogs are happy (actually we might care about dogs, but put that thought aside for a moment). 

We do care whether humans are happy. To say this is to state the obvious. It was so self-evident to Aristotle that all humans wanted to be happy that the goal was not to define happiness but to devise a society where each could obtain it. But, it is also true that we do prefer our own species over others. If I ask you if you want your child to be happy, you would have to be perverse to say ‘no’. And, if we want our own child to be happy, then clearly it would be wrong not to want other children to be equally happy. And, if we want all children to be happy it is not a big stretch to imagine that this is something we want for all humans. The point is that a moral foundation is based not so much on happiness, but something about humanity. We value humanity in a way which we do not, necessarily, value other life forms. Or, for that matter, inanimate objects (despite the seeming love affair some people have with their cars).

All humans have an inherent dignity

It is this human capacity for happiness, pleasure and suffering that is at the root of our moral outlook. Indeed, it is precisely this respect for the “dignity inherent in every human” that seems to be what David Schmidtz (2002) has 

described as our “basic moral desiderata”. To return then to our original question which was about decision-making, what I want to suggest is that decision-making removed from our moral infrastructure is decision-making which can be reduced to naked self-interest, or what is often referred to these days as ‘populism’, which is another way of saying ‘tell the people what they want to hear’. It is this tendency which removes the morality from politics. A moral infrastructure reminds us why we engage in political debate. It gives us reasons to favour one outcome over another. Rather than appealing to prejudice, self-interest and greed it enables us to develop policies and societies that are driven by a desire to enhance the dignity of every human being.

References

deToqueville A (2010/1840) Democracy In America Edited by Eduardo Nolla Translated from the French by James T. Schleifer (Paris: Liberty Fund)

Gidengil E & Bastedo H (2014) ‘Perceptions and Performance: How Do MPs Shape Up?’ Canadian Parliamentary Review 25-30

Ipsos-MORI and Mumsnet (2016) Enough of Experts. Trust and the EU Referendum available online at https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/publications/1896/Enough-of-Experts-Ipsos-MORI-Veracity-Index-2016.aspx

O’Callaghan J F (1967) ‘The Meaning of Moral Principle’ The Furrow, 22(9), 555-563

Middleton D (2004) ‘Why We Should Care About Respect’ Contemporary Politics  10(3-4), 227-241

Ryder R D (2006) Putting the Morality Back Into Politics (Exeter: Imprint Academic)

Schmidtz D (2002) ‘Equal Respect and Equal Shares’ Social Philosophy and Policy 244-274

Sylvester J (2010) ‘What makes a good politician’ The Pyschologist 23(5)

Trigg R (2005) Morality Matters (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing)

Vardy P & Grosch P (1999) The Puzzle of Ethics (London: Harper Collins)