This Christmas, Suit Up Compassion for Battle
As we search for meaning in the holiday season, trying to elevate the atmosphere of Christmas above the commercialism of it, various moral principles come to the fore of our minds at this reflective time of year: giving, forgiveness, love, kindness, and most of all, compassion.
The former nun and interfaith proponent Karen Armstrong’s latest book, “Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life” argues that compassion as a principle lies at the heart of all religions. Others would argue that this is wishful thinking, as did philosopher Ophelia Benson in her straightforward response to Armstrong’s book: “The principle of obedience to God lies at the heart of many religious traditions, and it is a modern illusion to think that is identical to compassion.”
In any case, it seems clear that compassion is not a regular enough part of the practice of either the faithful or the faithless, whether or not it’s a principle we fancy ourselves as espousing.
By this I don’t mean to say that we don’t take care of own, but that much of the time, we only take care of our own, peering seldom into realities that are too unpleasant and too much trouble to deal with.
Canadians can be counted on to come through every December with donations to the toy drives, food banks and other charitable initiatives to meet the needs of the sick, the poor and the victims of unfortunate circumstances. We also give generously to humanitarian causes: Canadians donated en masse to Haiti earthquake relief. We can be depended upon to shake our heads in sadness when we hear of floods, tsunamis, hurricanes or fires that wreak havoc in faraway places, and in places close to home.
But very often, when it is people hurting people, especially over a prolonged period of time, and far away, we are all too silent. Our compassion stays tucked away in reserve, for some other crisis that is less demanding on the conscience. The sad truth is that our compassion has been largely impotent for the millions who live under Burma’s military junta, for the torture victims of Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, for the people of Iran pleading for democracy, for the citizens of Turkmenistan, for the Sudanese, the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Lybians. We have failed to call out the Islamo-facism of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to truly confront the danger of their death-cult ideology. We have failed to truly criticize the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen and others where to be born a woman means to be shrouded, literally, in second class citizenship. We’ve allowed genocide to persist into the 21st century, an epidemic of mass rape to occur in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, extremism to envelope Somalia, and the continued imprisonment of Cubans under a morally bankrupt regime.
And yet, these tyrannies are just as lethal and sorrowful as earthquakes and tornadoes. Their poison is more agonizingly drawn out, but we are possessed of little sense of urgency in our reactions. Sam Harris, of Project Reason, has advised that we should “look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises. Kim Jong Il has thirty million hostages. Saddam Hussein had twenty-five million. The clerics in Iran have seventy million more.”
As a society, we have a patchy record of speaking out against human rights abuses. For a short while, after World War II, we paused in stunned mourning to endorse that declaration of “never again” when the full extent of the holocaust was uncovered. We have always had the human rights organizations, the sparsely attended vigils on Human Rights Day, or the odd petition floating around the Internet. But we have never risen en masse to defend the rights of strangers to also strive to live with the freedoms we already enjoy. Their suffering is often abstracted and we deem their cultures sufficiently different to somehow be accepting of authoritarianism and abuse- the same abuse we would never dream of accepting for ourselves. We have drawn our lines in the sand: this is my backyard and that is yours. Our fear of offending other cultures or faiths and our cowering to radical anti-Americanism seems consistently to trump our obligation to speak out against the leaders of Iran, North Korea, or Hamas; or to bring up the atrocities of the Taliban in the Swat Valley in the lunch room at the office.
And yet, as homo sapiens, we are all born with the capacity for a biological reaction akin to the emotional reaction of empathy when we are exposed to the suffering of other humans. When we actually do come face to face with this suffering, our stomachs churn in reaction, in signal that what is happening is not right. We can instinctually imagine the feelings of pain inflicted on ourselves. It’s why you wince when you see someone get a paper cut. We can’t help it; it’s genetically coded within us.
But after that initial biological reaction, we are then faced with a menu of options about how to respond emotionally to the pain felt by strangers.
One option is to ignore it.
Another is to feel consumed in anger, but to remain passive.
Another is to respond with empathy, and with action.
But too often, we opt for the fourth option, which is to dig around for a way of justifying in our minds why this pain is acceptable to others, though not to us, and why we are not obliged to respond.
The greater the distance we place between ourselves and the strangers, the easier the justification option is. We can tell ourselves, “it’s none of our business,” “we can’t impose our views on other countries,” “they’re not ready for democracy,” or “their culture is just different than mine.”
In the end, these are hollow excuses. We would be better advised to drown out our own resistance to speaking out and taking action in favour of the signals we should be taking in from the brave actions of dissidents in the world’s last tyrannical outposts. There are those like Jafar Panahi, the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker who has just been sentenced to six years in prison plus a twenty-year ban on all artistic activities. Panahi spent his life making art that would challenge the theocracy he lives under, even when this meant possible imprisonment, torture and death. Or there is the recently released Aung San Suu Kyi who has sacrificed years of freedom in her fight for democracy in Burma; or Muhannad al-Hassani, the Syrian lawyer who languishes in jail among at least 6,000 other political prisoners, for the preposterous charge of “weakening national morale” the code word for his fight for human rights under the Bathists who reign in Damascus.
It is these dissidents, and the millions of hostages among whom they walk, who are the frontline in a fight for reason and basic rights. It’s a fight our own ancestors in western democracies once fought, and it should not be so dead to us even though the frontline has shifted to other locales. The risks these dissidents take are a call to action and a plea for solidarity that we have too long ignored. And ultimately, our silence in the West makes us complicit in the East. Apathy is deadly.
When we reflect on our capacity for compassion over the holidays, let us stretch our backyard beyond our own borders, to recognize human rights atrocities as the urgent catastrophes that they are, and to make the choice to respond with empathy and action when faced with the pain of others, where ever it is occurring.
Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.
