Abstract
This article considers how compassion can be subversive to political-economic orders, whether these orders are found in church or society. Compassion is explained in terms of John Macmurray’s and Alex Honneth’s notion of recognition, the psychoanalytic concept of identification, and Michel Foucault’s views of knowledge and power. To illustrate how compassion can be subversive, the author turns to the realities of a market society—a society dominated by a culture of neoliberalism and neoliberal capitalism—and concludes with two case illustrations.
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Notes
Although Boer (2009) clearly admires Bloch, he is also critical, arguing that Bloch “moves too quickly from repression to emancipation and would have done well to tarry with the negative somewhat longer” (p. 27).
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt considered compassion, Sophie Bourgault (2017) writes, “to be radically antithetical to freedom . . . and thus should remain out of politics” (p. 216). Arendt goes so far as to say that compassion “remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence” (as quoted in Bourgault, p. 216). One reason why Arendt views compassion as politically irrelevant is that she understands it as being “enthralled in the other’s suffering [such] that the space between them vanishes” (p. 220). Compassion is, in her view, something appropriate to the private realm, to the household. Arendt’s conception of compassion leads her to reject it in the public sphere, but in my view she has a distorted view of compassion. To suggest that compassion involves enthrallment and a lack of space between oneself and the other suggests a lack of differentiation, if not obsession. As I argue in this article, compassion involves a high degree of differentiation or space. Moreover, to relegate compassion to the home or private sphere seems to contradict scripture and the ministry of Jesus.
I have chosen this because medical expenses are the major source of bankruptcy in the United States. D. Mangan, Medical bills are the biggest cause of US bankruptcies: Study,” June 25, 2013, CNBC, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148, accessed 27 April 2017.
Someone might counter by saying that Jesus’ compassion was not aimed at helping identify and act toward the real source of suffering—the Roman Empire. But I suggest he did, by speaking and living out a counterkingdom to imperial Rome.
Compassion, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compassion, accessed 27 April 2017.
The concept of empathy is contested. Paul Bloom (2016) argues that empathy is actually one of the reasons for inequality. It can interfere with judgments and, in some cases, lead to malicious acts. I am confident Daniel Goleman (1997, 2006) would oppose this view, though perhaps agreeing that empathy can, at times, be problematic. Although I am more sympathetic to Goleman’s arguments, the focus of the article is on compassion and not empathy. For a discussion of the literature on empathy, see Dreyer’s (2018) article in this issue of Pastoral Psychology.
The case of the empathic salesperson muddies the water here. On the one hand, personal knowing is present in the way he or she treats the customer. On the other hand, there is an underlying instrumental motivation connected to recognizing this individual as an object to be used for the sake of a sale. To be sure, the customer may also be helped here, making this ethical in the Macmurrian sense that a person obtains a benefit. A clearer example would be a physician in the emergency room who treats the patient as an object in order to save his or her life. In this instance, personal knowing is subordinate but is for the sake of the patient and not the physician.
In psychoanalytic literature, identification can be healthy or unhealthy and can also be viewed as a defense (McWilliams 1994, pp. 135–138). For my purposes, I focus more on identification in light of the recognition of others as persons, which indicates the existential and political nature of identification. Moreover, I am less concerned with the “unhealthy” forms of identification and disidentification, which are legion, than with the paradoxical reality of both vis-à-vis personal recognition.
Power, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power, accessed 1 May 2017.
Contra Arendt, solidarity requires a space between one person and the other—not a collapse.
Numerous authors distinguish between neoliberalism as a culture and neoliberal capitalism (Helsel 2015; Johnson 2014; Rogers-Vaughn, 2014, 2016). These are distinct, but they are also inseparable. Just as it is difficult to imagine the rise of capitalism without the philosophy of liberalism, so too it is impossible to imagine the rise of neoliberal capitalism without the presence of a neoliberal culture.
B. Stein, In class warfare, guess which class is winning, Nov. 26, 2006, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html, accessed 8 August 2017.
How we work, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work, accessed 8 August 2017.
Charity is not identical to compassion. There are many possible motives, and one can be charitable without ever having to rub elbows (solidarity) with those who actually are receiving the charity.
Horsely (2009, pp. 100–103) discusses the Qumram Jewish community that likely served as a model for some early Christian communities.
Although I have tried to differentiate between compassion as subversion and obtaining practical results in overthrowing or undermining unjust systems, I am not suggesting that compassion’s power, when it is separated from violent action, is in itself impractical or ineffective. To say that compassion is not contingent on changing the system does not mean that compassionate people do not attempt to make things better for others. The outrage and compassion that motivated Civil Rights workers’ aggressive nonviolent confrontation of the racist sociopolitical order led to judicial (Brown v. Board of Education) and legislative victories (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968). These achievements would not have occurred without ongoing courageous confrontation of civil authorities, institutions, communities, and individuals who supported racism and the suffering it produces. Yet, if those changes had not occurred, I am confident that compassionate prophets would not have fallen into despair but would have continued to demonstrate their compassion by witnessing and trying to ease the suffering of their brothers and sisters as well as continuing to resist and subvert systems that supported racism.
War is a funeral, Taoism, https://sites.google.com/site/ontaoism/31, accessed 8 August 2017.
Even if this was a later addition to the gospel, it is nevertheless part of the Christian tradition—a tradition that challenges believers to emulate Christ.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants in New Directions in Pastoral Theology for their comments on this paper. I would also like to thank Lewis Rambo for his support of New Directions in Pastoral Psychology.
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LaMothe, R. Pebbles in the Shoe: Acts of Compassion as Subversion in a Market Society. Pastoral Psychol 68, 285–301 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0833-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0833-1