Armchair Saints: the cold water of abstract compassion


	Armchair Saints: the cold water of abstract compassion

abailart

8-17-2009 4:14 AM

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tags:

abstract compassion

abailart says:

How much easier to grieve for blocks of statistics rather than the real people in our lives. How easy and cheap to love a cartoon figure than our neighbours.

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<div style="margin: 12px 0px; font-family: arial; color: #333333; background: #ffffff; border: solid 4px #e5e5e5; width: 100%; clear: left;"><div class="CM_CTB_Content_Wrap" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;background-color: #ffffff;"><div style="border-bottom: solid 1px #dcdcdc; white-space: nowrap; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: #eeeeee ;background-image: url(http://clipmarks.com/images/source-bg.gif); background-repeat: repeat-x; height: 24px; line-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle; padding-bottom: 4px; color: #666666; font-size: 10px;" ><a href="http://clipmarks.com/clip-to-blog/" title="see clips that are hot right now"><img src="http://content.clipmarks.com/blog_embed/983eb03d-b62a-4ed9-819c-7465ba5ef4e1/4D90A957-AE5A-42DD-BDDA-C609C7564A6A/" alt="" width="19" height="19" border="0" style="vertical-align: middle; margin: 0px 4px; display: inline; border: none; float:none;" /></a>clipped from <a title="http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=112" href="http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=112" style="font-size: 11px;">www.incharacter.org</a></div><blockquote style="text-align: left; padding: 0px 8px; margin: 4px 0px 8px 0px; background: transparent; border: none;" cite="http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=112"><div align="center"><img src="http://content6.clipmarks.com/blog_cache/www.incharacter.org/img/CAF76672-573A-4DAF-AE64-689D93704B24" alt="" /></div></blockquote><div style="height: 2px; font-size: 2px; background: #dcdcdc; border-bottom: solid 1px #f5f5f5; margin: 2px 4px;"></div><blockquote style="text-align: left; padding: 0px 8px; margin: 4px 0px 8px 0px; background: transparent; border: none;" cite="http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=112">Though it is often — and often rightly — placed in opposition to honor, compassion is like honor in belonging to a face-to-face world, like a battlefield, that is increasingly alien to us. Even battlefields now often involve combat at long distance. Just as there is no honor in general — that is, apart from particular people and particular actions in particular social contexts — so there is no compassion, properly called, where there is no particular person with (<EM>com</EM>) whom suffering (<EM>passion</EM>) is shared. Abstract or hypothetical suffering — as of whole classes of people, supposed by some philosophical or political hypothesis to be suffering merely by virtue of their membership in the class — cannot be shared except in a theoretical way.</blockquote><div style="height: 2px; font-size: 2px; background: #dcdcdc; border-bottom: solid 1px #f5f5f5; margin: 2px 4px;"></div><blockquote style="text-align: left; padding: 0px 8px; margin: 4px 0px 8px 0px; background: transparent; border: none;" cite="http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=112">the pose of abstract compassion makes us feel good about ourselves while keeping us from having to look real suffering in the face.</blockquote></div><div style="margin: 0px 6px 6px 4px;"><table style="font-size: 11px;border-spacing: 0px;padding: 0px;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tr><td style="background:transparent;border-width:0px;padding:0px;">&nbsp;</td><td align="right" style="background:transparent;border-width:0px;padding:0px;width:107px" width="107"><a href="http://clipmarks.com/share/4D90A957-AE5A-42DD-BDDA-C609C7564A6A/blog/" title="blog or email this clip"><img src="http://content7.clipmarks.com/images/c2b-foot.png" border="0" alt="blog it" width="107" height="17" style="border-width:0px;padding:0px;margin:0px;" /></a></td></tr></table></div></div>

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