The Limits Of Sympathy

I hate to see stray dogs. Unfortunately, I live in a city that has more than its fair share of them. They’re a sad sight—skittish, fearful, usually in some state of malnourishment or starvation, ribs visible. Dogs are domesticated animals, and they don’t do well when they’re all on their own in the concrete jungle. Abandoned and pitiable creatures. My typical reaction, though, to seeing some un-collared mutt limping along is honestly nothing much. I think dark thoughts for a moment about irresponsible dog owners. Reflect briefly on how much I hate metropolitan life. Move on with my day.

My wife, however, is a different story. She has a more difficult time letting it go. She always wants me to turn the truck around and see what we can do to help the little guy. If she were given free rein, there’s no telling how many dogs we would own at this point. Too many, though. She doesn’t see the additional vet bills, food costs. Doesn’t see the fact that it’s likely diseased and behaviorally damaged. Doesn’t see the hassle of integrating it with the two dogs we own already. None of that. She just feels for it and has to do something.

I’d chalk it up to a woman being a woman, but I see this sort of psychology cropping up all over the place nowadays, even in people who are ostensibly male. Feel first. Ask questions later. It’s a compulsion to remedy sad situations right now, this very instant, with no thought towards the complexity or cost of that remediation, no eye towards the longterm consequences thereof. Sympathy über alles.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign illustrates this sort of psychology perfectly, but it’s only one illustration of many. It seems like there’s one every week or so. Social medialites the world over put on their most serious faces, their saddest eyes, their most furrowed brows and scribble something on a whiteboard to broadcast on Twitter and Facebook. Stop cyberbullying. End female genital mutilation worldwide. Stop homophobia in the NFL. Stop Japanese dolphin drive hunting. Stop gun violence. Just stop it. It’s 2014!

(These kind of shenanigans aren’t limited to social media, either. What is the evening news anymore but a serial list of outrages? )

A lot of conservative types criticize these fireworks as absurd and infantile, which they are. The news items that set them off are just shiny bits of foil that attract momentarily the magpie hivebrain of the social justice leftists of contemporary America, who have quite a few public address systems at their disposal. Then the messaging starts. Jihadists have captured schoolgirls in Nigeria. Tragedy in the making. Time to blunder our way into the middle of a holy war in a backwaters shithole in Africa so that progress-education-human-rights triumphs over the hateful ignorant hatred of Boko Haram. Time to make the world safe for intersectional feminism. Boots on the ground. Full steam ahead.

Other conservatives, of a slightly more vicious bent perhaps, point out that such hysterics boil down to public posturing for moral brownie points. This is also correct. Half the point of adding your individual selfie to the trending hashtag is so that your circle of online friends and family know that you’re the type of soul that is grieved by the plights of other people, no matter how remote or foreign, which is the height of contemporary morality.

What I would add to the foregoing criticisms is that these campaigns—as ridiculous and self-aggrandizing as they are—are the somewhat grotesque results of elevating sympathy above its natural station. They are the sort of thing that happen when you start and end your political reasoning with sympathy. They are take-in-the-stray type reasoning. This is how national debate about abortion devolved into, “Why don’t you care about teenage girls who have experienced rape?” This is how immigration turned into sappy stories about DREAMers living in the shadows and crops rotting in the fields. And it’s how sensible discussion about education reform got crowded out by, “What kind of monster would deny someone a shot at college?” Judging by the tenor of our plaintive wailings, we care about these issues more than ever before. But the quality of the discourse that surrounds them is in the tank. And our ability to propose useful solutions is, too, because the whole point of the game is to act out your inner carebear and make sure that everyone sees you do it. The whole point of the game is to seek out the most vulnerable, most victimized “other” you can possibly find and then agitate on their behalf noisily.

It’s a shameful state of affairs. Yes. And it has to stop. But we don’t have to lose our minds right along with it. I don’t want to overcompensate from these observations and recommend that we excise sympathy from our political reasoning entirely. There’s no need for that. Sympathy is not a vice. All I want to suggest is that it’s not a virtue either. It’s not a moral consideration at all, just a basic human capacity that allows us to function in the complex social arrangements that homo sapiens tend to form. It’s a faculty, like eyesight or the use of language. And honestly we have far better faculties for making our decisions, like reason and imagination and memory just to name a few, so we ought to make sure that we prioritize those faculties.

In your exchanges with others, then, don’t let yourself get caught up in the “I care more than you do” frame. It’s a silly one. The extent to which you care is largely irrelevant to whether or not your ideas are worthwhile. And in your personal meditations, avoid reasoning from the fever pitch of your own tugged heartstrings. We live in a day and age rife with strays of all sorts. But we’re not going to be able to rescue or house them all. Our conduct has to be guided by solider considerations than which pair of puppy dog eyes moves us the most piteously. Our attentions should be devoted to more crucial topics than the latest tragic outrage.

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