Recently in Limitations on compassion Category

I've already blogged about how William Makepeace Thackeray's bitchiness to Becky Sharp fouls up his plotting in Vanity Fair.  But the more I think about his lack of compassion for Becky, the more compelled I am to take issue with his behavior simply as an affront to women and the poor. 

Thackeray creates Becky as a creature of few advantages.  Her mother dies when she's very young, and her father dies of delirium tremens when she is a teenager.  Moreover,

[Rebecca] had the dismal precocity of poverty.  Many a dun she had talked to, and turned away from her father's door; many a tradesman she had coaxed and wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more.  She sate commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk of many of his wild companions - often but ill-suited for a girl to hear.  But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old.

(p. 10.) 

Thackeray bounces orphan Becky from one demeaning environment (Miss Pinkerton's School) to another (the Sedley house, Sir Pitt Crawley's house in Queen's Crawley, Miss Crawley's house in London), marries her to a gambler solider without a penny, promptly revokes the soldier's inheritance, and then gleefully watches Becky make do (dishonestly) in genteel society.

Social climbing (particularly in Becky's time and place), of course, is vulgar, and people who do it well are invariably insincere, insecure, shallow and vain.  (Becky is all these things.) 

And, yes, vanity is a sin.  But one of the great innovations of Judeo-Christian ethics is proportionality: Inspector Javert, the policeman - not Jean Valjean, the thief - is the sinner in Les Misérables because hounding a man for a lifetime is a disproportionate punishment for stealing a loaf of bread when a man is starving.

In the same way, casting vanity on par with murder and cannibalism is hardly in the enlightened Judeo-Christian spirit.  Here, for example, is Thackeray giving an account of Becky after she's been ruined:

In describing this siren [Rebecca Sharp], singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water?  No!  Those who like may peep down under the waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, and curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish moralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie?  When, however, the siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour lost to look into it ever so curiously.  They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twanging their harps and combing their hair, and beckon to you to come and hold the looking glass; but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling [sic] and feasting on their wretched pickled victims.  And so, when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better.

(p. 620-21 (emphasis added).)  

I bridle reading this indictment.  Becky, without question, exploits those foolish enough to allow her to do so - her lady companion, Briggs, and her landlord, Raggles, in particular (both of whom she ruins financially).  She's beastly to her husband, Rawdon Crawley, and utterly cruel to her son. 

But, frankly, her crimes are the usual run-of-the-mill misdeeds of the impoverished.  The fever pitch of Thackeray's accusations is unwarranted.  (Besides which, his constant excuses that propriety prevents him from recounting her bloody - as opposed to economic and emotional - crimes is scarcely credible and makes the whole passage seem gratuitous.)

Thackeray's excessiveness surprises me because I believe he loves Becky Sharp (in contrast to Amelia Sedley, who I think Thackeray comes close to despising).  I don't think Thackeray would've made Becky so beautiful, intelligent, witty and resourceful - nor would he have given her an adventure with so many men and opportunities - if he didn't adore her.   

And yet, I feel that, in spite of himself - in spite of Thackeray's certainty that those of high birth and spotless reputation are as decrepit in their moral conduct as those of their opposites - Thackeray can't really accept a smart, resourceful, poor woman who isn't a monster.  Cerebrally or ideologically, he knows that poor women aren't deserving of especial reprimand; but viscerally Thackeray connects them with terror.  (As I discussed in another prior post, I think Thackeray attributes too much power to women, which may relate to this fear he manifests in respect of Becky.)

Thackeray's treatment of Becky also put me in mind of another novel about a rapacious, social climbing woman, a woman who exploits and abuses everyone she can, a woman who comes from crushing poverty and who dies desperate and penniless.  The book is The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Bad Girl is based on Madame Bovary, an ambitious book with which to compare one's work; and yet Vargas Llosa more than lives up to the company in which he places himself. 

The reason is his compassion for his bad girl.  Despite all her bad behavior, Vargas Llosa made me believe that poverty - not original sin or some other form of damnation - had tarnished her.  With this tactic, Vargas Llosa is not simply being sentimental: he's making his story work.  Although I never came to like the bad girl, I did feel emotionally engaged in her fate (and that of her steadfast lover) in a way that never happened with Vanity Fair.  I read The Bad Girl in a matter of days (not a month, like Vanity Fair), and the bad girl's scar of poverty has resonated with me for years after I finished the book. 

Speculating about the sources of authorial limitations and strengths is always risky.  Nonetheless, I'll hazard the following guess:  Vargas Llosa has compassion for the bad girl because he's well-acquainted with his naughty side; Thackeray thought Becky a monster because she was too close to what he didn't want to know about himself. 

(Image of Melusina from Wikicommons) 

Reading Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of Chapman Pincher's book, Treachery: Betrayal, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain (in The New York Review of Books), I experienced one of those synergies that make me look up from my reading and exclaim, "That's exactly right!"  The passage that provoked my experience quoted Isaiah Berlin, speaking of Guy Burgess, one of the "Cambridge Five," who spied on England for the USSR:  "Guy . . . [was] someone with no moral center to his life."
 
Knowing little-to-nothing about Guy Burgess (except for the fact that he's not Anthony Burgess, a point I had to reiterate several times in conversation recently), I was excited, not by the personal specifics, but by the general import of Berlin's remark.  Having lived in China for four and a half years, I've had plenty of opportunity to observe the way Communism erodes the moral fabric of a society and the moral integrity of its adherents.

In reflecting on this side-effect of Communism, I've concluded that its mechanism relates to the connection between morality and compassion, and to the further connection between compassion and individuals. 

Morality, in essence, is the intellectual expression of visceral compassion.  When we empathize with another person's pain, we condemn the cause of that hurt in moral terms: e.g., because we feel bad for fatherless children, we define as immoral the behavior of deadbeat dads who shirk their parental duties to their children.

The human capacity for compassion, however, is limited.  Whether by hard-wiring or otherwise, we relate best to other individuals.  Our empathy doesn't spring into its fullest expression until we can lavish it on another individual.  Our moral outrage at deadbeat dads is never stronger than when the neglected children are known and beloved by us.

The fundamental flaw of Communism is its insistence on cultivating compassion for the group, in preference to the individual.  Human beings do this poorly at best.  (The group with which most of us identify most strongly is our family, and even that instance of empathizing with a group tends to pale beside our sympathy for individuals within the family.)  Throw in the typical Communist government modus operandi of instigating betrayal of one's nearest and dearest - children informing on parents, siblings turned against one another, etc. - and Communism produces an individual whose compassionate capacities are well and truly broken.

And without a visceral compassion response in working order, moral reasoning cannot operate properly.

Milan Kundera has repeatedly documented this breakdown as it occurred in (then) Czechoslovakia (viz. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being).  Kundera's example is significant because it suggests that the problem is with Communism, and not China's flavor of Communism.  Isaiah Berlin's observation about Guy Burgess resonated with me because it provides additional support: a man with no moral center would, of course, match with a system that eviscerates the moral backbone of society and person.

I did not match with such a system.  To illustrate just how profoundly I was at odds with Chinese Communism, I'll admit that, upon learning that Guy Burgess defected to the USSR in 1951 and died there, I felt - traitor that he was - pity.

(Image of Guy Burgess sunbathing at the Black Sea in 1956 from Times Online) 

The Code of Conduct of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies decrees, in its tenth and final point, that, "In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects." 

The principle distills general anxiety about interactions between powerful storytellers and powerless subjects.  Such anxiety is neither new nor unjustified.  In an article in The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban describes the Farm Security Administration's (FSA) photographic propaganda work as follows:

the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers.

Obviously, storytellers engaging in such interactions should act with a consciousness of the risks and an acceptance of responsibility for the outcome.  Nonetheless, despite the risks, such interactions are not merely worth undertaking, but critical.

Without such interactions, of course, fund-raising for relief efforts is much harder.  But that explanation does not make such interactions critical.  Rather, such interactions are critical because engagement with the world, and everything in it, is a moral responsibility.  Yet a paradox exists: engagement with any "other" or "unknown" is difficult to achieve without doing more harm than good. 

If war and enslavement is on the negative end of the spectrum of engagements with "others," and colonialism is somewhat more towards the center of the spectrum but still on the negative side of the balance, then photographing the dispossessed for humanitarian purposes (or engaging in any type of storytelling about disadvantaged peoples) must be on the positive end (although, again, not without its risks).  Indeed, undertaking the empathetic leap to tell the story of an "other" (in whatever medium) is possibly our safest and most promising tool for engagement. 

Full disclosure:  I take photos for humanitarian purposes (examples right and below).  I have found the experience uniformly rewarding.  Usually I am able to ask permission before I take photos, and where possible I know the subject's name and rudiments of his or her life.  Very often, the subjects request that I take the photo, either verbally or by appearing before the camera and posing.

Although I cannot speak for the subjects of my photos, what feedback I have received has been positive.  In my experience taking such pictures, I have typically been photographing individuals who have either never been photographed before, or who have been photographed only rarely.  Some have indicated to me that being photographed gives them a sense of importance as well as excitement to join that part of humanity that has appeared in photographs.  Many smile or laugh upon seeing their photos.  I have felt the satisfaction of having made a contribution to my subjects' enjoyment of their lives. 

In the case of photos I have taken, the subjects have only rarely seen the end products in which their pictures appear (brochures, online stories, etc.).  In the instances in which they have seen themselves in fund raising and knowledge awareness materials, they have been pleased.

That said, I have never taken a photograph that has been worth any amount of money or garnered any fame.  Such events tend to change the calculus.  Florence Thompson, depicted in Dorothea Lange's photograph "Migrant Mother" (first photograph above), ultimately objected to circulation of the photograph for reasons that appear to have to do with the class disparity between herself and Lange (although Lange didn't own the copyright to the photo and made no money off its reprints).

And although the female subject of Kevin Carter's photograph of a starving Sudanese child and a hovering vulture (right) never complained, Carter was harshly condemned for snapping pictures instead of helping the little girl more directly.  After winning the Pulitzer in 1994 for the photograph, Carter committed suicide.

But iconic imagery is a bad baseline for the vast majority of interactions involving powerful storytellers and powerless subjects.  When images become iconic, they represent concepts greater than either the subject or the photographer, and control of the image transitions from model and photographer to the public. 

Although the fallout of that shift in power may usually be worse for the less empowered subject (e.g., Florence Thompson) than for the more empowered photographer (e.g., Dorothea Lange), the fundamental problem is not that the photographer somehow exploited the subject at the time of the photograph, but that exposure (through fame or otherwise) is terrible to bear.  Few have the capacity for it: Florence Thompson didn't; but neither did Kevin Carter.

Blaming the photographer for this outcome is neither productive nor fair.  A photographer (or any storyteller) has a very limited tool at his or her disposal.  A means of telling a story may be our safest and most promising means of engagement, but it does not include protection from the aftermath of that story's circulation, nor does it include a guarantee of reward should the story prove profitable. 

Even a storyteller's responsibility for the outcome of the interaction with the "other" cannot extend beyond circumstances in the storyteller's personal control.  When an image becomes iconic, the photographer has lost whatever control he or she had over the image's use and message and cannot be accountable for the actions of unrelated third parties or the public at large.   

We can condemn the storyteller for not doing enough (e.g., snapping pictures instead of feeding the child).  But ultimately such criticisms are hypocritical.  The storyteller, after all, was (among other tasks) fulfilling a moral obligation to engage the world, while most often the critic was doing substantially less.  

Moreover, the storyteller's engagement produced a lasting contribution to our collective imagination and awareness.  We are richer for the storyteller's efforts. 

Rather than criticizing the storyteller, then, perhaps efforts should be directed to compensating (or feeding) the subject of the story.  Or critics should get off their asses and try engaging the world themselves.

(Dorothea Lange's photo "Migrant Mother" from Wikimedia Commons; Kevin Carter's photo of a collapsed Sudanese girl and a waiting vulture from the Pulitzer Prize website)

"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago.  I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought.  She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.

I was dubious, as I am of all claims that society is getting dumber.  From what I can see, society has always been composed of a healthy majority of idiots.  In any event, I've never been convinced by comparisons between today's reading population and that of times past because literacy rates are so much higher now.  You can't expect literate morons to gravitate to the same fare as literate non-morons, and incorporating so many of these morons into the literate population (a development which I fully endorse) was bound to change the overall mix of reading options.

But I continued to mull Gabi's question, and I was still mulling when Daniel Mendelsohn published his review of Ben Yagoda's book, Memoir: A History, in The New Yorker.  Mendelsohn, like Gabi, suggests that the recent glut of memoirs "may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture."  Although Yagoda apparently doesn't speculate about why such a displacement is occurring, Mendelsohn has a theory.  Televised talk shows, reality TV and the confessional Internet culture, Mendelsohn conjectures, may be creating an audience that cannot identify with protagonists who don't claim to be "real":

Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?

Although, as numerous recent memoir fakes have demonstrated, "real" protagonists often tread into fictional territory, modern audiences (according to Mendelsohn) may find such protagonists easier to sympathize with (and to forgive) than fictional characters.

I am as intrigued by Mendelsohn's explanation, but ultimately as skeptical of it as I am of Gabi's.  Certainly, "real" stories have an allure that the fictional will always lack, but the notion that an audience's ability to relate to characters depends on the claimed truthfulness or fictional nature of the story doesn't (intuitively) strike me as persuasive. 

More likely, in my opinion, is that people are becoming conditioned to expect certain narratives in certain media: quite possibly people are gravitating towards TV and Internet content that delivers some semblance of "the real" - 24 hour news stations, reality TV, infotainment, documentaries, nature programming and, of course, talk shows.  Television and dynamic Internet leave less room for the imagination than a book; demanding that such media deliver narratives that, likewise, are composed of more facts and less fantasy is (to my mind, misguided, but nonetheless) an understandable expectation.

But if people aren't becoming too stupid for novels, and if television and Internet narrative expectations aren't infecting books, then what explains the recent outpouring of published memoirs?  The most credible supposition, to my mind, builds on a point Judith Shulevitz made in her review of Yagoda's Memoir in The New York Times Review of Books.  She argues that memoirists, whether liars or oracles (or, more likely, something in between), appeal:

(1) because [they] might become . . . friend[s]; (2) because we might learn something useful; and (3) because we can't help being curious about the ways other people go about reflecting on themselves and justifying their existence.

At this historical moment, those last two reasons are intensely salient.  The modern world demands much of its denizens.  People must be educated and informed.  They must be physically fit and attractive.  They must be healthy and engaged in the world.  They must have families and jobs.  They must be sexy and productive.  They must be prosperous and environmentally-sound.  They must be free of prejudices and self-aware.  They must be mobile and simultaneously rooted in family and community. 

No other time in history has demanded as much of its people.  Typically, in past ages, societies have been content to let their women occupy one limited realm, their soldiers another, and they restricted similarly their wise men, merchants, rulers, wealthy and poor.  These groups all had roles that were, generally speaking, well-defined; and these roles required skill sets that were, generally speaking, within the capacities of their players to learn within a relatively short time.  Not so today: "unbounded" is le mot just with respect to social roles.  Everyone must be everything.  And the necessary skills for such high-level functioning require more time, training and experience to acquire than most of us will ever have.

The current popularity of memoirs, to my mind, relates to these social demands.  Memoirs tantalize readers with the promise of answers to their stress-inducing question: how do you do it?  How do you meet social expectations in this day and age?  Can someone else - someone successful enough to merit a published book about their life - tell me what I'm supposed to do?

Historically, of course, seekers of such information turned to (among others) the witch doctors, elders, gossips and teachers of their day.  They might also seek second opinions in the works of their relevant epic poets, myth makers, and story tellers (playwrights, novelists, etc.).  

Usually, of course, the advice of the witch doctor contingent was oral and unrecorded, so quite possibly we undercount the extent to which it was relied on by past generations.  Today, of course, the modern equivalents of the witch doctors (Jack Welch, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, etc.) have many mass platforms and outlets on and by which to promote and record their answers to the pressing question: how do you do it?  So perhaps we now overcount their importance.  

Regardless, if today we are seeing a supposedly ahistorical reliance on the witch doctors, et al., and a corresponding decline in reliance on the epic poets and their ilk, perhaps the reason is not the audience's intelligence, nor its capacity for identifying with fictional characters, but the content of the fiction on offer.  Surely fiction that enfolds the breadth of this global moment and provides fodder for rumination about the modern predicament is not penned by MFA graduates enjoying suburban lives underwritten by their jobs teaching in MFA programs?

(Image of title page of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the website of The Library Company of Philadelphia)

A memorable feature of The African Queen - now three weeks after I've finished it - is C.S. Forester's empathy for the Germans.  Early on in the story, Forester highlights one of his heroine's few flaws by emphasizing her lack of compassion for the German military predicament:

     [N]aturally [Rose] could not see the other side of the question.  Von Hanneken, with no more than five hundred white men in a colony people by a million Negroes, of whom not more than a few thousand even knew they were subjects of the German flag, had to face the task of defending German Central Africa against the attacks of the overwhelming forces which would instantly be directed upon him.  It was his duty to fight tot he bitter end, to keep occupied as many of the enemy as possible for as long as possible, and to die in the last ditch, if necessary, while the real decision was being fought out in France. Thanks to the British command of the sea, he could expect no help whatever from outside. . . .
     Rose saw no excuse for him at all.

p. 8-9.  Later, when The African Queen squeaks by the German troops stationed at Shona, on the last stretch of river before the rapids, C.S. Forester endows the German commander with a complex range of reactions:

[The captain of the reserve] stood staring down between the cliffs for a long minute.  Von Hanneken would be furious at the news of the loss of [The African Queen], but what more could he have done?  He could not justly be expected to have foreseen this.  No one in his senses would have taken a steam launch into the cataract, and a reserve officer's training does not teach a man to guard against cases of insanity.
. . . .
As he walked back to Shona, bathed in sweat, he was still undecided whether he should make any mention of this incident in his report to Von Hanneken. . . . It might be better to keep quiet.  The [African Queen] was gone, and the poor devils in it were dead. . . . But he was sorry for the poor devils, all the same. 

p. 85-86.  And in the tale's dramatic conclusion, the Germans "[p]retty decent[ly]" bring Rose and Charlie Allnut over to the British side of Lake Tanganyika - in a move that has "a touch of the formal chivalry of the Napoleonic wars" (p. 233-234) - before the British finally sink the German ship, Königin Luise, in a maneuver that sees the British "not want[ing] to kill the wretched Germans" and the Germans gallantly going down with the ship.  (p. 241-242.)

C.S. Forester's notable and humanizing depiction of Germans prompted a number of questions for me:  First, I wondered if C.S. Forester was taking any political risks by offering so three dimensional a glimpse of his German characters.  WWI - and the use of mustard gas - was still fresh in the minds of the British public, and Hitler was already in power by the time to book was published.  His good-natured approach to the enemy could have cost him readers.

Second, I wondered if, even if he'd perceived the political risk, C.S. Forester would have cared.  In his criticism of Rose's inability to relate to the German military predicament, I perceived that C.S. Forester was gently contrasting her with himself; his characters may be privileged to be narrow minded, but the author can afford no such luxury.  In that case, his discharging of his authorial duty seems tinged with bravery.

Finally, I wondered if his empathy was an expression of a longing for a romantic, chivalrous (imagined) golden age - an idealistic hope that if he could conjure a civilized conflict on the page, readers might be inspired to live it out in the real world.  If so, a rich irony exists in the fact that Rose and Charlie Allnut - the patriotic, intrepid, salt-of-the-earth lovers - planned to destroy the Königin Luise in a suicide bombing.

Occasionally, I stumble across a quote that sums up my thoughts exactly.  At such moments, I'm startled at the connection that I share with this other person, typically someone I've never met, maybe even a person from another age.  I had such an experience when I read this NYT review of two of Amos Oz's recent publications.  At the end of the article, Oz says, "I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred.  It is, in my view, also a major moral imperative."

I've written before about the importance of imagining the perspectives of "the other" as a basis for compassion, which is incompatible with fanatical hatred.  But the intense identification I felt with Oz's quote related not to these musings, but to my reaction to Adam Hochschild's book, King Leopold's Ghost.

In his thorough research and quoting from primary sources, Hochschild deserves much praise for King Leopold's Ghost.  Nonetheless, Hochschild's story-telling annoyed me.  In presenting his data, Hochschild chose to inhabit the mind of King Leopold, but refused to inhabit the minds of the Congolese living under his oppressive regime.  Hochschild repeatedly offers subjective opinions about Leopold's character, thoughts, morality and conduct, portraying these assumptions as conclusions drawn from evidence.  In reality, they are PC condemnations of a man whose time, thinking, and morality are alien to Hochschild.

Hochschild doesn't make the same mistake with the Congolese.  To the contrary, he refuses to offer any speculation about how they might feel.  The Congolese were routinely flogged to death and forced to walk hundreds of miles over rocky terrain infested with insects that burrowed into their feet, all the while lugging obscenely heavy cargo.  How might they have felt about those circumstances?  According to Hochschild, we have no idea because of the lack of primary sources written by Congolese.

Hochschild's approach is, to my way of thinking, PC nonsense.  In reality, we have no more primary source about King Leopold's mind than we do about the inner thinking of the Congolese who suffered for Leopold's pleasure.  The concept of "primary sources" begins to break down when the "facts" we are hoping the source will "establish" are thoughts, mindsets and moral constructs.  Yes, it's true that people can leave written records of their thoughts.  But most people are inarticulate, and even the articulate among us very often have only an imperfect grasp of the operation of their own minds.  We can never truly know the mind of another to the standard of historical fact.  We can only ever conjecture.

My criticism is not that Hocschild was, of necessity, required to offer conjectures.  My concern is that he doesn't seem to realize that he's offering conjectures about King Leopold, while refusing to do so for the Congolese.  Hochschild, a white man, seems to feel comfortable inhabiting the perspective another white man for purposes of condemning (what appears to our eyes today as) his racism and immorality; but Hochschild doesn't seem to feel qualified to imagine how it felt to be a Congolese person under King Leopold's rule.  Although Hochschild purportedly supports the Congolese against King Leopold, the Congolese remain to him an "other" beyond his imagination. 

Is it really so impossible to imagine the Congolese perspective?  A man is forced, on pain of death, to march three hundred miles across land that razors his feet.  He's carrying an 80 pound load.  He's not fed enough.  Knowing these facts (which are confirmable through primary sources), is it possible that he's pleased about the situation?

I reject the idea that it's wrong for me to ask these questions because I am a white, American woman living in the 21st century, and the Congolese who lived and died under King Leopold were black tribal people living in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I cannot, of course, know comprehensively or viscerally what the experience of their lives was like, but mental connections (whether imaginative, cognitive or both) between me and the Congolese are as possible as they are between me and Amos Oz.  Indeed, they are not merely possible but, according to Oz, morally necessary.

Oz's assertion that imagining the other is a moral imperative stands as a severe condemnation of Hochschild's political correctness (however well-intentioned).  Isolating another group as being beyond the imagination, whether out of respect or out of maliciousness, forecloses meaningful comprehension and compassion. 

Far from demonstrating his sensitivity, Hochschild has undermined his credibility with his PC crutch.  By constructing King Leopold's Congolese subjects as unimaginable others, he has telegraphed one indelible impression: fear of criticism.

Tom Bissell's NYT Book Review essay about David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address made me think back on -- and want to write an addendum to -- my blog post about Foster Wallace from last month.  Interestingly, in his commencement address, Foster Wallace expounds on exactly the issue I discussed in my blog post: the limitations on human compassion.

In particular, Foster Wallace focuses on the work necessary to cultivate compassion.  Advising graduating seniors on the imperative of seeing multiple perspectives and taking the trouble to imagine the motives of people who are annoying us, or who are in our way, Foster Wallace cautions, "it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to . . . . It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out."

But if you don't at least try?  Foster Wallace has another word of warning, to the effect that if you don't buoy yourself with ethical principles, the world will erode you: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

I read Foster Wallace's commencement speech for the first time today and, frankly, I was surprised that his words echoed my own thoughts -- that our hard-wiring isn't well suited for compassion, that compassion requires cultivation, that that, in turn, requires hard work, that any other course basically leaves you fucked, and that drudgery sacrifice for people we love is as close as we get to the meaning of life.  I hasten to add, lest my surprise sound arrogant (which is not my intent or feeling), that I wasn't surprised because I thought my own ideas were so original or refined, but because in general I don't relate to Foster Wallace's writing, or to his overall conclusions about America and American culture.  Foster Wallace's commencement address reminded me that people who share fundamentals can nonetheless go in completely different directions with those basic concepts.

I was also interested to experience in Foster Wallace's commencement address an illustration of another point I'd raised in my previous blog post: our tendency, when generalizing about others, to project ourselves onto the people around us.  As I wrote previously, this bent impairs our ability to empathize with others.  Even when we exert our wills, determined to see multiple perspectives, and expend the energy to listen or imaginatively embody another's position, what we hear (regardless of what's said) and what we imagine (regardless of the facts that form the springboard for our imaginative leaps) are determined by our own identities.

Knowing this limitation has not freed me from its constraints. 

For me, the worldview that I've adopted -- that correllates with the framework Foster Wallace outlines in his commencement address -- has been a comfort, a resource and a wellspring of strength.  When I have wanted to die (and there have been times in my life, more than I hope anyone experiences), I have received succor from believing in the basic tenets that Foster Wallace articulates in his speech.  As a result, I've basically assumed (very broadly speaking and oversimplifying for the sake of illustrating my point) that people who adopt a similar worldview get similar results: that if you can accept that worldview, then it puts to rest existential crises.

Obviously, I was wrong.  Given my current (limited) capacities for compassion, I'm having difficulty relating to Foster Wallace.  I'm surprised that the man had a similar worldview to me because I have been generalizing about others based on myself, and so my default assumption was that a suicide must have a different set of values.  But the relationship between any individual's (cerebral) world view and (visceral) drives is no doubt more complicated than my assumption allowed.  And, in the absence of any basis for understanding that relationship, I'm still groping for an entry point for understanding an existence that is beyond my experience.

What I wouldn't give for Foster Wallace to be able to elaborate on his ideas in another commencement speech.

In recent months, I've thought a great deal about the limits of human compassion.  We seem hard-wired to relate to individuals and their stories, but our compassion breaks down when we're asked to relate to groups.  We can empathize with one Holocaust survivor; 6 million dead, on the other hand, are a number. 

I was put in mind of another limitation on human compassion as I read D.T. Max's recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace.  Wallace, he says, perceived "that America was at once overentertained and sad."  Speaking to Salon in 1996, Wallace said that living "in America around the millennium" was "particularly sad . . . . It's [a] like a stomach-level sadness. . . . It manifests itself as a kind of lostness." 

Wallace's experience of the 90's made me gape in amazement.  Sad?!  The 90's?  The Internet boom?  The swinging Clinton years?  When America was good and loved and Whole Foods was becoming mainstream and salaries were rising and everyone was making money hand-over-fist in the stock market?

Of course, Wallace's 1990's included stays in mental asylums, a half-way house, a failed relationship, as well as the pre-Infinite Jest stage in his career, when he was worried that his career had ended before it'd begun.  His diagnosis of the American condition during those years strikes me -- and I say this gently, cognizant of Wallace's suicide six months ago, and feeling that engagement with his ideas is a proper way to honor his memory -- as a projection of his own profound sadness onto the country writ large.

That Wallace felt the need to address the state of the nation is a reflection of his ambition, but whether he could have come to any other conclusion of the world around him -- be it his closest circle of peers or the broadest circle of the globe -- seems doubtful because of another of the limits of human compassion: the tendency to generalize about others based on ourselves. 

For example, my default assumption is that most people value time efficiency; my experience, on the other hand, is that my default assumption is wrong.  Nonetheless, it's difficult for me to restrain my frustration at the Beijing taxi driver who has resignedly driven me into a traffic jam instead of taking a faster detour; unless replenished through conscious effort, my compassion dwindles for people who operate on rules different from my own.

This limitation makes challenging any individual's ability to relate to another person; applied on a group level, it's even more likely to cause distortions ("All Americans want fast services"; "All Beijing taxi drivers waste time").  Wallace was, without question, aware of his pain, but the fact that he detected sadness in himself does not mean that other Americans were aware of their own conditions, sad or otherwise.  Self-awarenes, in my experience, is among the least useful of characteristics to project on others if the goal is obtaining accurate deductions about them. 

Of course, maybe I'm falling into my own trap; my generalizations about the limitations of human compassion could be wrong; I may be completely misconstruing the basis of Wallace's conclusions.  And perhaps Wallace was right about millenial sadness in America (for example, the musical Rent makes the same point). 

The question is whether nurturing such doubts is a means of transcending those limits and expanding the scope of human compassion.  I am hoping the answer is yes.