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On Compassion
My husband was watching some commentary on loan forgiveness. The talking heads kept reiterating that this wasn’t “compassionate” because it isn’t “fair” to the people who paid off their loans.
Regardless of your feelings regarding that particular policy, I want to dispel this ridiculous idea that Compassion = Fair.
Fairness doesn’t exist in this world. If everyone got what was fair, we would all be dead. (Because we are all sinners and the wages of sin is death). I get a lot of people around here aren’t Christians, so don’t care much for that phrasing, so let me put it another way. If the world were fair, Bernie would be living in Venezuela waiting in a bread line. If life were fair, 53 percent of the homicides in Chicago wouldn’t be unsolved. If life were fair, we wouldn’t have BOGO deals, freebies at job fairs, or any number of ridiculous and mundane bonuses in life.
And yet, we should show compassion to others. Please take note: a moral people is a compassionate people. If compassion equaled fairness and fairness doesn’t exist, then compassion wouldn’t exist, either. Therefore, compassion does not mean fairness.
Compassion is about grace. A silly little word that means getting what you do not deserve (in a positive way). So, if you want to be compassionate, you are absolutely talking about the exact opposite of fairness. And yes, if you are giving grace to someone, it might not be fair to someone who doesn’t need that grace – but life isn’t fair!
Again, this post isn’t about what brought this to my attention, it is about compassion, so don’t let what you think my position on loan forgiveness is colored by what follows. This isn’t about loan forgiveness. Here’s the question: should we be compassionate even when it means making things unfair? (If your answer is no, please see the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 and refer yourself to the oldest son.)
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Well said, and evergreen in relevance. Thanks for the reminder.
Fair does not mean equal outcomes to people on the right. Instead, “fair” means an equal opportunity. That said, changing the rules after the fact on school payments is not fair. It might be fair, if the money did not come from the people that already paid their tuition. But, there is no “free” when it comes to government mandates.
Here’s the applicable Bible passage:
/facepalm/
SMoD 2020!
The root of compassion is “suffering with.”
Sure. But that’s not really the question posed by the student loan forgiveness discussion. Here’s the appropriate question: should we give charity to debtors using money involuntarily taken from third parties?
Your question and all of the other points swirling around this topic serve to obscure the underlying question.
Compassion may be unfair, but it need not be so. And when its application results in a true lack of fairness, it’s important to point that out.
Let’s note that the older son does not have clean hands in the story to the extent he is petulant and refuses to participate in the celebration. He is, in short, greedy. However, to the extent that there is a “flip side” to the compassionate treatment of some, those burdened by “compassionate treatment” are often not blameworthy (i.e., they are not the same as the older son). Certain acts (even government programs) may well be justified through the lens of compassion. That’s all well and good. But I see no reason that we also can’t be compassionate about those disadvantaged by those acts who may be blameless for the consequences.
On the loan repayment issue, don’t we have a compassionate bankruptcy system in the United States, and wasn’t the particular type of loan in question here removed from that compassionate approach. Just put it back.
I think it depends on the situation. Should we in general aim to be compassionate? Yes, I think we should. But how should we deal with the person who continually tries to take advantage of that compassion. Should we continue to extend it? I’m not so sure. If we warn someone that if they do ABC that XYZ will be the consequences they’ll have to deal with, should we show “compassion” and negate XYZ if we can should the person go ahead and do ABC? I’m not so sure. Is it more compassionate to continually rescue someone from their mistakes when letting them deal with consequences might prove more helpful to them instead? I’m not so sure. So as I said, I think it depends on the situation.
I may have told this story here before, but if so, it was years ago
At a New Years Eve party about 20 years ago, a conservative friend of mine (I’ll call him “Joe”) got into a debate with a liberal friend (who loved to get into political arguments, especially after a couple glasses of wine; I’ll call her “Sue”) about the far-east “sweat shops” that were then in the news. Some female celebrity had a clothing line and it had come out that the clothes were being made in so-called “sweat shops”, creating a mini-scandal resulting in the “sweat shops” being closed down.
Joe’s argument was that shutting down the sweat shops wasn’t necessarily good for the people employed therein because the alternative wasn’t between earning $2.00 per day (or whatever it was) sewing garments vs. making a middle-class wage doing something else. Rather it was between making $2.00 per day vs. having a job worse than that — maybe picking rice for $1.00 per day or something — or perhaps having no job, at all.
Sue wasn’t having any of it. She couldn’t logically rebut his argument, and so responded with, “It’s about compassion, Joe!” She thought this was a killer argument, though she couldn’t explain how it was compassionate to throw these workers out on the street.
Ultimately, I believe Sue wanted to feel compassionate much more than she wanted to be compassionate.
Exactly! So which is more compassionate? Providing jobs which are low-paying by the developed world’s standards but which allow families to eat? Or closing down the jobs, causing the families to starve? It’s very easy for someone who doesn’t live in the situation to say that the jobs should be shut down, but he/she won’t have to deal with the fall-out.
It was removed from that system because it was abused by the flower children of the 60’s. It became fashionable to run up the student loans to stay in college as long as possible, collecting Vietnam deferments, then “stick it to the man” after graduation. There’s no way to collateralize an education or otherwise deter bankruptcy when the debtor has nothing but a diploma to their name.
The only mechanism that might have a chance would be to make the provider of the education liable for all or most of the loss in a bankruptcy. Of course, that would utterly devastate the colleges that have fattened themselves up on churning out worthless degrees in watered-down liberal arts and/or “studies” flavor of the month. So don’t expect politicians to promote that solution any time soon.
In the meantime, don’t put it back.
When it is paid for with other people’s money, it isn’t compassion. Period.
Justice is getting what we deserve.
Mercy is getting what we don’t deserve.
Grace is getting what we can’t deserve.
Your question is worthy of its own post, since this post is not about specific forms of compassion but whether compassion is something we should strive for on some level, even if it makes things unfair.
I don’t expect an unequivocal and full throated “YES.” Like all things, discernment is important. And yeah, it does depend on the situation. Like Terry’s example, is our idea of compassion truly compassionate? But ultimately, compassion does not mean fairness. The left gets this wrong, and judging by what I heard today, some on the right do as well.
I once got into an argument with a mother whose son has severe peanut allergies. I’ve also been on Bryan Stephens’ bad side for repeating it and I know Arahant doesn’t appreciate the sentiment. I am rather against parents with children with poor health forcing others to cater to their health. Note the word force. It should be an act of compassion for us to make room for sick kids. But our compassion isn’t something others are entitled to – and she believed she was entitled to others’ compassion. The Left also thinks they are entitled to others’ compassion. And they will attempt to take it from you by force.
Wrong. I agree with you.
Wonderful. You explained it well.
However, I still don’t support excusing loans. Compassionate it may be but it would undermine the the financial system and screw it up for future people seeking college loans. Maybe all loans. Compassionate to some, detrimental to others.
Right. Individual compassion would be better, like George Soros could spend his money to pay those loans off.
Awesome :)
Nonsense. There is no universally agreed-upon concept called “fair” even among the Right. Fair is situation and ideological, thus rendering it empty. The only useful application of the word fair is in the sentence, “Life is not fair.” The reason it works there is that everyone perceives unfairness directed at them by others who viewed it as the opposite.
Hopefully the older son still inherited while the younger reformed his life but did not actually profit from his profligacy .
Student loan forgiveness is only compassionate in a selfishly arrogant short sighted way, same as all the gender erasure initiatives of late. It destroys cultural coherence and trust. Anybody who paid for college would understand they had been played for suckers.
To make fools out of the people who worked and saved and sacrificed to pay for their children’s education would end what is left of integrity in the country. It would not be compassionate, it would be evil.
Aaaaaand, I hear it’s a very popular idea.
He used his inheritance in the profligacy… So I don’t think he got a second inheritance. However, by living in his father’s house and being graced with the very rich celebration, it could be argued the father was using his older son’s inheritance in doing so. So the older son was actually upset in seeing what could be his inheritance being used on his younger brother who had already been given his share of the inheritance.
Again, not about student loan forgiveness. Its about compassion vs fairness. I’m not engaging on that debate stage, so please leave off it.
The argument against your edifying and totally wonderful writing is that those who consider themselves “financial experts” and who are inside the bigger financial and political con games no longer have any compassion. They consider compassion to be a dozen turkeys given out at Thanksgiving and Christmas to be all the compassion that is needed, even as they pilfer the pension funds of the companies that they have brought to bankruptcy, while awaiting their Golden Parachutes on the way out of those companies.
So as far as an individual getting loan forgiveness, I think about it from a political sense of the world and a large overview of what is going on:
We “Forgave” the people who brought us the Economic Collapse of 2008. We allowed Obama to appoint Tim Geithner, with whom he had a friendship going back to boyhood, as the Secretary of the Treasury. This man should have been inside an orange jump suit for the way he racketeered positions for his friends on Wall Street, with only Lehman Bros being designated as going down.
Some 23 to 32 trillions of dollars from Main Street went into bailing out the Too Big To Fail crowd.
There was no need to do this. The first trillion maybe, as Steve Bannon points out in a brilliant recent interview conducted by Frontline on youtube.
But the rest was a crime. You do not loan the entire segment of the economy that has managed to do well on its own in order to prop up criminals whose only saving grace is that they are well connected to the Establishment politicians.
The effects of this financial crime and financial sin are still with us. Many people, including those who were about to retire, lost their pensions.
Currently the Bigger Banks are not loaning monies to one another, and the smaller banks, which are now very few in number, are struggling to exist.
One of my biggest fears is that if Trump, who understands the above, survives the impeachment efforts, the Dems and their cohorts in the Republican Party will bring the economy down. Before Obama left office, Congress established new laws ensuring that when the economy is brought down once again, again the tax payers will pay Bail Outs.
If we can be “overly compassionate” to the organized monsters that run our economy repeatedly into the ground, we certainly should be considering forgiveness to those who have outstanding personal loans.
@arahant I read this and thought, as my middle-schooler would say, “plot twist!”
I may have issues in what I can eat, but that doesn’t mean I think anyone should have to cater to me. Now, lying about what’s in something, I would object to. “Oh, here, Jimmy, eat this. There are no peanuts in here…” But that’s not what we’re talking about. My food issues are my problems, and I won’t put unreasonable demands on people. Neither should the mother of a child demand that no peanuts or peanut butter even be brought into a school building. At that point, she should be homeschooling to keep the child safe.
Precisely. If an allergy is that severe, merely venturing out in public puts the child in mortal danger.
That, or a parent is being delusional.
I’ll see your Luke 15 and raise you a Matthew 22:21 (“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s . . .”). I’ll raise you a Matthew 10:16, too (“be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves”).
I think that it is a mistake to equate politics with the grace and mercy of God. I think that an overemphasis on compassion leads to the errors of the Social Gospel — which, incidentally, generally led to a loss of faith altogether.
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the authors suggest that schools may be creating more peanut allergies by banning them. One of my kids has a life-threatening allergy to tree nuts, but can eat peanut butter. She has always been able to take PB sandwiches to lunch, but her former elementary school has become increasingly restrictive. With so many students having nut allergies now, none of the kids are allowed to bring any food with nuts to school. I know how scary nut allergies are, but I wonder whether eliminating all exposure is the answer.
At one of my elementary schools, we would go home for lunch. That would solve the problem, but I can’t imagine it happening today. The inequality debates would be off the charts!