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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
Also, dear readers, don’t put signs on cookies that say “chocolate chip” when really they’re “macadamia nut” cookies because you ran out of chocolate chip.
Government is an involuntary association by any definition. Government takes resources from its constituents and uses them to accomplish ends set by the government. This is hardly an arena for compassion. Compassion is better expressed through private voluntary avenues where the actual owner of wealth, for example, decides to use that wealth for compassionate ends.
Except it is not at all that clear cut. For instance, almost every one of our wars since Aug 1945 has been about the need for US citizens to agree to embark on a war in order to demonstrate the nation’s compassion. One example: a huge ploy on part of US media leading the citizens to believe in a war in Vietnam. With our troops at the ready, then the Buddhist monks in Vietnam would no longer be pestered by Commies to the point they incinerate themselves.
Or that we need to topple Saddam Hussein in order to give the Iraqi people freedom and democracy.
Compassion is fine as long as it is waged in order to bring maximum profits to the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex. It is frowned on only when it seems like a real live human being, unattached by an umbilical cord to some Senator or Congressperson, might benefit.
I didn’t say the government won’t try to use compassion as an inducement. I just suggested one should not accept it as a government function.
Oh, please. The welfare/wealth-transfer-industrial-complex puts the military-industrial-complex to shame. With much larger “umbilical cords.” At least with the latter the country as a whole gets something for its money.
Okay, got it as far as your viewpoint. But it is common sense that when citizens are hammered continually with the idea that to be part of a “good and decent citizenry” one must be compassionate about this policy or that one, whether it is to bring about another endless war, or more immigration, then eventually there is a huge portion of the population that has been brainwashed that the very first obligation any citizen has is to be compassionate.
Because there is a huge bleedthrough relating to how a mechanism used as an inducement eventually becomes a characteristic of the populace.
Well, compassion as a notion is a big feature of communism or socialism and we know how that works in practice. It’s an extreme form of what I previously described.
Bingo.
Economist Michael Hudson’s fascinating book …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year discusses the invention of interest bearing debt, the problems it began to cause, and the remedy used by Bronze Age rulers in the ancient Near East.
From the Amazon blurb:
Hint: it was the debts owed by small farmers and tradesmen that were forgiven.
I wonder what the effect would be if municipal debt were to be forgiven. Or if the debts owed to Illinois government employees in the form of pension promises were to be forgiven. Or if the debt corporations owe to corporate bondholders were to be forgiven.
[continued]
Hudson writes:
“Compassion” in the context of public policy in general and student loan forgiveness among other hot issues has become a partisan propaganda term. @philturmel was right in calling out: “The welfare/wealth-transfer-industrial-complex” to which I would add “and its propaganda arms in mass media, social media, and K-12 and higher education.” The higher education part owes its life to guaranteed student loans and won’t go quietly away.
The real question is “would some form of large scale debt forgiveness have social utility.” Maybe if loan forgiveness was part of a package that shut down the woke sector of the economy, academia and the administrative apparatus it might be worth considering.
Otherwise, student loan forgiveness would be hugely destructive.
This whole thing got me thinking of the famous statement in the Midrash Rabah to Ecclesiastes.
That’s the one that’s often translated something like this:
The usual text brought as an example is I Samuel 15:9. Saul, having been commanded to destroy Amalek and erase its memory, defeated Agag… and then:
That incident cost Saul the throne with which he had been entrusted. But it’s not actually the dead feeble no-accounts that the “in the end” is understood to refer to, though. It’s the city of Nob, whose inhabitants were prophets and whom Saul’s henchman Doeg slaughtered in I Samuel 22.
Those “שנעשה רחמן”; She-na’aseh rachaman. The verb root ע•ש•ה means “to act” or “to do.” Grammatically, na’aseh is a first person plural verb or such a verb being used as a participle to describe a noun. One word in Hebrew, in English, it’s an adjectivally modified noun: “merciful person.” Na’aseh would be, depending on conjugation, “let’s …” or “We will…” or something along those lines.
Maybe the grammar says that “Saul and the people” were in cahoots. The Agag incident is certainly worded so as to be ambiguous about who was in charge when the decision was made to disobey G-d.
The Amazon blurb for another Hudson book:
Explain if you can exactly what the middle class got when Obama/Geithner allowed for the transfer of 23 to 32 trillions of dollars. Like Steve Bannon states in his excellent Frontline interview (January 2020) the first trillion was needed asa stop gap measure.
however as far as the restof the situation went: both Kucinich and Issa tried to get first George W and then Obama and the rest of Congress to understand that there was another mechanism entirely other than Bailouts for the Too Big To Fail. the mechanisms wee firmly established during the Savings and Loan debacle. In fact, the laws that guided the nation back to economic salvation were still on the books.
What would have happened if anyone in power had listened to Kucinich/Issa would have been this: in each region of the nation, the state chartering of specific banks woul d have occurred. Then the Fed would have given money to those state banks, with the provision that the monies be loaned out to citizens who owned businesses or farms under each bank’s regional purview. This would have allowed for a true recovery.
Under the Obama/Geithner method of capitulating to the Big Financial Players, the US faced a L-shaped recovery. People lost their homes – many in a class of people who had not taken out the weird zero percent loans given to anyone who asked. But when an entire economy tanks, so do welders, carpenters, teachers, social workers, accountants, cafe owners, beauticians et al. Only the top one percent of the economy ended up doing fine – and since they were the ones who caused the problem, they should have been th4e ones forced to sink in excrement up to their necks.