Pity, compassion, solidarity

Abstract

Compassion plays a key role in politics. It is a key, perhaps the key, moral sentiment and perhaps along with anger at injustice (the focus of the previous chapter by Simon Thompson) it is central to what we might think of as “progressive” political struggles and campaigns. For example, Blair’s recent attempt to kick-start a concerted international strategy for ending poverty in Africa seems predicated upon the politics of compassion. And yet, as this example might indicate, compassion seems to be an emotion capable of taking on many hues. As Lauren Berlant (2004), for example, notes, it can also provide the motif for the state’s disengagement with its own poor. “Compassionate Conservatism” shows its solidarity with the suffering of the poor in American society by freeing them from their dependency upon the so-called “infantilising government aid programmes”. And in Britain too, “tough love” has become the inspiration behind a Blairite social policy which promises “hand ups not hand outs”. It seems that no one has a monopoly on compassion. Indeed Sara Ahmed (2004) argues persuasively that love and compassion are also central to the way in which fascist groups in Britain and the USA see themselves in their struggle to protect the vulnerable body of the white race. So compassion may be a more slippery emotion than one might at first think, one easily deployed by a wide range of normative discourses.