On Compassion
Looking Out For Number One. That’s the title of Robert Ringer’s best-selling motivational book first published in 1978. A die-hard libertarian, his view is that positive outcomes for the whole group are optimal when each member of the group seeks out his or her own pleasure. Within Ringer’s world, the bogie man is the absolute moralist – a person who should be ignored. Instead, we should evaluate for ourselves whether our actions are moral. This sounds a lot like personal responsibility – which is undoubtedly an orientation to the world which West Hill endorses. However …
This is where Gretta Vosper introduces the notion of compassion – a notion which gets little attention in Ringer’s thinking. Is our response to the need of others really motivated by self-interest? Gretta notes that in Hebrew the word for compassion is cognate with the word for womb. The libertarian account of humanity presents a fractured view of the individual in relation to the rest of the group, but a womb implies an integrated account. Compassion from the integrated (womb) perspective means that looking out for number one simultaneously embraces the other. This morning’s readings from Matthew 9, stories of healing, are similarly a compassionate response to a “looking out for number one” world.
Beyond the Tribe
This is a political meditation – a dangerous thing particularly at a time when we face federal elections in both Canada and the U.S. Although we pride ourselves as practitioners of a more highly evolved form of social organization (liberal democracy), the adversarial cat-fighting that emerges at election time reveals an underlying tribalism that is anything but evolved. The increasing creep of religious fundamentalism into the political sphere only reinforces the tribalism and undermines the possibility of political organization more in keeping with our global presence and powerful technologies. Perhaps religion could offer a positive moral influence by drawing attention, not to where we have come from (our tribal heritage), but to where we are going.
The End is at Hand
“It’s the end of the world as we know it.” This is the opening of the chorus of a pop song by R.E.M. Sing it three times and then finish with: “and I feel fine.” It’s an apt song for the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator which some doomsayers believe will produce a black hole that sucks up the world and brings about “the end of the world as we know it.” You can check online to see if, in fact, the world has ended. However, there is a very real sense in which the Large Hadron Collider may end the world as we know it. If, in fact, it allows physicists to detect the postulated Higgs boson particle whose presence would provide an “answer to everything,” then our understanding of our place in the order of things will be radically altered.
But even if this experiment achieves its goal, will it give us an answer to everything? Will it help us in our relationships? Will it help us in our quest for meaningful living? In our transformation, both within the physical and the spiritual world, we are always witnessing the end of the world as we know, and then moving on. We can never forget the second half of the song’s chorus: “and I feel fine.”
Retelling Our Myths
Here’s a thought experiment for you to try. Imagine yourself in a primitive state with no knowledge of how the world works (except language). How would you account for the way things are? For example, what kind of a story would you tell about the origin of suffering? From the perspective of this thought experiment, creation myths of the Hebraic tradition (you know the ones – the tree, the serpent, the woman) are a reasonable development. Some, like St. Augustine, suggested that the origin of suffering inheres in our nature (original sin); others, like Pelagius, thought that humans are born good and that evil arises from outside influences. (Matthew Fox adopted the Pelagian view as a “doctrine of original blessing.”)
But the need to account for “evil” persists in personal ways for each one of us. We tell ourselves stories (myths?) about traumatic events in our lives, troubled relationships, disappointed aspirations. The stories we tell may help us cope in the short term, but these stories may also become a habitual response to similar situations later in life and, as such, more a hindrance than help. As with our creation myths, we need to recast our personal “myths” in ways that reflect our maturing view of the world.