Unkinder and Ungentler: A Not-Too-Cynical Meditation on our Global(ist) Modern Compassion

I

A wise librarian once described Walter de la Mare - a poet considered by some to be the greatest children's writer in English of the twentieth century - as distinguished by something I find rather remarkable. Maybe even quite rare: even among poets and children's writers. Something she called a "passionate concern for all unhappiness [emphasis mine]." Including the miseries of not a few animals - such as turn up in his stories, for instance - who fall under the care of often zealously well-meaning, but not always the most wisely considerate, human owners.

Now I can't claim to have read Eileen Colwell (1904-2002)* anywhere near the extent to which I've explored Walter de la Mare. But what I think she meant was (among his many other gifts) a kind of revulsion - or revolt - from all that oppresses the nature, the real fulfilment, of any thing, or any one. A loathing, mind you, not necessarily of what's most apt to provoke that creature's wilfulness, or petulance, or rebellion. But rather, and above all, a horror of whatever would stifle and persecute its underlying peace, its deeper joy, its spirit, if you will. What I think she discovered in him was a kind of delicate concern - gentleness in its most basic mode, as it were - not for what makes any creature most instantly dissatisfied or frustrated or angry, but for what makes for its largest unhappiness: its most oppressive unfulfilment over periods of time, and under many different circumstances. And it is precisely this patient, exacting compassion of his, not with what we want to be right now, but with what we may deeply regret having become, say, five or ten years from now, that made de la Mare in his day, I believe, a most poignant depicter of the miseries of animals and children. Including not a few sufferings that might seem, to us anyways, to be largely self-inflicted. This same compassion, then, may also be the hardest thing about him for many of us moderns to understand and accept, much less approve of. For instance, how many of us who read de la Mare today, I wonder, would be much more inclined to say of one of his characters, whether fictional or real: "Well now, so far as she's made this choice of her own free will - why should we care if she's unhappy with the consequences, or that they prove to be irreversible? As the saying goes, she made her bed," etc.

*Though to be fair, "librarian" hardly begins to describe her. Rather, she seems to have been of that type of educator whose passion, not just for books, but for the happiness and well-being of children was by no means uncommon in the mid-20th century. Whereas in our time it has become, I believe, all but extinct.

It's not that we have no use for gentleness as a principle. And especially when confined to its proper place, which it must know and adhere to at all times. Nowadays we Global Moderns are - or strive to be - the very soul of gentleness in certain select departments of human life. We seek to be tenderness and accommodation itself to people's latest up-to-the minute whims, or fancies, or fashions. But in particular we defer, I notice, to those wholesale self-refashionings - those eager, impatiently novel images and reconstructions people often make of themselves - that go most against the grain of what other people, who know and love them, would recognize as their natures, talents and temperaments. In short, we are paragons of gentleness towards all those dreams, projects, obsessions, etc, that tend to make people (in effect, if not in intention) least merciful to, and so hardest on, themselves. Maybe not on themselves as they may be next week or next month, or even next year. But almost certainly farther down the road? 

The reason, I suspect, is that nowadays we're tempted to be suspicious of any compassion that extends beyond Right Now. We tend to distrust anything that makes us strive to understand and appreciate, not just what people think they want - or want to become - but what they might actually be "in themselves." Much less what they might actually need. We may regard concerns like these as just so much condescension, or pity. Or lack of respect for their basic freedom, and adult self-agency. In sum, as a kind of demeaning pseudo-compassion we not only have no use for, but that's NO part of who we are today, in this Best of All Humanly Possible Worlds So Far. 

I'm not altogether sure why this may be so. But to me, it's as if there is assumed to have been a sudden cosmic change - a kind of simultaneous mass self-realization in everyone - like nothing ever before in recorded history. Almost as if we were expecting, any day now, everyone in this enlightened century to proclaim to the whole Creation: "Behold - whatever I may have been before - I am now as strong and self-malleable as I think I am. I can make myself whatever I want to be. As for my pre-existing so-called nature, or native temperament, or 'inherent constitution' - these are just so much material, so many building blocks, so much wiring and circuitry that I configure according to my own best (or even latest) self-definition. And of course I can hardly expect others to be more respectful to, or considerate of, that about myself - say, my 'original' gender - which I despise, and reconfigure as I please." 

In other words, you may be only as gentle and compassionate with me as I have first given permission, and above all as I  - and not you, or God, or the Bible or history or mankind - have chosen to define gentleness and compassion.

II

Thus far our Global Modern Compassion, as I understand it. Meanwhile, let's see if we cannot further investigate our other, and possibly much older, definition. GENTLENESS - as in: respect (or even concern or regard?) for not just the fragility of a creature's ego - of the walls and masks, the costumes, armor and weapons it has built around itself - but for the intricacy and complexity of its nature: of what it was before it was able to build or defend anything. A tenderness for all those things about it that remain, when every striving, grasping attempt at self-definition, or self-transformation, or self-perfection has either fallen away or collapsed in a heap of disgust and disillusionment: e.g., its intrinsic beauty and grace (or whatever is left of them); its deeper life and need; its real satisfaction and joy. Of any particular living thing, human or non-human - but most especially of that kind whose practical virtue and strength, whose material utility and power are by no means readily evident to the casual observer. Or to the hasty, or the over-utilitarian observer. Which nowadays, let's face it, tends to be most of us, in one busy high-pressure situation or other. 

I'll grant you, gentleness as defined above hardly suggests our Global Modern attitude of extreme deference to what you and I have made of ourselves - and re-made, and unmade - times past counting. What I am unable to see, though, is how the above-mentioned definition isn't the very soul of  understanding, of consideration, of solace and encouragement for what you and I have been made. Not to mention all those things our Maker may long to re-make in us - all those lingering fragments and shards and tossing, whispering shades and echoes of Eden. Gifts which can never be recovered - much less redeemed, it seems to me - so long as we continue to believe in a God who almost never chooses (or else nearly always refuses) to get things right the first time. But who instead, more often than not, leaves the Major Corrections up to us.

Now I may sound very naive, or very unmodern or unprogressive - perhaps even very unsaintly? - in what I am about to suggest. But I consider this kind of gentleness to be not just a mode of charity, but an extremely valuable and useful one. Granted, among all the various loves that may be classified as unselfish, it may not be the most strenuous kind, or the most sacrificial. Much less sublime or heroic. But I'd like to know, Is there any mode of sacrificial love that wouldn't be so much the poorer without it? And among all the ways in which we love, is there any better insurance against the tendency of Today's busy, vehement sacrificial loves to become too pushy, too presumptuous, too forceful?

Indeed my concern is that, the farther our Modern Charitable Loves stray from this, if I may say, "Delamarian" definition of gentleness, the deeper they're liable to drift into mostly unintended, unanticipated realms of violence. Because as I've touched on elsewhere, I find this to be an Age that (wonder of wonders) admires and celebrates impatience, abruptness, surliness, insolence - and even violence. If not always a violence of direct physical action, surely almost always one of thoughts and words and gestures, of demeanors and expressions, of plans and projects and "initiatives." Sometimes even with those we profess to love and care the most about. But in particular, it seems to me, with those (people, places, regions, countries, etc) that we Westerners understand the least. And perhaps least care to understand.

Now, for the record, by these latter, non-Western cultures I don't mean primarily Saudi Arabians, or Turks, or Pakistanis, or even Salafi/Wahhabi Muslims generally. And least of all do I mean the mainland Chinese. From where I stand, these folks get - or have been getting until pretty recently? - all the handwringing tenderness and compassion of which Western globalists are capable. But clearly not everyone else has. Rather, it's as if we were saying to - say - your average "unglobalized" Afghan, or Yemeni, or Tibetan, or Russian or Hungarian or Iranian: "You know, I really don't care to know what you're feeling, or what you have 'always' needed, or what you're most afraid of; indeed, I don't even care to know who and what you are. Because frankly, I don't need to know any of those things to know what you most urgently need, and NEED TO DO, right now. And what you need right now is a clean, sharp, bold break." 

My question is, Really? Are we really sure that what most people need today is a love that is blithely, callously, cuttingly ungentle? As if the one thing that really counts, about anyone, is what they can be made to see, or do, or become - whether by themselves or by other people? Regardless of how different it is from what they are by nature or by habit? Or by history? As if nothing of what they are in themselves - or indeed, ultimately, of what you and I are in ourselves - matters in the least? 

III

But enough of my pet peeves for the moment. Because right now, I suspect, might be a good time to hear a word from our Globalist sponsors: 

"WHAT? Would it be an impertinence at this point to ask just WHAT ON EARTH you're talking about? You indict the Age you're living in for a lack of - or certainly a lack of respect for - gentleness. Perhaps you'd care to explain how there's never been a greater striving than right now to understand and identify and commiserate with EVERY permutation of  gender/transgender/multigender euphoria / dysphoria / dystopia / dyspepsia presently known to our turbo-changing globe? That's right - dare you deny it? - with what these poor individuals ARE! 

"But if you prefer the geopolitical arena: What else, may I ask, would you call our tender, coaxing patience with human sinkholes like Afghanistan these past twenty years? What else but a gentle regard for all those (few or many) CREATIVE individuals yearning for the freedom of self-definition - or even self-transformation? - who remain trapped within that patriarchal prison/death camp? 

"And since you brought it up, what else would you call it but an infinite patience, not just with what they are - or think they are - but with the slow pace of freedom and democratization, in important places you so casually dismiss, like China and Saudi Arabia? What else but gentleness - and with the VERY HARDEST OF HEART? 

"And if you're going to indict us for failure on both counts, can you in the same breath blame us for trying?"

Well, I'm not sure exactly how I would answer any of those questions. Nor do I imagine my objectors being in the least apt to use that sort of over-the-top language in asking them. (Except that sometimes more is more? - more revealing of what we actually think, but also more unmasking of how we feel about, and try to justify, our thoughts.) 

But I will tell you what is my greatest wonder in all this:

In this present Great Global World of slow-motion train-wrecks like, yes, Afghanistan and Yemen, and Libya, and Syria (maybe even Iran and Ukraine?) - not to mention our pre-Trump, no-daylight, thick-as-thieves collusion with the mainland Chinese - in such a Progress-Infatuated Globe (PIG), where all our most hands-on attempts at spreading humanity, compassion, democracy, diversity, etc, seem capable of begetting only more violence or threat of violence, more chaos or threat of chaos, my real amazement is that such a question can be asked at all. And especially when you consider the sort of progressive humanitarianism most fashionable in the West today. A kind that may indeed have a "passionate concern" for certain very modern, and possibly transient, forms of unhappiness, among extremely select categories of human beings. And yet note: it's also one that, for some reason, seems at least as intent on - if not obsessed with - the profit, power and influence of certain rather more artificial and collective human entities. Like, say, global corporations, NGOs, etc. Even as it ignores, glosses over - or even aggravates?- the deeper unhappiness of those natural human entities we call individuals, and families. And by no means just in backwater places like Afghanistan and Yemen. Or even Hungary, or Poland. Or Russia. Maybe most of all - who knows? - right here, in our Globally Enlightened West.

(Edited.)

A Brief Rejoinder to "Words of Encouragement"

Well, anyhow - as I'd hoped I'd succeeded in putting into the mouths of our fearless Western leaders - I find this to be a boldly adventurous Age. 

In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was almost recklessly, heedlessly adventurous. (Not that that should matter either way, right? I mean, so what if we Westerners often end up leaving things an even bigger mess than we found them - so long as we make them more interesting, and challenging?)

But if there's one notion more than another that, for me, embodies the Spirit of this adventurous Age, it is the notion of Knowledge as Work. And Love as Work. And Reality as Work. 

It is as if we Global Moderns have made, not so much Man as created by God, but rather Work as created by (workaholic) Man, the measure of all things. Meaning, to get to the heart, the essence of anything, you've got to WORK at it. To the point, indeed, where work itself may seem to become all-but-indistinguishable from one or another mode of productive violence. Or sometimes even destructive violence. Again, no creation without destruction.

(Meanwhile, certain rather ancient traits and exercises that we used to call virtues: patience, vigilance, forbearance, humility, awe, rapture, contemplation, even prayer itself - well,  these once may have been useful enough for creating amusing or distracting fictions about reality. But they're utterly useless for getting at the core, the inner workings and outward effects, of any truly real thing. Any truly real thing - including God, assuming there is a god.) 

The whole point of Modern Work, thus defined, being that you must seek out whatever there is in anything - and ultimately anyone - that is "workable," i.e., reducible to something else. And then you change it, or reconfigure it, or otherwise put it to some good use or pleasure by making it wholly unrecognizable. Much like turning a tree into paper. Meanwhile, whatever there is that seemingly can't - yet - be reduced, you either ignore, or find some way of overcoming, or breaking through its wall, so to speak. In short, there is only way to be truly objective about anything, and that is to objectify it.

But now imagine something else. Suppose that the only unshifting, abiding objectivity we can ever attain - concerning any one or any thing - is to see that creature, not for what we can make of it, but for what it is. And that the only way to see it fully for what it is is to see not just its "objectness", but also that in it which is (so to speak) subjective. That in it which is, as it were, irreducibly its Self - such that we can only make into something else, by either killing it or taking it apart.

But now let's go a step further. Suppose we can only fully, sympathetically understand this Self - we can only get into the heart of this or any living creature - so far as we let its Maker get into the heart of us? I.e., not merely to command us, or exhort, or threaten, or coach, or exemplarize or didacticize us: but get into our very soul, and bone and marrow and sinews (and all those other things that only the soul knows best). And all for the purpose of so loving us, in fact, as to make us One - not merely by knowledge or by will, but by nature - with Himself? Even as He is One with His Father and His Spirit?

And now for something really unbelievable: What if this one small further step is, in fact, both the key to, and the heart of, all our truly good work?

Words of Encouragement; or, How Our Leaders Might Exhort Us (if they could first be honest with themselves)

"Let not your hearts be troubled; neither be afraid. 

"I.e., don't let yourselves be discouraged even for a second by Afghanistan and other so-called reversals, withdrawals, etc. Always make it a point to look at the practical side of the larger picture. Nobody can control everything: not YET anyway. In the meantime, why not focus on what we humans - and most of all we indomitable Yanks - can and have controlled? 

"Just think what a God-like generation we've become in our proper domain, insulated and buffered by this Americanized/Sinicized/Amazonized global corporatopia we've fashioned. 'Oh, but it's still a FORTRESS!' you say? Well, and what of it? And where do you suppose the God would be, without the fortification and protection of His Heaven?

" 'And just what [you ask] are the earmarks of our self-created divinity?' 

"Well, first off, consider what are the defining characteristics of so-called Deity Itself, as catalogued in our far-from-perfect (but nonetheless foundational) Scriptures. And then think how far we've already built and advanced upon them. 

"Consider the God of both Scriptures (Hebrew and Greek), with His strange, eccentric, self-effacing - even humble - perfection: one that's inseparable from a sort of modest, discretionary wisdom that actually respects the nature of the things He's made. Almost as if they had made themselves - or at very least had created their worlds? - and He was somehow reluctant to intrude. 

"Consider His love, that prizes above all the kind of grace - graciousness? - we call patience and kindness. As if these silly virtues were somehow capable of overcoming evil, or redeeming anything - much less anyone - from the corruptions of time, chance and 'sin'!

"Consider, finally, this so-called power of His, that finds it necessary to abdicate - nay, evacuate - itself, to the insane point of dying an agonizing death of a piece of wood! And His enemies are supposed to be impressed? Is that what it's going to take to over-awe REAL sin, real rebellion? On the other hand, if you and I are to be rescued and saved - well then, who are we wiser to depend on: the prince who relinquishes power, or the peon who seizes power and is not ashamed to wield it with a vengeance?

"And now picture, if you can, a very different - if not opposite - sort of perfection. One that's far too productively busy to fret over, say, just how a creature has been made . . . or what is its proper mode and manner of life . . . or even what makes for its happiness. Picture rather a - why not? - wisdomless, mechanistic, and, yes, LIFELESS perfection. One that has less and less to do with any facet of what we call Creation, precisely because it is already making itself sovereign in those areas of human life that really count: the realms of REAL Power - of procedure, technique and organization. And, of course, technology. 

"Imagine a graceless, commanding, heavy- and HIGH-handed love, that no longer needs to listen or be attentive because it it always knows best already . . . or in any case knows a helluva lot more than you or I do . . . and even when it doesn't, why, surely we're all better off for having learned from our experts' legitimate mistakes??? 

"Finally, picture not a poised, serene, satisfied power - such as one might find, say, in Heaven? - but rather one that, being 'of the earth earthy,' is unabashedly eager, hungry, insatiable. Such that it never met a corner of the universe it didn't want to conquer, and dissect, and find some really good use for.  Such that, in fact, it's not just utterly void of either sensitivity or subtlety, but hasn't got the least bit of time, respect or regard for any such antiquated constraints.

"In short, consider - and admire - a Perfection, Love and Power that can't be bothered really to understand any created thing, precisely because the time is so short, and there's not a moment to lose in the urgent business of learning, and mastering, how that creature is to be best utilized. Remember, we humans are gods with a difference. We're not in the business of creating a universe; we're simply trying to control, manipulate, reconstruct, and finally put to some good use, the one we've got."

(Edited.)