Beware the compassion police

reposted from donaldsensing.com

links were good at the time or original posting

Why compassion cannot be a basis for public policy

I recall a story in the Washington Post from the early 1990s, when I lived in northern Virginia, written by a Catholic nun. It told of a ministry in downtown DC that she was working, offering free lunches to the poor.

When she and her fellow charity workers had started this ministry they had decided not to require means tests of the people who came to eat. Means tests - requiring the recipients offer evidence they could not afford to pay for the meals - would be degrading, they concluded. The poor were beaten down by life enough without the church adding to it.

Yet after several weeks the sister had changed her mind. The soup kitchen initially attracted diners who were clearly homeless, near-indigent or working poor. But as time went on, she observed the diners were better and better dressed. They were cleaner, obviously more healthy. At first, a large number of diners had walked to the kitchen, but now most drove, and as more time passed, older cars parked outside gave way to newer cars, then expensive cars. The kind of person who first began eating there became rarer and rarer.

The nun concluded that they should have required means testing to protect the poor. It was clear to her that they were now running a kitchen serving free food to people of substantial means, not the poor they intended to serve.

"Which among you," asked Jesus, "when asked by your child for bread, would give him a stone?" Well, none of us, of course. And which of us, encountering someone who truly could not afford his next meal, would fail to buy it for him?

Personal charity and works of compassion are basic requirement of Christian ethics. But Christian people with best of intentions go awry when they attempt to make their personal ethics public policy. Compassion is bad public policy.

I table-talked once with several of my colleagues at a seminar, some of whom insisted that health care should be free for the poor, meaning, of course, that the government will pay for it - meaning of course, the non-poor will pay for it.

As one of the seminar’s presenters pointed out, the non-poor are already paying for the poor’s health care. Heath insurance premiums are padded to cover the costs of treating the uninsured. In 2003, wrote Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Victor R. Fuchs, "the average health insurance premium for a family of four is about $9,000." Make no mistake, the poor don’t receive high-quality care except for emergency-room visits, but that is where they tend to get almost all their health care. Our taxes also pay health care costs. Of the $1.4 trillion the United States now spends about on health care, the government pays about 45 percent. (link)

Individuals exercise compassion, defined by the Oxford dictionary as "sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings and misfortunes of others." Governments and social arrangements exercise justice. Justice is only accidentally compassionate because justice, to be justice, must balance the valid, competing needs of persons and groups within society. Justice attempts to answer, "What is right, what is fair?" Justice is enforced against the will of at least one of the contending parties. Hence, justice is at its foundation coercive.

Compassion, though, seeks to alleviate shortcoming, suffering or pain, to heal in body, mind or soul. Compassion cannot be enforced. I could not compel a stranded motorist named one day to accept my aid, because it would have been literally criminal to do so. In offering aid, I did not have to balance competing claims for my time and money because there were no claims and could not be any. The issue of aid was not what was right or fair, but what was possible.

Compassion is self limiting; one is compassionate to whom one will to the extent of the resources one decides to donate. There are, say, 50 hungry people. You buy lunch for 15, maybe 25, 45 or all. You stop when you can afford to buy no more or simply when you decide you have spent enough and still want to have enough to buy a new DVD. There is no guilt on anyone’s part because no one has done anything wrong. You were under no legal obligation to buy anyone lunch in the first place, so choosing to feed some, not all, is your free choice. The others had no rightful claim to your money.

But justice is only roughly self limiting. An employer who cheated his employees of some of their wages for a time, totaling $25,000, cannot plead for reduced judgment because he has only $10,000 in the bank. The court will hold still him liable for all of it, plus lost interest and punitive fines and perhaps prison. The employees have a rightful claim that the employer may not rightfully deny.

Justice attempts to make right or compensate wrongs done by persons or groups against others. Compassion attempts to make more level the relationships of resources or care between persons or groups of persons.

Compassion makes a very poor guide for justice. Compassion can exist only when there is no right to receive it. A judge, for example, cannot be justly compassionate. For a judge to show compassion for one party to a case is to treat another party unjustly. Showing compassion to a burglar by an unwarranted light sentence is to rob the victim’s family of their rightful claim that the burglar will be fairly penalized. And it puts at risk larger society, which has the right to expect that burglars will not soon be turned loose to rob again.

Similarly, compassion for the victim’s family that leads to an overly harsh sentence - life in prison, for example, for a first offense when no one is injured - sets aside the rightful claim of the convict that his punishment will be consonant with the crime. Likewise, society has a rightful claim not to bear the burden of supporting him for a lifetime for commission of one, non-violent offense.

The fact that different groups have different interests that must be sometimes balanced and sometimes found to be right or wrong is what seems to escape many churches’ proclamations about public policy. The pronouncements tend to be personal compassion writ large, into state policy, then to be coercively enforced.

Case in point: identification cards now being issued by the Mexican consulate in Tennessee, including last year in Shelbyville. Anyone care to guess how many card recipients are in the US illegally? Shelbyville is the center of Tennessee Walking Horses, a major equestrian industry. A man who was senior manager of a large Walking Horse ranch told me that the whole industry would "dry up" if its illegal-immigrant workers were taken away.

From compassion, some people say that illegal immigrants should be allowed to enter the US and work here unhindered. They come here only for economic opportunity, after all, having no prospects for personal advancement in their home country (Mexico, for most of them).

But this argument also exposes the emotional blindness of wishing to make compassion public policy. For when compassion is moved into the large-scale public arena, its focus is too narrow to promote the general welfare. Amnesty for illegal immigrants (whether by proclamation or non-enforcement, which is what we have today) means depriving others of something they to which they have a rightful claim.

I guarantee that the jobs the Walking Horse illegal aliens are working existed before they moved here. Ranchers had to mend fences and shovel barns and bale hay long before Mexicans moved here in numbers. But who was doing that labor before? Not business executives. Not otherwise idle, bon-bon eating housewives. The American working poor made the ranches go. That is who the illegals displaced. But those displaced have a rightful claim to such jobs over persons who are at-large criminals, which is literally what illegal aliens are.

There is a long list of other groups who have rightful claims adversely affected by the issue, but that’s not the point of this essay. My point is that compassion fails as policy because it is impossible to be fairly compassionate, except with one’s own resources. Making compassion into policy or law for society compels others to conform to your idea of compassion, trampling on their freedom to be compassionate according to their own lights or to be hard-hearted as they wish. And compassion that coerces is not compassion at all; it is tyranny.

Systems of justice may be tyrannical, too, of course. That is why Western political philosophy has promoted mercy to temper justice. Mercy is not the same as compassion, though as a personal quality mercy and compassion are closely related. William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice,

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc. 1.)

In terms of justice, though, "clemency" is probably a better word, indicating mercy shown toward one who has offended, but whose punishment or rehabilitation is either completed sooner than expected, or earned during the course thereof.

Not only mercy tempers justice. Religion has served that purpose in Western history also, as have Enlightenment philosophies of individual rights and the idea that the locus of state sovereignty lies in the people, not the state apparatus. But justice remains coercive at base, serving no one perfectly but (hopefully) all as fairly and unobtrusively as possible. However, this is what compassion cannot do.

I find, then, that I have arrived at the place theologian Reinhold Niebuhr arrived several decades ago.

Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor of Christian ethics, was one of the most influential theologians of the last century. In his work, Moral Man in Immoral Society, Niebuhr explained that while individual persons live generally moral lives, high morality is difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups as a whole. Very rarely does a group of persons comport itself better than individuals do in personal relationships. When human beings engage in collective activity, Niebuhr said, they are overwhelmed by an inability to be moral. The larger the group, the greater this inability is.

Niebuhr was specifically addressing Just War theory in the works I cite here, but I think the same train of thought applies to issues of justice and compassion within societies.

Niebuhr concluded [in "Must We Do Nothing?" in The Christian Century, 3-30-1932], "The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means, without coercion . . . is an illusion" of the "comfortable classes" of society. There never will be enough love and unselfishness among nations [or persons] to resolve the conflicts of history [or societies] only by ethical [or compassionate] means, even though there may be occasional successes now and then. It is part of humanity's "moral conceit" to think that human sin will not overwhelm individual morality [and compassion] when persons act collectively.

Until the return of Christ, wrote Niebuhr, human societies will never be able to conform purely to the ethic of Christian love. In the interim, we must structure our world based on justice, as best we can, even though communities of justice are inferior to communities of love or compassion. The best justice human societies can attain will only roughly correspond to divine justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful.

Niebuhr concluded that the ethical goals of human society must not be sacrificed "simply because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means." Nor, I think, should they be sacrificed because an ethic of love cannot serve as the fundamental ordering of society.

Yet works of compassion can indeed take on orders of magnitude that project them into the arena of justice, just not judicial justice. When acts of compassion come to affect so many persons that the order of society is changed, so is the nature of the society’s justice. Justice is, after all, only the "right ordering of things" in human affairs (said Aristotle, as I recall).

I have in mind the work of Bangladeshi economist Muhammed Yunus. Banks in Bangladesh refused to loan impoverished women money to begin business independence. The average loan refused was 62 cents. Yunus reached into his own pocket and loaned 42 men and women in one village a grand total of $27.

Every borrower paid Yunus back with interest. The banks still refused to write loans. Reports "Vanderbilt Magazine," Fall 2003, p. 49:

Village by village, district by district, Yunus proved conventional bank lenders wrong. Twenty-seven years later, his pioneering approach to micro-lending has spawned nothing short of a credit revolution.

His Grameen Bank . . . has disbursed roughly $3 billion to more than 2 million borrowers in Bangladesh alone, allowing many thousands to lift themselves up from the most abject poverty. [italics added]

His bank has been imitated by more than 7,000 other organizations around the world, including some in America. This is compassion writ large and well. It is personal; Yunus used his own money, not someone else’s. Yet its effects are transforming the social order of societies.

As for me, though, whenever I hear a politician tell weepy anecdotes about some unfortunates, then declare that "America is better than that," I lock up my wallet. I know he wants to make his personal sense of compassion into public policy, by coercion, using my money.

As it turns out, US Congressman David Crockett had some things to say about this topic about 171 years ago.

I should also point out that some of my Christian friends will take offense at my claim that, "Compassion can exist only when there is no right to receive it." I say again: works of compassion are a duty of Christian disciples. But they are done in gratitude for and imitation of the saving work of Christ. Hence, they are unenforceable by human agency and are voluntary. Compelling others to perform one’s own idea of compassion is the very opposite of compassion, for compassion cannot coerce others and remain compassion. Even so, the Scriptures are clear that we will be judged by Christ according to our works of compassion.

Another thought by Neibuhr: In February 1941 Niebuhr wrote,

Love must be regarded as the final flower and fruit of justice. When it is substituted for justice it degenerates into sentimentality and may become the accomplice of tyranny. Looking at the tragic contemporary scene within this frame of reference, we feel that American Christianity is all too prone to disavow its responsibilities for the preservation of our civilization against the perils of totalitarian aggression. We are well aware of the sins of all the nations, including our own, which have contributed to the chaos of our era. We know to what degree totalitarianism represents false answers to our own unsolved problems - political, economic, spiritual. Yet we believe the task of defending the rich inheritance of our civilization to be an imperative one, however much we might desire that our social system were more worthy of defense. We believe that the possibility of correcting its faults and extending its gains may be annulled for centuries if this external peril is not resolutely faced.

This is a critical point. Niebuhr was saying that if Christians refrain from maintaining justice, even by force if necessary, because they substitute love for justice, then the love they wish to promote actually becomes the handmaiden of tyranny. And of course, that is no love at all.

The metrosexual Jesus

Would you trust your eternity to this guy? Neither would I.

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Every Tuesday I meet with several other pastors to do a morning of Bible study about the lectionary passages for the coming Sunday. (The lectionary is the selection of Scripture passages designated by an ecumenical committee for each Sunday and Holy Day, on a three-year cycle. You can read them here.)

Last week during the preliminary discussions I made a point that one of the main thrusts of liberal Bible scholarship over at least the last 40 years has been to devise arguments that the Bible does not really mean what it says.

A ready-to-hand case in point: sexuality. The biblical proscriptions against certain kinds of sexual acts - homosexual acts, bestiality and adultery all alike are strictly prohibited - are as clear as anything that can be found in Scripture. But modern liberal scholarship has invented ingenious arguments that the proscription of homosexuality isn’t real, that what matters most is the "authenticity" of the relationship, whether there is love and caring, and then they claim that what is really being forbidden by the texts is not homosexuality at all, but pederasty, claimed to be quite common in the ancient Mediterranean world, and that "non-exploitative" homosexual relations are actually quite in accordance with the Bible.

Now, reconstructing the Bible is nothing new. Christians have been doing it for, oh, more than a thousand years. But what is distinctive about modern scholarship is what one of my colleagues, a Ph.D. candidate at the liberal Vanderbilt Divinity School, observed: In addition to interpreting the Scriptures in ways that suit them (not a new thing at all) liberal scholars have "demythologized" the Bible in radical ways. So radical, in fact, that it is barely recognizable in many of their works as revelatory of the divine.

"Modern biblical scholarship wants to liberate people from the Bible instead of immerse them into it," he said. "The Bible is presented as oppressive, patriarchal, exclusionary and ‘privileging’ certain people at the expense of others. Therefore, scholarship is highly concerned with providing reasons to reject the teachings of the Scriptures rather than embrace them."

What got me on this post’s train of thought was skimming Kim du Toit’s regretfully titled (to me, not him) essay on the demasculinization of American men. (If that link doesn’t work, try here. Kim’s server has been overwhelmed with hits already, so he has filed it at a temporary URL for the nonce.)

Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of "good guy vs. bad guy" that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker. ...

What I care about is the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a concerted campaign to denigrate men, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them impotent, figuratively speaking. ...

Out there, there is a huge number of men who are sick of it. We're sick of being made figures of fun and ridicule; we're sick of having girly-men like journalists, advertising agency execs and movie stars decide on "what is a man"; we're sick of women treating us like children, and we're really [deleted] sick of girly-men politicians who pander to women by passing an ever-increasing raft of Nanny laws and regulations (the legal equivalent of public-school Ritalin), which prevent us from hunting, racing our cars and motorcycles, smoking, flirting with women at the office, getting into fistfights over women, shooting criminals and doing all the fine things which being a man entails.

Now I think that Kim is over the top in his essay, here and there, but there’s no denying that it has struck a huge chord with a lot of guys. And its basic theme, once you work through Kim’s evident anger and provocative profanity, is really quite simple:

Manhood must no longer be defined by women, but by men. Specifically, men who are self-confidently masculine and don’t regret it, who don’t want to regret it.

Since I am in a religious vocation, Kim’s essay made me think of Leon Podles’ controversial book, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Leon’s complaints are very similar to Kim’s, except they are more, uh, genteely stated. Amazon’s book description states thus:

After documenting the highly feminized state of Western Christianity, Dr. Podles identifies the masculine traits that once characterized the Christian life but are now commonly considered incompatible with it. ... He contends that though masculinity has been marginalized within Christianity, it cannot be expunged from human society. If detached from Christianity, it reappears as a substitute religion, with unwholesome and even horrific consequences. The church, too, is diminished by its emasculation. Its spirituality becomes individualistic and erotic, tending toward universalism and quietism. In his concluding assessment of the future of men in the church, Dr. Podles examines three aspects of Christianity-initiation, struggle, and fraternal love-through which its virility might be restored.

A reader comment on the Amazon page made the following point: " If Christianity keeps appealing to "feminized men" and rejecting the masculine, we just may see a masculine spirituality go hypermasculine to the cry of "Allah Akbar!"

As the saying goes, on Sundays women go to church and men go to NFL games, either in person or on TV. Because men darn sure are mostly absent from Christian services (not Jewish or Muslim, though).

In an essay online, Podles writes,

Something seems to be creating a barrier between Western Christianity and men. Why is it that men in the west are so little interested in religion and that the men who are interested often do not follow the general pattern of masculinity? Why doesn't religion seem to interest men much, until they reach old age? ...

It seems that the clergy are not unhappy with the absence of men. Women are easier to deal with: even feminists can be satisfied to some extent. Hymns and the Bible are being rewritten to expunge references to men; the few men in the congregation will not protest. ...

Because Christianity is now seen as a part of the sphere of life proper to women rather than to men, it sometimes attracts men whose own masculinity is somewhat doubtful. By this I do not mean homosexuals, although a certain type of homosexual is included. Rather, religion is seen as a safe field, a refuge from the challenges of life, and therefore attracts men who are fearful of making the break with the secure world of childhood dominated by women.

Clergy don’t get off Podles’ hook:

The clergy have long had the reputation of not being very masculine. The main line, liberal Protestant minister in the early twentieth century had a reputation for being soft and working best with women. They were seen as exempt from masculine trials and agonies, part of the safe world of women. As one layman put it, "Life is a football game, with the men fighting it out on the gridiron, while the minister is up in the grandstand, explaining it to the ladies."

Now, why is that? After all, the apostle Paul was a man’s man:

23 Are they servants of Christ? ... I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again.
24 Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.
25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea,
26 I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers.
27 I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.
28 Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. (2 Cor 11:23-28)

(As for me, I feel pretty secure in my masculinity, here’s why.)

The Sissified Jesus
But maybe the reason that so many clergy seem to be not terribly manly is that the church has made sure that Jesus is presented as something of a wuss, too.

As children in Sunday School we see our first pictures of Jesus as the good shepherd (see above, for example). They are wildly inaccurate. They show a Zest-fully clean Jesus with his Breck-shampooed, blow-dried hair, in a spotless, Bill Blass robe, carrying a little lamb on his shoulders. This is an inoffensive, domesticated Jesus, a tamed Jesus who looks good. This Jesus is a poster boy for people who think that Christian faith is supposed to make them popular. But if this wimpy, smarmy, gender-confused, television-evangelist-looking Jesus ever told you, “I lay down my life for the sheep” (cf: John 10:11), you’d laugh out loud in derision. And if it ever occurred to you that your life was literally in his hands, you’d cry in despair.

A good shepherd Jesus would have grubby clothes that were torn and tattered, perhaps bloodstained. He would clip his hair short because it would be constantly dirty. Soot and sweat would be streaked across his face. His hands would be grimy. His aroma would prove he is unacquainted with Ban Roll-on. The type of fellow who can do the work that shepherding requires is not the kind of fellow any of us would invite home to meet mother. Good shepherds don’t appeal to persons of refined sensibility.

A good shepherd Jesus would look out of place in our Ethan Allen dining rooms, and probably in most churches as well. This is not a Jesus who has time to idle the day away with us. Jesus the good shepherd has countless skills and strengths, honed on this earth to rescue us from countless dangers, including ourselves. Bluntly, a good shepherd is ready for battle at any time. “Ours is a Jesus who is powerful enough to grab us from the jaws of a hungry wolf. But at the same time Jesus is also powerful enough to grab us from the jaws of too much civility and niceness, from our need to have a pretty picture and a happy ending to the story, from our hiding from the raw, sometime coarse and smelly vitality of life itself.” (Rebecca Young)

In the tame, domesticated and frankly feminine images of Jesus we use, we suppress Jesus’ masculinity, of which shepherding is one example. It’s a cultural thing, you see. Boys and men find it overwhelmingly important to be seen as manly men, independent, confident and self-assured, but Christian faith is culturally seen as a sort of wimpy crutch for people who can’t handle life on their own. Such stereotypes are reinforced by artistic and verbal images of Jesus that I think would make his first apostles wonder just whom we are talking about.

When King David was just a lad, he volunteered for single combat with Goliath. David was a shepherd, a tough guy, alert to dangers. He stood before King Saul. Saul denied David the right to confront Goliath in single combat because David was so young.

But David said to Saul, "I have been keeping my father's sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. I have killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them. . . .

That’s what good shepherds do.

There’s a lot more to this general topic, especially as relates to the feminization of culture at large (Kim’s complaint), the feminization of university curricula, which Geitner Simmons writes about without really intending to:

A freshman at Bowdoin cannot take a course in Shakespeare.

A freshman at Amherst isn't offered a single overview of European or American history.

A freshman at Williams will find that what few courses review U.S. or European history focus on "race, ethnicity and gender," rather than the given period's main developments.

A freshman at Wellesley will find that the few broad English courses offered to freshmen focus on gender and not the books' themes and styles.

In short, the masculine has been driven from the curriculum. Then there is The Feminization of the American Military, which offers this pointed observation:

Writing in the 1940’s in opposition to the ordination of women as priests, C. S. Lewis argued that the issue was not whether females could perform the caring and instructional missions of the clergy as well or better than most men, but rather that the Church was a creature of revelation, not reason, and that the Lord had chosen to place the burden of priesthood on men. But if men had become insufficiently masculine to perform their appointed duty, the solution was hardly to call upon those who were not masculine at all. We arrived at our current impasse over women in combat for the simple reason that not enough American men could be found to perform a masculine duty. And if our only solution— and it appears that it is— is to call upon those who are not masculine at all, then we may reach the point when— as Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.”

But this post is plenty long enough now, so I’ll let Podles have the last word. Referring again to the general absence of men in churches, he says:

Neither has the absence of men left women untouched. Unfortunately, women have been forced into the unnatural mold by Christians' misunderstandings of the feminine. Much of current feminism is an understandable reaction against the caricature of feminine roles. The breakdown of the proper relationship of masculinity and femininity, male and female, Adam and Eve, is at the root of many of the churches failures in the modern world, but this situation would not surprise the author of Genesis.

More later, maybe.

Update: Glenn Reynolds posts that he has been emailed Kim's essay from diverse sources with no attribution, "suggesting that it's taking on a life of its own," and refers us to a Salon essay on the Berenstain Bears syndrome, the kids books in which Papa is consistently presented as a loser, a "post-feminist Alan Alda fumbling wimp," as Charles Krauthammer put it.

Update 2: Glenn now has a lot more feedback on this topic with a number of other links.

BTW, if you don't know what "metrosexual" means, see here.