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Conspicuous Compassion
by Roger Sandall
We slammed the house door behind us and fled into the night. There had to be some way of escaping this insufferable media melodrama. Thinking that a seedy Moroccan restaurant might be safe we ventured in, and found no television or anything else to remind us of the outside world: across the yawning spaces of the dining room two earlier arrivals were already tipsy, and having found a table we began a shouted conversation, glad to meet others who felt the same way about that car crash in Paris a week before.
Was the grief insincere?
Yet it’s hard to say exactly why we felt so nauseated by the goings-on in Westminster Abbey. Was it because the grief being displayed was insincere? Was it social aversion—an unwillingness to be even vicariously drawn into Diana’s circle of admirers? Or was it because we were tired of her promiscuous causes, her mindlessly diffuse compassion, and because the canonization of a young woman whose death was a direct result of living dangerously seemed entirely grotesque?
In his 2003 book Conspicuous Compassion Patrick West argues that today’s extravagant displays of public grief, concern, and sympathy are “about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrate not how altruistic we have become but how selfish.” So it’s the insincerity of the emotion displayed at events like Diana’s funeral—the outright fraudulence—that deserves to be scathingly denounced. In his view what’s going on is moral posturing, theatricalised compassion, public displays of cheap sentiment illustrating Wilde’s remark that “a sentimentalist is someone who wants the pleasure of an emotion without paying the price for it.” And in the case of conspicuous compassion, the moral kudos that goes with being seen to care.
Indignation at seeming compassion, at seeming piety—at the theatrical management of false appearances while concealing our true feelings within—is an ancient feature of ethical thought. There have always been people for whom it is more important to be seen to be doing good than to actually do good itself, and it is natural that William Miller should begin his 2003 book Faking It with the admonitions of Jesus in Matthew 6.1–5:
Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them… (and when you give alms) sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men… But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men.
Doing good versus feeling good
Compassion is about helping the distressed. Conspicuous compassion is about showing off—not about results, not about feeding the hungry or bandaging those who bleed, but about various forms of moralistic self-display indulged in for their own sentimental enjoyment. In the wake of the tsunami it’s important that the distinction be understood, for what Patrick West attacks is the second, not the first. In his introduction to the Australian edition of West’s book Paul Comrie-Thomson helpfully contrasts the two, noting that compassion entails a commitment to alleviate a problem, while “sentimentality does not entail a commitment to do anything.” Sentimental acts, he says, are accompanied by public announcements that one is ‘doing good’; but what the sentimentalist is mainly doing is ‘feeling good’.
West’s book is a useful study of moral pathology. It may well be true that the phenomenon of “recreational grief” he describes is increasingly expressed in much the same spirit as rather more mundane public events. Despite its solemn rubric, Australia’s annual National Sorry Day on behalf of the Aborigines is an orchestrated apology that has now turned into a picnic outing where solidarity prevails, camaraderie overflows, and everyone has a jolly good time feeling morally superior to the rest of the world. Amidst a plethora of T-shirts, reconciliation badges, and Sorry Postcards, the masochistic appeasement of white guilt is what it is mainly about: it is most unlikely that Black Australia benefits in any way. In the theatrics of National Sorry Day, white, middle-class, feelgood politics is classically embodied.
“Compassion inflation” is something else West points to. More and more causes are deemed worthy of an empathy ribbon on the lapel; where one poppy formerly served for Remembrance Day whole bouquets are now expected; the one minute of respectful silence lengthens ominously to two minutes, and then to three—will we next be required to fall dumb for five? That the world is not changed for the better by such activities and gestures is surely the case. The most conspicuous beneficiaries of conspicuous compassion are plainly those whose memorial walks and demonstrations provide them with a warm inner glow.
Few things are more enjoyable than demos
Yet human psychology is complicated, and I suspect that rather more is going on in displays of conspicuous compassion than author Patrick West admits. Our motives are seldom pure. They usually bring a variety of emotions and moral feelings into play. This is obvious enough in the remark of U2’s Bono that “As a pop star I have two instincts. I want to have fun. And I want to change the world.” And it is even more explicit in Doris Lessing’s admission that “few things are more enjoyable than marching, picketing, striking, rioting; to be part of a large crowd high on singing, chanting, slogans. To be, by definition, with the forces of good against evil…” (Both of these examples are from West’s book.)
We might expand this a little and say that the individuals assembled at a ‘Save the Whale’ demo may be there because they like whales, or because they are bored, or because U2 is playing, or because they have just had a painful breakup and are looking for new partners, or because it is Sunday and whales are the latterday saints of their new religion, or because they are deeply alienated and want to protest about everything, or because a marine biologist suggested they go along, etc. This is not to say that one motive may not preponderate: but the reasons for attending are various.
West’s claim that at Diana’s funeral “the mourners were not crying for her, but for themselves” very likely contains a significant truth—but does it entitle us to jeer at them? After all, the author’s own theory of crowd behavior suggests that a more solicitous (or even compassionate) attitude might be appropriate. He himself presents the argument advanced for a hundred years by numerous communitarian theorists that modern society is atomised, and that because of this modern citizens are often lonely and depressed:
We are given to such displays of empathy because we want to be loved ourselves. Despite being healthier, richer and better-off than in living memory, we are not happier. Rather, we are more depressed than ever. This is because we have become atomised and lonely. Binding institutions such as the Church, marriage, the family and the nation have withered in the postwar era. We have turned into communities of strangers.
The sentimentalising of modern society
Of course if this is true—if a large part of conspicuous compassion is a real symptom of a real collective disorder—then the aversion one feels at the theatricality of Diana’s funeral has to be looked at in a somewhat different light. In the 1998 essay collection Faking It: the Sentimentalisation of Modern Society the British philosopher Anthony O’Hear takes seriously both the attendance at the funeral and the emotions displayed: “The media, for all their undoubted power, could not have forced millions of people to come to London… (or) made tens of thousands of people queue for eight hours to sign the 43 condolence books or lay carpets of flowers around the royal palaces.”
Moreover, the mourners were neither hysterical nor deranged. “They were in fact quiet, orderly, and in demeanour dignified… and their emotion, it has to be said, was genuine…” In other words there is little point in straining to interpret their behavior as purely artificial, or insincere, and even less point in pretending that it illustrates La Rochefoucauld’s witticism that “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”
O’Hear suggests instead that what repelled us about her media canonization in Westminster Abbey on September 6th, 1997, was the canonization of all she stood for—“the elevation of feeling, image and spontaneity over reason, reality, and restraint”—combined with a determination to have her highly privileged royal person portrayed as a victim among victims. In O’Hear’s words:
Diana as victim is a personification of the Rousseauian principle that the first feelings of nature are always right, and that all the restraints of civilization, duty and commitment are harmfully repressive. In the therapeutic world in which Diana increasingly moved, one’s only duty is to one’s own feelings, their expression and fulfilment. If the world does not like it, too bad. You scream, you give vent to your anger, you throw yourself downstairs. This is literally infantilism…
Celebrating infantilism
It is this childish self-indulgence, this elevation of the bohemian values of the counter-culture above all questions of public role and civic duty and personal decorum that was being canonized. Having seen the bohemianization of the middle classes, it was inevitable that with the merging of Buckingham Palace and the wealthy aristocracy of the Spencer family, we would be watching the bohemianization of the Windsors next—the upshot being a nominally royal establishment that was sooner or later bound to self-destruct.
One was inured to the likelihood of this development. One was almost prepared to accept its inevitability. But asking us all to join loyally together and celebrate this orgy of infantilism on television—this pretence that there is no price to be paid for human folly—that was unbearable. Even a night eating bad Moroccan food was a better option.
January 2005
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