Compassion Unbridled by Prudence and Reason Is a Wrecking Ball

Commentary

According to artificial intelligence and other sources online, author Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. And tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”

The words are attention-grabbers, but that’s not what O’Connor actually said.

In her introduction to “A Memoir of Mary Ann,” a book about a child with cancer written by the Dominican nuns who cared for her, O’Connor briefly addressed the effects on compassion and truth when religious faith goes missing.

She wrote: “In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

O’Connor’s assertion still shocks, but it was clearly more nuanced than the truncated version often attributed to her. For her, the Good Samaritan compassion that is a part of our Western heritage was real and authentic. We find it in the nuns who cared for Mary Ann and in the tenderness we show to a neighbor who has just lost a child to death, to a beloved aunt who is sinking into dementia, or even to an old, enfeebled pet who has, for years, served as a loyal companion.

On the other hand, false or inauthentic compassion can lead to dire consequences. In the late 1930s, the idea of “mercy killings” allowed the Nazis to kill tens of thousands of disabled children. In Soviet Russia, opponents to the regime were committed to psych wards with the understanding that no sane person could possibly oppose communism. In the West today, abortion and euthanasia are both grounded in motives of tenderness and empathy.

And sometimes this misbegotten and mismanaged compassion can lead to unforeseen national disasters.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs were aimed at reducing poverty in the United States. While these programs, all enacted in the name of compassion, did reduce the most extreme poverty in some areas of the country, they also exacerbated the breakdown of the traditional family, created a long-term dependence on welfare, and, as we have recently seen, entertained widespread fraud and corruption. The expansion of these programs has also placed an increasingly heavy burden on U.S. taxpayers.

More recently, many people purportedly moved by compassion supported the open borders policy of the Biden administration, allowing millions of immigrants to enter the United States. Some Americans marching beneath this banner of goodwill were undoubtedly sincere in their empathy for these migrants, but they ignored, or were ignorant of, the iron weights their tenderness hung around the necks of their fellow citizens, such as the staggering financial cost, the strain on the housing market, the burdens placed on U.S. schools, and rising crime rates.

Meanwhile, both our welfare and immigration policies are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The U.S. national debt has doubled in the past 10 years—to more than $38 trillion from $19 trillion—and is zipping along ever upward.

Rent control, minimum wage, health care, affordable housing, and food assistance: These, too, serve as examples of policies of government compassion that often end up doing greater harm than good for the citizenry at large.

Singular examples of such misguided institutional compassion appear almost daily in the news. A judge, for instance, frees a criminal with a rap sheet as long as his arm, and the criminal commits murder within the week. The law insists that transgender prisoners be housed in women’s facilities, and rape follows on the heels of understanding and empathy. Misguided compassion forces female athletes to compete against men who claim to identify as women, wreaking havoc on the world of female sports.

Call out this institutional compassion for its blunders and falsehoods, and today’s thought police will vilify you as hardhearted, deaf to the cries of “victims.”

But here’s the thing: True compassion is hands-on. The word itself comes from the Latin meaning “to suffer with.” Here is a tenderness that requires presence, not a government check or enforcement by law. It requires action and sacrifice, even if only by providing a listening ear and an open heart. Real compassion also requires the strength and the mental and spiritual toughness to understand the boundaries of empathy, that there is a point at which compassion is not only useless, but dangerous. The man who advises his alcoholic uncle to join Alcoholics Anonymous while pouring him another shot of Jim Beam is no more than an enabler and a fool. The government that doles out welfare check after welfare check, all the while only encouraging the recipient to work, is the same.

All too often, our government and many others have favored and deployed a grand-scale compassion unchecked by reason or consideration of consequences. They fit Oscar Wilde’s definition of a sentimentalist as “one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.