To Worry, or Too Worried?

July 30, 2015September 6, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“God is dead!” might be the most famous phrase German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ever wrote, and some believe it might be the most famous philosophical phrase of all time. Nietzsche, an atheist, wrote the phrase in a celebratory manner, as he thought it freed us up to be our own gods, so that we could pursue our own meaning of life. As an atheist throughout his adult life, Nietzsche didn’t believe God was alive in any way, shape or form, so why would he need to make such a public proclamation? He claimed that the Enlightenment killed God in a proverbial manner, and a societal and cultural manner. He basically declared that freedom from God and religion permitted the individual to greatness, unimpeded by religious constraints. As great as Nietzsche considered the moment, he did not write the phrase without caveats.

As often as “God is dead!” is quoted and spray painted on bridges and abutments, most Nietzsche followers, or lovers of the phrase, don’t add the full part of Nietzsche’s thought on the effect he thought the Enlightenment had on man. The thrust of the phrase was that God’s proverbial death in society freed the ubermensch from the shackles they experienced in religious societies and cultures, but it may not portend well for others. Ubermensch is a German term that refers to an ideal, super human who is able to overcome weaknesses, rise above societal norms, and create new values. Americans might call the ubermensch a philosophical Superman.

We do not claim to be experts on Nietzsche, and there is a much better analysis of this quote here, but to summarize the second part of Nietzsche’s idea, the glory of the freedom attained by God’s death in society is almost solely afforded to the supermen. The supermen are the ones who’ve been waiting for God’s proverbial death, so that they could help shape society, the culture, and prepare the people for a God-less existence. They, in Nietzsche’s view, are responsible types who will use their powers for good. He did worry about the rest of man, the common man, the man on whom God’s existence provides meaning. He believed they might lose a sense of morality and fall prey to feelings of hopelessness.

The idea behind freedom is interesting, because we often hear, from both sides, that too much freedom may not be a good thing. The definition of freedom, in these arguments, is often vague, relative, and directed outward in a semi-autobiographical way. They usually make an exception for you, the listener, because at least as long as you’re in the vicinity, the acknowledge that you, too, are a superman. They also make the implicit argument that they are immune, but they worry about others.

It may seem illogical to argue that we’re too free, in lieu of the legislation and monitoring we’re experiencing from the public and private sectors. Yet, Francis O’Gorman’s Worrying: a Literary and Cultural History is not a study of freedom, but one of the common man worrying about how the people, places, and things around us are affected by too much freedom. Mr. O’Gorman makes this proclamation, in part, by studying the literature of the day, and the themes of that literature. He also marks this with the appearance, and eventual proliferation of self-help guides to suggest that readers reward writers who provide more intimate, more direct answers. Without direct answers, we have empty spaces, and in these empty spaces, we worry. This study leads Mr. O’Gorman to the conclusion that this general sense of worry is a relatively new phenomenon, as compared to even our recent history.

One fascinating concept Mr. O’Gorman introduces to this idea is that the general sense of worry appears to have a direct relation to the secularization of a culture. As we move further and further away from the idea of God, the Christian philosophy, and it’s religious to a more individualistic philosophy, we might feel freer to do what we want to do, but we also worry about a susceptibility we have to unchecked consequences and mortal decision making. How do we fill that gap? Some say that if we select the correct representatives as lawmakers to sign the necessary laws, we’ll be all right. Others say that we can be moral without religion by choosing a philosophy, personal or otherwise, other than religion. We can be out own gods. The philosophy of Christianity teaches that happiness can be found by living a moral life, and it lays out the tenets of its morality. The theme of Mr. O’Gorman thesis is that without a controlling moral authority, humans worry that they and their peers will, by their nature, become more immoral.

If we have an almost inherent need to be led, how do we replace the tenets of religion? Some choose to align their spiritual guide with politicians. They view these leaders as the religious view prophets, and they view opposing views as heretical. As much as secularists believe themselves fully capable of living without leadership, all political thought revolves around the desire to be led.

Reading through the various histories of man, we learn that our ancestors chose the guiding principles found in The Bible. The general theory, among those who preach the tenets of The Bible is that man’s mental stability, and happiness, can be defined in direct correlation to his desire to suborn his will to God’s wishes. God gave us free will, they will further, but in doing so He also gave us guiding principles that we can follow to a greater sense of happiness.

Some argue that Christianity is not a religion but a philosophy. Catholicism, Judaisim, and the Protestant religions all fall under the umbrella of the Christian philosophy. Putting that idea into this argument, it could be said that Christianity provides guiding principles and religion translates and enforces them.

If a man has a poor harvest –an agrarian analogy most preachers use to describe the whole of a man’s life– it is a commentary on how this man lived. The solution they provide is that the man needs to clean up his act and live in a Godlier manner. At this point in the description, the typical secular characterization of the devoutly religious comes to the fore, and their agreed upon truth has it that that these people are unhappier because they are unwilling to try new things, and puritanical in a sense that leads them to be less free. The modern, more secularized man, as defined by the inverse characterization, has escaped such moral trappings, and he is freer, happier, and more willing to accept new ideas and try new things. If the latter is the case, why are they so worried?

We’ve all heard secularists say that they wish they could set aside their mind and just believe in organized religion, or as they say a man in the sky. It would be much easier, they say, to simply set their intelligence aside and believe. What they’re also saying, if Mr. O’Gorman’s thesis can be applied to them, is that it would give them some solace to believe that everything was in God’s hands, so that they wouldn’t have to worry all the time.

Like the child who rebels against authority, but craves the guidance that authority provides, the modern, enlightened man appears to reject the idea of an ultimate authority while secretly craving many of its tenets at the same time. A part of them, like the child, craves the condemnation of immorality, a reason to live morally, and for some greater focus in general. As a rock musicians often complain, “I got nothing to believe in.” The randomness of the universe appears to be their concern.

One other cause for concern –that is not discussed in Mr. O’Gorman’s book– is that the modern man may have less to worry about. If social commentators are to be believed, Americans have never been more prosperous:

“(The) poorest fifth of Americans are now 17 percent richer than they were in 1967,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

They also suggest that the statistics on crime are down, and teenage pregnancy, and drinking and experimental drug use by young people are all down. If that’s the case, then we have less to worry about than we did even fifteen years ago. It’s a concern. It’s a concern in the same manner that a parent is most concerned when a child is at its quietest. It’s the darkness-before-the-storm concern.

Francis O’Gorman writes that the advent of this general sense worry occurred in the wake of World War I. Historians may give these worriers some points for being prescient about the largely intangible turmoil that occurred in the aftermath the Great War, but World War I ended in 1918 and World War II didn’t begin until 1939, a gap of a generation of concerned citizens worrying about the silence and calm that precedes a storm. This may have propelled future generations into a greater sense of worry, after listening to their parents’ concerns over a generation, only to have them proved right.

The idea that we worry about too much freedom, as in freedom from the guidelines and borders that religion, or God, can be accomplished without consequences, writes The New Republic writer, Josephine Livingstone in her review of Francis O’Gorman’s book:

“The political concept of freedom gets inside our heads. It is a social principle, but it structures our interiority. This liberty worries us; it extends to the realm of culture too, touching the arts as much as it touches the individual human heart and mind.

“In this way, O’Gorman joins the tide of humanities scholars linking their discipline with the history of emotion, sensory experience, and illness. It’s an approach to culture most interested in human interiority and the heuristics that govern the interpretation of experience: Happiness can be studied; sound can be thought through; feeling can be data.”

Ms. Livingstone furthers her contention by writing that the human mind can achieve worry-free independence, in a secular society, by studying select stories, from select authors:

“Worrying also fits into the tradition of breaking down myths and tropes into discrete units, a bit like Mircea Eliade’s Myth and Reality or C. S. Lewis’ Studies in Words. We care about these books because we need stories about the cultural past so that we might have a sense of ourselves in time. The real value of O’Gorman’s book lies, I think, in the way it flags the politics of the stories we tell ourselves. In its attribution of emotional drives to the ideas behind modernist culture and neoliberal politics alike, Worrying shows that their architects –writers, mostly– are as much victims of emotion as masters of thought. If we can see the emotional impulses behind our definitions of rationality, liberty, and literary craftsmanship, we can understand our own moment in cultural time more accurately and more fairly: Perhaps we can become our own gods, after all.”

One contradiction –not covered in the O’Gorman book, or the Livingstone review– is the trope that religious people are miserable in their constraints. This is ostensibly based on the premise that they fear the wrath of God so much that they’re afraid to live the life that the secular man enjoys. Yet, O’Gorman infers that religious people tend to worry less, because they follow the guidelines laid out in The Bible, and they place their destiny, and fate, in the hands of God. The import of this is that for religious minds, there is a plan, a roadmap as it were to a less random universe.

Ms. Livingstone’s review basically says that the secular life doesn’t have to be so random, and it doesn’t have to cause such concern. She basically states that if we study happiness as if it were an algorithm of either physical or aural data points, and incrementally form our thoughts around these findings we can eventually achieve happiness. She also states that through reading literature we can discover our own master plan, through their mastery of emotions of thoughts and ideas. On the latter point, I would stress the point –in a manner Ms. Livingstone doesn’t– that if you want to lead a secular life, there are ways to do so and still be worry free. The key words being if you want to. If you’re on the fence, however, a religious person could argue that all of the characteristics Ms. Livingstone uses to describe the virtues of the stories and the authors she considers masters of thought, could also be applied to the stories, and writers of The Bible, and the many other religious books. If her goal, in other words, is to preach to her choir, she makes an interesting, if somewhat flawed case. (I’m not sure how a living, breathing human being, could study a data sheet on happiness and achieve the complicated and relative emotion, but she could also say the same thing about students of The Bible.) If her goal, on the other hand, is to persuade a fence sitter that secularism is the method to becoming your own god, this reader doesn’t think she made a persuasive case.

An Intellectual Exercise in Exercising the Intellect

July 28, 2015September 5, 2015 RilalyLeave a comment

“There are no absolutes,” a friend of mine said in counterargument. The snap response I had was to counter her counter with one of a number of witty responses I had built up over the years for this statement. I decided, instead, to remain on topic, undeterred by her attempts to muddle the issue at hand, because I believe that for the most part this whole philosophy has been whittled down to a counterargument tactic for most people.

Whenever I hear the “No Absolutes” argument, I think of the initial stages of antimatter production. In order to get the protons, neutrons, or electrons spinning fast enough, a physicist needs to use a Particle Accelerator to attempt the production of an atomic nuclei, otherwise known as antimatter. The acceleration of these atoms occurs in a magnetic tube that leads them to a subject, upon which they smashed to produce this final product. The process is a lot more intricate and complex than that, but for the purpose of this discussion this simplified description can be used as an analogy for the “There are No Absolutes” argument that is often introduced in an echo chamber of like-minded thinkers, until it is smashed upon a specific subject, and the subject matter at hand is then annihilated in a manner that produces intellectual antimatter in the mind of all parties concerned.

The “No Absolutes” argument is based on the post-structuralism idea that because we process, or experience, reality through language –and language can be declared unstable, inconsistent, and relative– then nothing that is said, learned, or known can be said to be 100% true.

This degree of logic could be the reason that a number of philosophers have spent so much time studying what rational adults would consider “Of Course!” truths. One such example, is the idea of presentism. Presentism, as presented by the philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, could also be termed the philosophy of time. The central core of McTaggart’s thesis has it that the present is the lone timeframe that exists, and that the past, and the future cannot exist at the same time. The past has happened, he states, and the future will happen, but they do not exist in the sense that the present does. This philosophy is regarded in some circles (to the present day!) as so insightful that it is included in some compilations of brilliant philosophical ideas.

Anyone that is familiar with McTaggart’s philosophy, or will be by clicking here, can read through the description of the man’s theory a number of times without grasping what questions the man was answering. His description of time is so elementary that the reader wonders more about the audience that needed that explained to them, than they do the philosophy of Mr. McTaggart. Was McTaggart arguing against the linguists attempts to muddle the use of language, or was he attempting to argue for the reinforcement of agreed upon truths? Regardless, the scientific community had problems with McTaggart’s statement, as depicted by the unnamed essayist writing in this article:

If the present is a point (in time) it has no existence, however, if it is thicker than a point then it is spread through time and must have a past and future and consequently can’t be classed as purely the present. The present is immeasurable and indescribable” because it is, we readers can only assume, too finite to be called a point.”

Those that want to dig deep into the physicist’s definition of time, of which this unnamed essayist seems to be a party, will find that time is a measurement that humans have invented to aid them in their day-to-day lives, and that the essence of time cannot be measured. Time is not linear, and it cannot be seen, felt or heard. They will argue that there is nothing even close to an absolute truth regarding time. Setting aside the physicists’ definition of time, however, humans do have an agreed upon truth of time that McTaggart appeared to want to bolster through elementary, agreed upon truths of time to thwart the confusion that sociolinguists, with a political orientation, introduced to susceptible minds.

There’s nothing wrong with a man of science, or math, challenging our notions, perceptions, and agreed upon truths. Some of these challenges are fascinating, intoxicating, and provocative, but some have taken these challenges to another level, a “No Absolutes” level to this point of challenging our beliefs system that has resulted in damage to our discourse, our sense of self, free-will, and a philosophy we have built on facts and agreed upon truths in a manner that may lead some to question if everything they believe in is built on a house of cards that can be blown over by even the most subtle winds of variance.

There was a time when I believed that most of the self-referential, circuitous gimmicks of sociolinguistics –that ask you to question everything you and I hold dear– were little more than an intellectual exercise that professors offered their students to get them using their minds in a variety of ways. After questioning the value of the subject of Geometry, my high school teacher informed me: “It is possible that you may never use any aspect of Geometry ever again, but in the course of your life you’ll be called upon to use your brain in ways you cannot now imagine. Geometry could be called a training ground for those times when others will shake you out of your comfort zone and require a mode of thinking that you may have never considered before, or use again.” This Geometry professor’s sound logic left me vulnerable to the post-structuralist “No Absolutes” Philosophy professors I would encounter in college. I had no idea what they were talking about, I saw no value in their lectures, and I thought that the ideas that I was being introduced to, such as those nihilistic ideas of Nietzsche, always seemed to end up in the same monotonous result, but I thought their courses were an exercise in using my brain in ways I otherwise wouldn’t.

Thus, when I first began hearing purveyors of the “No Absolutes” argument use it in everyday life, for the purpose of answering questions of reality, I wanted to inform them that this line of thought was just an intellectual exercise reserved for theoretical venues, like a classroom. It, like Geometry, had little-to-no place in the real world. I wanted to inform them that the “No Absolutes” form of logic wasn’t a search for truth, so much as it was a counterargument tactic to nullify truths, or an intellectual exercise devoted to exercising your intellect. It is an excellent method of expanding your mind in dynamic ways, and for fortifying your thoughts, but if you’re introducing this concept to me as evidence for how you plan on answering real questions in life, I think you’re going to find it an exercise in futility over time.

Even when a debate between two truth seekers ends in the amicable agreement that neither party can sway the other to their truth, the art of pursuing the truth seems to me to be a worthwhile pursuit. What would be the point of contention for two “No Absolutes” intellectuals engaging in a debate? Would the crux of their argument focus on pursuing the other’s degree of error, or their own relative definition of truth? If they pursued the latter, they would have to be careful not to proclaim their truths to be too true, for fear of being knocked back by the “There are No Absolutes,” “Go back to the beginning” square. Or would their argument be based on percentages: “I know there are no absolutes, but my truth is true 67% of the time, while yours is true a mere 53% percent of the time.” Or, would they argue that their pursuit of the truth is less true than their opponents, to therefore portray themselves as a true “No Absolutes” nihilist?

Some may argue that one of the most vital components of proving a theoretical truth in science, is the attempt to disprove it, and others might argue that this is the greatest virtue of the “No Absolutes” argument, and while we cannot dismiss this as a premise, purveyors of this line of thought appear to use it as nothing more than a counterargument to further a premise that neither party is correct. Minds that appear most confused by the facts, find some relief in the idea that this argument allows them to introduce confusion to those minds that aren’t. Those that are confused by meaning, or intimidated by those that have a unique take on meaning, may also find some comfort in furthering the notion that life has no meaning, and nothing matters. They may also enjoy informing the informed that a more complete grasp on meaning requires one to have a firmer grasp on the totality of meaninglessness. The question I’ve always had, when encountering a mind that has embraced the “ No Absolutes” philosophy is, are they pursuing a level of intelligence I’m not capable of attaining, or are they pursuing the appearance of it?

Weaponized Compassion

November 3, 2014August 22, 2021 Rilaly1 Comment

Ask a modern-day liberal how they arrive at the notion that the progressive method of problem solving is more effective than conservative one, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the word “kindness” dropped at one point in their explanation. If they do not use that word, they will undoubtedly drop the words “compassionate” or “nice” in some form. If we point out that most of the kind and compassionate big government fixes for ending poverty have resulted in numerous unintended consequences, and that it could be argued that many of those programs have ended up doing more harm than good, we should be prepared to hear their “best intentions” argument. Those who vote Democrat want these programs to succeed of course, but they are not so concerned with the programs’ success that they would vote to “fix” them, or change them if some cold, numbers-oriented accounting spreadsheet proved them ineffective. Their greater concern is that their favored politician puts forth an effort to solve the problem.

Political philosophy professor Leo Strauss says that it’s a mistake “to presume to understand important political philosophers better than they understood themselves, unless one had already put in the hard work necessary to understand them as they understood themselves.”

In an attempt to avoid undue partisan characterization, when it comes to trying to understand why common, ordinary citizens profess an allegiance to the progressive method to problem solving, we provide a characterization of the progressive ideology from someone who could be said to be a forefather of modern day liberalism, former President Franklin Roosevelt:

“Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

If the manner in which most progressives characterize their philosophical pursuit of problem solving is this stark, then it stands to reason that a politically astute observer who opposes it must be cruel, greedy, and callous. If that’s not the case, then the next logical conclusion would have to be that the observer who rejects the problem solving approach of the modern liberal is either not very astute, or woefully uninformed.

On those occasions when I’ve been able to discuss these matters with a concerned liberal citizen, I’ve found that they make an exception for me, because I’ve established the idea that I’m a nice person who means well. They might question my sources of information, my overall knowledge of the situation, and my status in life, such that it places me above those in need. Yet, most of them find it difficult to view me as inherently evil, because they know me, but they choose to view me as anecdotal evidence of those who share the evil mindset. Their extreme characterizations of opposing viewpoints, William Voegeli writes in his Imprimis piece, are a natural result of the repeated messaging from liberal politicians and activists that he calls “weaponized compassion”.

Using compassion as a weapon against the opponents of modern liberalism can be viewed in the following quotes:

“I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.”

Last year (2013) President Obama said, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough—I want your kids to do well also. Empathetic kindness is “what binds us together, and . . . how we’ve always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.”

Conservatives might view this type of “Mean People Suck” messaging as so condescending and simplistic that it could not possibly be effective, but it is. In election after election, exit polls reveal that such themes have worked for liberals, for generations. The reason for this, writes Voegeli, is that Republicans have never mounted an effective defense against it.

“If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential benefits. The fact that liberals are, if anything, increasingly disposed to frame the basic political choice before the nation in these terms suggests that conservatives have not presented an adequate response.”

The problem that exists for Republicans, as it has for most of my life, is how does one defeat a negative? How does a political party prove to the population that they are not mean? An individual candidate can try to prove that they are personified evidence to the contrary, but that candidate will usually end up, as John McCain did in the 2008 Presidential Election, expending so much of their time and resources trying to defeat the charge of being mean that not only do they get distracted from other substantive issues, they leave the electorate wondering if they are protesting too much and, in fact, a mean person.

Money

If these two philosophical pursuits of problem solving can be broken down to admittedly simplistic structures, it could be said that when one sifts through all of the rhetoric that both sides of the aisle engage in, the crux of the difference between the two philosophies revolves around money. Those who allocate more tax payers dollars to a problem are deemed more compassionate, and those who don’t are viewed as mean, cruel, and in favor of the rich.

Renown budget cutter, and former Indiana Republican Governor, Mitch Daniels believed he has at least one effective counter to the idea that the austerity measures that conservatives employ for problem solving are hateful.

“You ought to be the most offended of anybody,” he says to liberals, “If a dollar that could help a poor person is being squandered in some way.”

I think that we can say that most honest, and well-meaning liberal citizens believe that when their hard-earned tax dollars are devoted to helping the poor, they don’t mind paying those taxes, and they will vote for any politician who pledges to do so. The question I’ve always had for these citizens of good intentions is what percentage of your tax dollar, ostensibly devoted to fighting poverty, ends up being allocated to the bureaucracy devoted to fighting poverty? What percentage of that dollar goes to administrative costs, various other bureaucratic expenses, and what percentage ends up being fraudulently wasted, abused, and trapped in the bureaucratic red tape of redundancies? What percentage of that hard-earned, tax payer’s dollar actually makes it to the poor people that that bureaucracy is intended to help, and what percentage ends up being squandered in some way?

Another way of framing the same question I would have for those who vote Democrat for the expressed intent of helping the poor, or resolving economic inequality, through the various methods of tax allocations, government regulation, etc., is what are the various programs’ rates of success?

The liberal response to former Governor Daniels’ quote is that he is hateful, racist, against the poor, against women, and mean. If Daniels followed the John McCain model of countering such charges, he would then spend so much of his time defending himself against these charges that his central message would get lost in the shuffle, and people would walk away thinking that he’s mean. It’s called weaponzied compassion.

The aspect of Mitch Daniels’ argument that Mitch Daniels doesn’t discuss, in his rational argument against liberals, is that the solvency issue, or the effectiveness of the welfare program, isn’t of primary concern to liberal citizens. They simply want more for more, and anyone who attempts to cut the amount of money going to entitlement programs, or decreases the increase from the previous year, is deemed mean, hateful, racist, and engaged in a war against the poor.

When these numbers are put into actual and proverbial spreadsheets, it can be proven that while the welfare program has expanded exponentially in the last two generations, the needle of the poverty rate hasn’t moved much at all. This appears to be of less concern to liberal citizens, when as Daniels points out it should be their primary concern.

Why doesn’t the welfare program work very well? Why have there been so many problems with the wealth redistribution aspects of Obamacare? Why has Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) 1964-65 Great Society program failed to move the poverty level over the last fifty years, and why do most of the well-intentioned plans of liberalism fail to achieve on a level that could promote liberalism as the ideal political philosophy for all Americans, as opposed to the twenty some odd percent who maintain unwavering belief?

The cynical conservative would say that these programs have inherent flaws that keep those immersed in these troubled programs voting for the career politicians who promise to fix them in every election cycle. These programs are never fixed, but politicians have vowed to fix them, or the system, for as long as most of us have been alive.

While this might apply to liberal politicians, the liberal citizen would inform you that they have nothing to gain from the stagnancy, or failure, of the program for which they advocate. They don’t understand how a conservative could be rooting on the failure of a program ostensibly designed to help the poor. Most conservatives are not, of course, they just have a different way of approaching the matter, but the conservative methods to fixing the problem are complicated, difficult to understand, numbers oriented, long-term, and very difficult to sell on a campaign trail. When people can’t grasp the totality of such an approach, they feel stupid, and when they feel stupid they need someone to help them understand it, or if that’s not possible, to, at least, make them feel better about not understanding it. What better way is there to relate to these people, and their confusion, than to call those with alternative, and complicated, solutions names? People understand name calling, it’s street, and it reaches us on a base level equivalent to bathroom humor –a tool that some comedians employ when they fear they’re losing an audience. This type of response unites us all in a manner –a Jerry Springer manner– that a complicated explanation with long-term problem solving techniques cannot.

“I conclude that the machinery created by the politics of kindness does not work very well–” writes Voegeli, “in the sense of being economical, adaptable, and above all effective– because the liberals who build, operate, defend, and seek to expand this machine don’t really care whether it works very well and are, on balance, happier when it fails than when it succeeds.”

To accentuate this particular point, William Voegeli pulls out his Oxford English Dictionary to provide us with the literal definition of compassion.

“Compassion means suffering together with one another. Compassion is the feeling or emotion, that a person is moved by when witnessing the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it.”

This definition of compassion does not include a wish to suffer the identical fate of the sufferer, but that they want to suffer the trials and tribulations of others vicariously, and they do want someone to do something about it, regardless how effective that something is.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile:

“When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow man, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself.”

Those who reject this characterization as simplistic still need to ask the question why liberals would be for programs that have, historically, proven ineffective? Why would their answer to the problems that everyone acknowledges exist in the welfare program be more welfare? With a fifty year track record of failure, why would so many liberals consider LBJ’s Great Society program to be a success?

The co-editor of a book called Pathological Altruism, Barbara Oakley explains her point of view:

“It’s the indifference –blithe, heedless, smug, or solipsistic– that liberals have to actual results that defines them as pathological altruists. It’s the idea that they can appear compassionate by being for these programs,” and thus be perceived as wonderful people by their peers, “That drives them to be for these programs even if they have a poor track record.”

Those who have introduced a results-oriented refutation of these programs to liberals –or people that are generally for such altruistic programs– have either witnessed genuine surprise on their face, or they’ve been greeted with a very frustrated person who reacts in a manner that suggests that a results-oriented presentation is obnoxious. To those who are surprised, some of us have recognized that not only did they not know these facts and figures that we’re presenting to them, but that the very idea of investigating for this kind of information never occurred to them.

“Pity is about how deeply I can feel,” wrote the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain. “And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.”

***

As a former fraud investigator of charitable enterprises, firsthand experience informed me that some people are pathologically altruistic. There’s nothing wrong with giving, of course, and there may be some merits to blind, uninformed giving, but those merits, as Rousseau points out, are generally immersed in how one views themselves, or how they want to be viewed.

There’s an old line that suggests: “Who cares why people give, as long as they give.” The same could be said, I suppose, when it comes to why some people are for government programs ostensibly designed to help poor people: “Who cares how effective they are, as long as they have the best of intentions.”

The calls I made to these charitable givers involved a disturbingly high number of givers who claimed that it was my company’s responsibility to police these charities, because we allowed them to use our payment service for their transactions. It was, in fact, our job to see to it that the charities who used our service were giving a universally accepted rate to intended recipients, but I couldn’t shake the idea that by castigating the company I worked for, these givers were absolving themselves of the responsibility of knowing, or learning, the true percentage of recipients that were actually being helped by their charitable giving and making more informed choices for their charitable giving going forward.

The givers did their part, in other words by caring enough to give money, and their responsibility concluded at that point. The same could be said, I believe, of those who absolve themselves of the effectiveness of federal government poverty programs. “I pay my taxes,” is something one might hear from one that learns that the poverty rate hasn’t moved much in fifty years, “and I vote Democrat. I can’t help it if they can’t get their act together.”

As a fraud investigator of charities, I was not permitted to provide those I called the actual percentage of the charitable givers’ dollar going to support the organization’s stated cause, but I was able to tell them where to find that number. The very idea that I would call these people to ask them questions about their charitable largess did raise some concerns among some about the institution they selected for their charity, but they were in the minority.

The question I would’ve loved to ask those (too few in my humble opinion) who were concerned about the charitable institutions I was calling about, had my company allowed me to do so, is, “Even though, as you say, it’s our responsibility to police this charity, will you continue to give to this charity? Even though you now wonder if the practices they engage in are, at the very least, questionable?” The answers, I believe, would’ve been fascinating for political scientists and psychologists to study, for it would’ve suggested that the most important part of charitable giving, for some, is to prove that they care, and the actual responsibility of seeing to it that people are helped is another entity’s responsibility. One could argue that most people, conservative and liberal, work very hard, and they are too busy to dot the I’s, and cross the T’s involved in the process of giving, and they they have to rely on others to see to it that their generosity is pushed through to its end. My firsthand experience with pathological altruism revealed that most people care more about caring than they do the ultimate reality of other people being helped.