Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Timothy Martin, Postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University
The 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil once said that compassion was an impossibility. She said it is “a more astounding miracle than walking on water.” The word she used for meeting the needs of the sufferer is not love or charity, but justice. Today, there is plenty of research that points to a decline in compassion.
Dealing with suffering, however, is part of the human experience, and as the American feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued compassion is “an essential bridge to justice.”
As an education researcher who examines activist efforts to educate the public, I think what we’re witnessing is not so-called “compassion fatigue” but the loss of a sense of a shared world.
When it comes to how housed citizens respond to their unhoused neighbours, I have noticed an increasing trend of describing this strained relationship as compassion fatigue. Compassion is a specific word, with a specific history, and I argue it’s the wrong word here.
The concept of compassion in ancient Greece was synonymous with pity. In those days, pity was tied to one’s capacity to expose oneself to suffering — to suffer with.
Turning away from one another
The rising narcissism in contemporary society is fuelled in part by our online lives, where algorithms insulate us from those who don’t think the same way. German philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of this phenomenon when she wrote about our “human condition” of introducing ourselves into public, appearing alongside those we did not choose, but with whom we share the world.
Judith Butler, an American queer philosopher, called this necessary experience of strained cohabitation “up againstness.” This concept of the world, or the public realm, could help us find the term we are looking for.
Compassion fatigue, applied to the housing crisis, consistently centres the experience of those with housing. In this rendering, compassion would assume that these neighbours have reached out to their unhoused neighbours due to the obvious suffering of life without adequate shelter.
Nussbaum, inspired by Aristotle, offered three parameters that we might use to determine whether someone is acting out of compassion. First, compassion understands the seriousness of the suffering; it is not trivial, nor is it made up. Second, compassion does not assume the sufferer is culpable; the person is not at fault for their situation.
The third parameter is what Nussbaum calls “similar possibilities.” To put it plainly, this is the belief that it could be you.
Meanwhile, countless city councillors, media outlets and even Ontario’s premier assert that unhoused citizens merely need to try harder.
Citizens are not only “tired” of seeing homelessness, they are actively suing organizations working on the front lines of this crisis. In the case of cities like Barrie, local government has tried to find ways to criminalize helping unhoused neighbours. This does not speak of compassion, it speaks of a pervasive world fatigue. If we refuse to exercise compassion, this is not compassion fatigue; it is atrophy.
What justice demands of us
Arendt emphasized the importance of a solidarity “aroused by suffering.” A love of the world — Amor Mundi — was essential to maintaining spaces and democratic systems shared with others. While she rejected the “sentiment” of compassion guiding political action, perhaps the educational experience of compassion can inform what we deem to be political in the first place.
What most see as homelessness is only a sliver of an iceberg, caused by systemic violence over several decades.
David Madden and Peter Marcuse observe:
“Modern homelessness is a family phenomenon. Families comprise nearly 80 per cent of the population in the New York City shelter system. In the past year in New York alone, 42,000 children were unhoused for at least one night.”
Similarly shocking statistics apply in Canada. Dozens of organizations and countless front-line workers operate in conditions equated with disaster relief efforts. Is the suffering of children trivial? Are they culpable? Could this be me?
A recent front-page story in The Globe and Mail offered an analysis of Ontario municipalities. The article acknowledges the soaring costs of groceries and housing costs have led to a 25 per cent increase in homelessness in Ontario over the last two years.
Despite this, and like so much media coverage lately, the piece veers toward a narrative about “lawlessness,” “vandalism” and “addiction.” The educational force of compassion can help return us to the basic questions of affordability, before we condemn those living at the tip of this swelling iceberg.
I offer here what Nussbaum calls “a just city in words” — they are simply words, an exhortation toward justice but, to complete her phrasing, “without a just city in words…we never will get a just city in reality…”
If Simone Weil was right, then perhaps we are waiting for a miracle.
Timothy Martin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
– ref. When it comes to homelessness, what we call ‘compassion fatigue’ is something else entirely – https://theconversation.com/when-it-comes-to-homelessness-what-we-call-compassion-fatigue-is-something-else-entirely-272799