Why We Need to Bring Back Love and Compassion

Today, I am going to start a new series, where I attempt to lay the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in some fundamental shared values. The value I am going to focus on today is compassion. Compassion, love for each other, following the 'golden rule', or whatever else you can call it, has long been a cornerstone of any successful society, and is a major driving force for society's improvement over time. I think a fundamental problem with today's Western political landscape is a lack of compassion, especially among the loudest voices on both the left and the right. This, in turn, is due to a combination of factors, including polarization and tribalism, obsession with ideology and philosophy, as well as the proliferation of dishonest influencers in the media. I will talk about how to tackle these problems, and bring back compassion.

The level of compassion in Western society has dropped rapidly in the past ten years or so. Many people might point the finger towards online political culture, especially of the right-leaning variety, which started the whole 'SJWs owned' thing. But although that culture is really toxic and is indeed part of the problem, what is often called the 'woke left' is equally responsible for trashing compassion, in my view. Let me explain.

Wokeness, the worldview and brand of activism heavily influenced by postmodern critical theory, likes to say that it is for social justice. However, it is not for the kind of social justice most of us knew before 2015 or so. The 'woke left' simply doesn't care much about justice at the practical, individual level. Instead, it cares about fulfilling its ideology, which is basically the dismantling of what it sees as interlocking systems of oppression. This ideology divides people into oppressor vs. oppressed groups, mostly based on their immutable characteristics like race and gender. And if you're somehow placed in an 'oppressor' group, they don't have much compassion for you. Even if you are in the 'oppressed' group, if you disagree with their worldview, they might try to label you as 'privileged' in another way, and by implication, less deserving of compassion. Therefore, under the postmodern critical theory identity politics model, there really is a lack of compassion towards many people, and in many contexts, especially when compared to the model of universal compassion old-school liberals used to argue for civil rights and gay marriage. Wokeness prioritizes its ideology of deconstruction over genuine, universal compassion, and its attempt to supplant old-school liberalism on the left in the 2010s led to a rapid loss of compassion on the left, and eventually across society more generally.

On the other hand, the New Right are clearly not into compassion either. During the 2010s, the angle they took was that so-called SJWs were too focused on compassion, to the exclusion of everything else. This implied that what was needed was less compassion. However, this is a dishonest way of framing the problem because, as previously discussed, the woke left suffers from a lack of compassion, rather than a surplus of it. By framing compassion as the problem rather than the solution, the New Right was able to mainstream their own extremely uncompassionate brand of politics. Instead of championing free speech on the ground that everyone deserves to be able to express their concerns, or that a free marketplace of ideas would allow us to get to the truth which is best for everyone, their 'free speech' is about nihilistically 'owning the libs', often by saying things that are deliberately bigoted towards minorities. This has allowed them to build a culture where deliberately antagonizing and hurting people for no benefit is not only tolerated, but actively celebrated. Today's online right, where being against interracial marriage and openly hating minorities is effectively normalized, is the end result. Thus the New Right effectively used the widespread frustration towards wokeness to dishonestly build an even more toxic movement.

To end all this, I think we need to start by simply demanding a return to compassion. We need to insist that compassion is universally applied to everyone, and that ideology and philosophy are never allowed to get in the way of this again. We need to insist that truly caring for everyone's wellbeing is a valid goal of politics, in and of itself. On one hand, the woke left should be called out for the harms that result from its ideology labeling certain people as oppressors based on their immutable characteristics. We should push this radically hateful way of thinking out of polite society, where it clearly doesn't belong. Indeed, we should teach our kids that it is always fundamentally wrong to think this way, so that this ideology doesn't find a way to spread to future generations. On the other hand, the New Right's toxic embrace of an anti-compassion culture that revolves around the nihilistic goal of 'owning the libs' should be firmly rejected too. Life is already difficult enough for most people as it is, if your mission in life is to make other people more miserable than they already are, there really should be a special place in hell for you. Again, polite society should be able to just say no to this cancer. If we can't even do this, there is no hope for the future of humanity.