the ethical imperative of compassion-driven action
our humanity depends on action driven by an imaginative sense of the other
In recent years, a rightful emphasis has been placed on the importance of dialogue across lines of difference. This dialogue promotes empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding.
But I believe that in this cultural moment we need to move beyond talking and organize towards action.
In a lecture on ethics and empathy, Rowan Williams argues for exactly this. He states that it is our ethical imperative as Christians to not appropriate the experiences of another as our own (“Ah yes, I understand…now be quiet”), but to recognize in humility where the experiences of the “other” go far beyond our own (“No, I can’t understand…but I perceive the world better (one might say ‘more justly’) because of you”). This sounds much like Gadamer’s experiential “horizons.”
Avoiding what Williams calls “emotional colonialism,” we are able to move toward action because the end of empathy when rightly understood within an ethical framework is not a satisfactory knowledge of another suffering, but action—a movement of “responding to and resonating with an experience that is not our own.” Williams concludes that our humanity depends on that imaginative sense of the other—the paradox of “the person whose perspective I can’t occupy but mysteriously need to imagine.”
Our conversations around dinner tables need to have implications for the way we function in the public sector. The lessons captured when we love our neighbors must lead us to advocate on behalf of our neighbors. Empathy must be coupled with action. Love must be paired with justice.
Action without proper imagination leads to misrepresentation and appropriation; but compassion without action will never lead to substantial, generative, or long-standing change in our world.
Indeed, this is the model of Jesus Christ who did not come in flesh only to die but to redeem. In the face of mass gun violence, systemic racism, food apartheid, and more, we must – like Jesus – move from words to action.
Reading:
“Shall The Fundamentalists Win?” - Harry Emerson Fosdick
Watching:
Peaky Blinders (Netfix)
Listening:
Summer Clothes - The Wonder Years
Grapejuice - Harry Styles
Grrrls - Lizzo