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Most folks value compassion and agree that it's important both in our own lives also as in society more generally. Undeniably, compassion is additionally a part of our everyday experience of being human. We love and look after our children; confronted with a person in pain, we instinctively pity them; when someone reaches out and touches us during a season of pain we feel connected. Most folks would also wholeheartedly agree that compassion has something to try to integrate with the essence of what it means to steer an honest life. So it’s no small coincidence that compassion seems to be the footing where the moral teachings of all major traditions, religious and humanistic, begin and end.
Even within the contested political sphere, compassion is one value that each side of the range or spectrum is wanting to claim. Even though we have widely shared beliefs and experiences about compassion, we fail to offer it a central role in our lives and in our society. In our contemporary culture, we tend to possess a rather confusing relationship with values like kindness and compassion.
In the secular West, we sometimes lack a consistent cultural framework for articulating what compassion is and the way it works. To some people, it’s a matter of faith and morality, a personal concern of each individual with little or no societal relevance. Others question the very possibility of selflessness for humans and are very suspicious of sentiments like compassion that produce other people’s welfare because of the primary concern. As scientist Michael Ghiselin once remarked, “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.”
At the opposite extreme, some folks elevate these qualities to such heights that they're way out of the reach for many folks, possible just for rare individuals like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King jr., Dorthey Day, Gandhi, and Thich Nhat Hanh. With this view, compassion becomes something that is admired from a distance in great and exalted beings, but not relevant or practical to our everyday lives.
Broadly defined, compassion may be a sense of concern that arises once we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to ascertain that suffering relieved. The English word for compassion, comes from its Latin root, literally meaning ‘to suffer with’. Consistent with what religious historian and ex-nun Karen Armstrong has defined, the word for compassion as found in Semitic languages (rahamanut in Hebrew and in Arabic: rahman) is etymologically associated with the word for womb, evoking the mother’s love for her child as a prototypical expression of our compassion. At its core, compassion may be a reaction to the inevitable reality of our human condition—our experience of pain and sorrow.
Compassion offers the likelihood of responding to suffering with understanding, kindness, and patience, instead of, fear and repulsion. As such, compassion lets us open ourselves to the truth of suffering and to seek its alleviation. Compassion is what connects the sensation of empathy to acts of generosity, kindness, and other expressions of our altruistic tendencies.
When compassion arises in us within the face of need or suffering, three things happen almost instantaneously:
We perceive the other’s suffering or need.
We emotionally connect with the need or suffering.
We respond instinctively by wishing to ascertain that situation relieved.
Compassion may cause action; it's a readiness to assist or to require to try something ourselves about another person’s situation. Today, scientists are starting to map the neurobiological basis of compassion and explore its deep evolutionary roots.
As a society, we've long ignored the elemental role our compassion instinct plays in defining our nature and behavior. we've bought into a well-liked narrative that seeks to elucidate all our behavior through the prism of competition and self-interest.
This is the story we've been telling about ourselves.
The thing is, a few stories like this, often tend to be self-fulfilling. When our story says that we are at the bottom selfish and aggressive creatures, we assume that each man is for himself. during this ‘dog eat dog world.’ It's only logical, then, to ascertain others as a source of rivalry and antagonism. We then relate to others with apprehension, fear, and suspicion, rather than with sympathy and a way of connection. In sharp contrast to this, if our story says that we are social creatures endowed with instincts for compassion and kindness, which as deeply interdependent beings our welfare is intertwined, this totally changes the way we view – and behave in – the planet. therefore the stories we tell about ourselves do matter, quite profoundly so.