SELFISH PITY

1 Pity is politeness

Passion is brusque to all but its beloved. But pity is a mere embellishment of our tact and decorum. It is born in politeness. But often it’s kept warm and breathing by our hostility to those whom we blame for inflicting the hurt.

Courtesy is a door which may let people in or shut them out. And affability is the least troublesome way of holding people at a distance.

I shrink from alluding to painful subjects, not because I don’t wish to cause pain to others, but because it would embarrass me to show how faintly I care for their pain. All the care that I am willing to show most people is to conceal how little I care for them.

How much empathy you need in order to fool your fellows that you feel empathy for them.

Courtesy is concealment. If we were candid, how obnoxious we would be.

I show courtesy by pretending to notice the frailties of others no more than I do my own. And I prove my empathy by pretending to feel their anguish as much as I in fact feel my own.

2 Shamed into pity

Shame achieves more than sympathy. I show solicitude for the distress of others, since I would feel embarrassed not to. A tramp who is not shameless enough to shame us into charity will soon starve. I don’t forgive beggars for what they take from me, be it my small change or my overlarge self-respect. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘it annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.’ What misgivings we get in return for our giving.

3 Empathy

We make too much of the compassion that others feel for us. So we trust that we can cause them a sharp twinge by bemoaning our own troubles. Empathize with those around you, and what you learn is how indifferently they feel for you. Johnson points out that whosoever ‘considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself.’

Egoists rage at the callousness of the world, when they find that it fails to break its heart over their own sorrows.

Empathy locks us inside our own selves. It is mindless action that makes us one. Feel the pain of others too much, and you become nothing but a pain to them.

We grow hard-hearted to the ordeals of others, either because we have not had to go through the same ourselves, or else because we have. We make light of them, because we have had no occasion to feel how heavy they are, or because we have weighed them and found that we could bear them with ease, and so we think that others should as well.

I don’t accept that any trouble that I am not prone to can be quite real. The maladies that I suffer from are unmerited afflictions. But the maladies that others suffer from are defects which they have been too weak to set right.

4 Self-pity

When howling misery rains down on me, I rush to shelter in the squat cabin of people’s concern, which I’m keen to quit as soon as the hurricane is past. Though I’m too smug to feel sorry for myself, now and then I act as if I do, as a snare to glean the aid or attention of others.

Our self-pity is a performance which we put on for others as much as our pity for others is a performance which we put on for ourselves.

You have dipped low indeed, if you can find a narcotic in the pity of others, or need to in your own.

I don’t feel sorry for others, because I care too frigidly for their troubles. And I don’t feel sorry for myself, because I think too warmly of my own success.

Our own imagined woes rack us. But the real woes of others scarcely touch us.

Sensitive egoists, such as Rousseau or Shelley, can find grounds for self-pity even in the sorrows that they cause others.

5 The self-pity of the powerful

Ruthless people pity themselves for the expedient wrongs that they have had to do in the service of others. The most cold-blooded potentates are also the most maudlin and self-pitying. And when they rise to a post far above their deserving, they resent the world for placing such blocks in their way.

The strong pity themselves for having to bear the burdens of the weak. And the weak pity themselves for having to put up with the oppressions of the strong.

The great ones of the earth, when they are not exulting in their triumphs, are wallowing in self-pity.

Those who pay a high price to push their overweening egoism are sure that they are martyrs to good will. And since they think they have reaped no gain from their selfishness, they conclude that they must be behaving unselfishly.

Some people are obnoxious when they are strong, since they know that they have the strength to press their claims. And they are just as obnoxious when they are weak, since they feel that their weakness gives them the right to make such claims. If they can’t tyrannize over you with their force, they’ll try to do it by playing on your pity.

6 We pity to savour our own good fortune

When I condole with someone, I add the balm of an unsullied conscience and the piquancy of a dram of discomfort to my contemplation of their distress, which I would elsewise not feel at all.

The cold flint of our pity for others strikes few sparks for them. But it whets the pleasure that we take in our own good fortune.

I give alms as a small toll to ride on the highway of my self-approval.

Some of us holiday in compassion as an emotional tourism through others’ anguish, which takes us on a brief scenic bypass from the broad highway of our uncaring. Your pity brings you no nearer to the heartbroken. It cheers you that you are so far above them.

You need more fortitude to deal with clear fortune and wealth than with cloudy fortune and want, say the fortunate and wealthy. Sweet are the uses of other people’s adversity. It may take more virtue to bear prosperity than tribulation, but only when the prosperity is another’s.

Our pity for others helps us to savour our own prosperity, as a twinge of remorse now and then helps us to savour how we’ve got away with the wrongs we have done.

7 The revenge of pity

Some poltroons take revenge on their enemies by pretending to commiserate with their mishaps as an excuse to keep harping on them. They drip a rivulet of tenderness on them to try to drown them in their own superiority. True consideration, like true agony, holds its tongue.

Pity is a sly way of triumphing over an enemy whom we were obliged to treat as a friend, or who has fallen so low as to be no longer worth our hate.

Pity is condescension with a good conscience.

We don’t waste our pity on our enemies. We save that subtle poison to serve up to our friends.

Cruelty is a tastier dish when it’s sauced with pity for its victims.

8 The powerless are pitiless

The powerless are pitiless once they get their hands on power. Now it’s their turn to do to others as they have been done to.

The heartsore have no compassion, since they are too caught up in their own woes. And the victorious have no compassion, since they have to press on to one more victory. Prosperity makes me careless of the troubles of others, and adversity enwraps me in my own. ‘Misfortune,’ Flaubert says, ‘renders us selfish and vicious and sottish.’

IMAGINARY PITY

9 Imagined pity

‘The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,’ claimed Shelley, who had so much empathetic imagination, and did so much unimagined harm. Imagination doesn’t move us to pity, though it may tell us that it has. Or else it does, and pity is no more real than a daydream. Pity may begin in the imagination, but that’s where most of it ends too.

It’s easy to see how much others are suffering, but it’s hard to accept that it matters. People can know all sorts of things, but there is just one thing they can care for, their own selves and what is theirs. And if they care for anything larger, they can do so only by making it part of their self.

Most people see more and care less than they let on.

My self-interest has a far busier imagination than my sluggish sympathy. Our brains never rest from hatching plans to glut the cravings of our hearts, but they soon tire of the thought of others’ pain.

The oppressed are so stupefied by their oppression, that they fancy that if their oppressors but knew their stories, they would not treat them as they do.

Moralists bleat that a bloodthirsty tormentor dismembers his victims because he lacks the imagination to feel how sorely they smart. But is it not they who lack the imagination to grasp how little he cares?

10 Sympathy and the senses

I feel no pity for the sorrows of others if I don’t see them sorrowing. Out of sight is out of sympathy. The virus of compassion is contracted through the eye. And often it is cured through the ear or nose.

Pity is a fleeting response to visual images, but justice is a cool virtue of slow reason. And in our world of speed and sensations, pity is more eye-catching than justice.

Visual mass-media serve as sympathy superconductors because they are so cold. I pity the picturesque, but I pass by the needy. And it is pictures that wring our hearts more than people. It’s not our own sympathetic imagination but outer images that stir our feelings.

11 The melodrama of our compassion

I love my own warm-hearted gestures more than I do the people that they claim to help. These play the part of mere wordless extras in my pageant of fellow-feeling. When I pity, I stage an edifying mime of my own moods. And I watch that so that I won’t have to watch the ugly writhings of the afflicted. My sensitiveness starts me blubbering, but then succours me for the anguish of others which I felt so weakly. My sobs and convulsions drown out their pain. How could I make out their agonies through the mist of my tears?

How delicious tears are, so long as it’s not our own woes that force them from us.

Our egoism appears luridly illumined in the gloom of another’s death. What lament would speak so eloquently, if it spoke solely of the dead?

We are so sensitive, that we end up pitying ourselves for having to endure the sight of so much piteous woe.

Other people’s woes are mere comic relief for the serious drama of our own. Humour is the best medicine that we have to deal with the ills of others, or at least it is the one that we use most frequently.

12 We pity to display our sensitivity

Most of our pity lasts just long enough for us to mouth how much we feel it. When people tell you how their heart bleeds for someone in pain, it is for themselves that they are seeking pity or praise.

We always care too late, when we have no cure left but words. It’s then that we can flaunt our stricken artistry and air our agonized perplexity. The wounds that we feel for others speak eloquently, but they don’t bleed.

The deaths of others give us one more opening to flaunt our own sensitivity. Their death is an event in our life, not in their own. We shrink it to a drama in which we play the starring role. When others are in pain, we declare how our hearts are rent for them. And when they are wronged, we act out our righteous ire. And when they die, we harp on our own loss and grief. When we mention their troubles, don’t we pay more heed to how we sound than to how they suffer? We sum up in a glib phrase a life that cost such deep pangs to live. The deaths of others are mere gossip for us.

We are quick to feel pity, so as to throw into relief our own commendable rectitude.

Even your death does not belong to you. As soon as it comes, they snatch it, and use it to bedizen their own grief and pity.

13 Squeamishness

We are the only animals that have a heart to feel pity. So why have we made such a pitiless world?

It may be that the anguish of others stings me so much because I don’t wish to do a thing to mend it. ‘We all like to see people in trouble,’ says Twain, ‘if it doesn’t cost us anything.’

The squeamish feel sure that they are kind-hearted, and the hard-hearted feel sure that they are clear-eyed.

Some of us fancy that we feel an unselfish concern for the troubles of others, because we feel so selfishly sensitive to our own, as invalids show an anxious concern for anyone who might be prone to the same ailment that they are. By our concern for others we signal our fears for ourselves. Our heart bleeds for those who die of a disease that we fear we might die of.

People view their hearts from the inside out. So their squeamishness feels to them like pity for others. They hold that others should not have to put up with the blows that they could not bear. Their tender egoism deems that all must be as nerveless as they are. Would they be so solicitous to help the sorrowful, if it didn’t give them hope that they could help themselves?

14 Squeamish sensitivity

Unhappy people resent the happy for their heartlessness. But their own kindliness may be no more than a symptom of their sorrow. They vibrate to the world’s woes, because they can’t do anything else, or else to turn their thoughts from their own woes.

So sensitive are we to the pain of others, that we have to shut our eyes and ears to it.

Selfish people pity themselves for feeling the pain of others too intensely. And frivolous people pity themselves for taking things too much to heart.

If people ached for the troubles of others half as much as they claim, how could they bear to live? And if they loved others as much as they love themselves, would they not be crushed by all the woes of the world, which they can’t lighten by an ounce? It would, as Johnson points out, be ‘misery to no purpose.’ Lucky there’s not much risk of us falling for that.

INDIFFERENCE

15 The ocean of indifference

We have so many ways of not caring and so many ways of seeming to. Behind the shining mildness of good people you glimpse their glazed indifference. Beneath pity’s sparkling surface rolls a cold unmoving ocean. Our fine feelings refresh us like oases of care in the parched flatlands of our unconcern.

Selfishness is so native to us, that we need years of training to perform the least act of self-denial. And the utmost consideration you can show most people is to conceal from them how little you care about their distress.

Insensitivity is our prevailing moral habit, as self-interest is our prevailing motivator. We want so much for ourselves, what do we have to spare for others but our stony blankness?

I snore through the pain of others, and wake for my own. The racked soul emits a shriek which is pitched too high for our dinned ears to hear. The disciples sleep on in Gethsemane.

When ruffled by the sorrows of others, I find in my heart a deep reservoir of apathy on which to draw. And when they would ripple my flat indifference, I calm it with yet more indifference. ‘We all have sufficient strength to brook the misfortunes of others,’ as La Rochefoucauld showed.

The giant agony of the world is matched by its giant indifference.

Pity is one luxury that the rich are happy to deny themselves.

16 Reluctant sympathy

We dare not go near those who stink of misery, for fear that they might taint our scented gladness. We step gingerly over the puddle of their spilt sorrow, which oozes so unbecomingly. It seeps from their pores like a fetid sweat, and we hold our nose as we pass by. And so we sprinkle a few drops of pity to perfume our hardheartedness or to cover up our repugnance.

Pity is not a tolerant virtue. It exacts strict terms before it goes to work. Before I lend my fellow-feeling to those who are in trouble, I stipulate that they pledge the collateral of not presuming to equal me and the interest of regularly acknowledging their inferiority.

‘Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery,’ as Gibbon points out. It is killed by time, remoteness and each recurrence. ‘Death or distance soon consumes them,’ as Hopkins wrote. A far-off catastrophe piques our flippant curiosity, and a drawn-out one palls. ‘How much does a bloodbath in China,’ asked Pessoa, ‘discomfort the most noble of us?’ And even what is close-by fails to come very close to us. ‘I doubt whether I can decently admit,’ Montaigne doesn’t quite lament, ‘how little it has cost my repose to have passed more than half my days during the collapse of my country.’

I decorously try to hide how little sympathy I feel for my fellows by avouching that I have used it up by feeling so much.

17 Fizzling pity

Our sympathies are selective, capricious, brittle, short-lived, amoral, easy to manipulate, and proud of their softness. They lack the gravity of selfishness. Though they look bright on our horizon, most of them burn up like meteors before they reach our dark hearts.

Pity flickers with a thin flame which lends us a brief warmth, but fizzles before it has time to thaw the frozen sufferer. It acts on us like ice. It may at first seem hot to the touch, but I let go of it before I feel how cold it is. ‘We talk of goodness,’ Renard says, ‘brim-full of beneficence that melts within us before, alas, we do any good to others.’

If tried too far, pity sickens into a queasy repulsion. Those who suffer unduly lose our commiseration, which soon curdles into blame. Why did they not dodge the blow?

When you leave your resentment to stand, it grows more and more sour. But when you leave your compassion to stand, it goes flat.

WEAPON OF PITY

18 Indignant pity

Compassion fires us to hate as well as to love. Spite stirs us to pity those who have been persecuted by our enemies. And pity incenses us with their persecutors. We don’t doubt that we feel the pain of the oppressed, because we are so indignant with their oppressors. We pick up a lot of our sympathies by moralizing our antipathies. And we mistake the blaze of our righteous fury for the glow of real kind-heartedness.

Pity and vengefulness are more often allies than adversaries. We burn to avenge injuries more than to remedy them, and to bring down the powerful more than to raise up the downtrodden. We develop compassion like a glossy photograph out of the scowling negative of our malignancy.

19 Polemical pity

Our pity is in great part polemical. It is as much a salvo that we aim at our enemy as a salve that we tender to the sick. We feel sorry for people not because they suffer what we would hate to, but because they are wrestling with those whom we hate.

The woes of others are one of the best ways we know to prove our point.

Our creed, which we don’t quite believe in, frames a large portion of our sympathies, which we don’t quite feel.

The circumference of our sympathy is exceedingly small. Cross the street, and you don’t know the people there, and don’t care what they might be suffering.

Those who hold that all men and women are born equal can at least feel superior to the swine who don’t. How nasty other people’s preconceived views are. And how I frown on those who lack my own fine moral vigilance. Half our empathy would melt, if we weren’t so sure that it would vex those whose prejudices smell so much more rank than our own.

A mob is both maudlin and punitive. It loves to pity almost as much as it loves to punish. But what it most loves to pity is its own hard lot. And then its first impulse is to take vengeance on its foes. And it will bow down to demagogues who prove their pity for it by persecuting its enemies.

Indifference is the best we can hope for from others. ‘When others start to think of you,’ Céline wrote, ‘it’s to figure out how to torture you.’ This seems to hold for the gods and fortune most of all.

20 Pointless pity

Most people are too pitifully pleased with themselves to need your pity when they meet with a reverse. And if they do need pity, they are all too quick to provide it for themselves. They know so little of their hearts and think so much of their merits, that your sympathy for them is as gratuitous as your revenge would be ineffectual. Pity and revenge are both vain, since most people are too obtuse to feel the subtle pangs that they ought. Our vengeance, like our tenderness, is too crude or too fine to impinge on the one whom it means to touch. Our soft heart feels betrayed, when those whom it pities forsake their anguish. What right have they to suffer less than we deem they should?

We love to find hurt souls on whom we can lavish our unavailing pity. If it could do them any good, we might not be so keen to lend it to them.

I don’t need others to pity me when I fail, since I never fail to spare myself the truth.

 

See also:          Virtues,              Conscience