Compassion and Control

Immediately after spouting off, I regretted it. Outside the college library a fellow had merely asked about my heavy breathing and whether I needed assistance. With a scowl on my face and voice I pointed out that I had just bicycled up one of the steepest hills in town.

The poor fellow must have gone away thinking that no good deed goes unpunished. What was it that caused me to react so ungratefully to his apparent kindness and concern? Perhaps whenever I am on a college campus I feel a latent hostility that always boils just below the surface, and it takes little to set it off.

Meanwhile, off in the big world, liberal interventionists are bombing away in the name of humanitarianism. The commentariat is struggling to make sense of liberal interventionism and nation-building as a type of muscular social work.

Is there a relationship between these two examples of meddling do-goodism: one a micro-version, the other a macro-version?

Many people have noticed that the transition is pretty quick and easy between a liberal's "caring and concern" and her coercion.

Do liberals ever ask themselves why they should have greater powers of empathy than anyone else? Which gene did they inherit that gives them greater capacity in this regard? The amount of genuine compassion that can be generated by a normal human being is quite limited. Recall your Boswell:

JOHNSON. 'Sir it is affectation to pretend to feel the distress of others, as much as they do themselves. It is equally so, as if one should pretend to feel as much pain while a friend's leg is cutting off, as he does.'

Nor is this a bad thing. The world has so much suffering in it that too much empathy would cause us to always be miserable.

But the liberal does affect to feel more sympathy for the world's suffering than the average slob does, thus showing her moral superiority. Combine that with her mental superiority (which should be obvious to everybody) and she is left with a social duty to help other people even if they don't want her help. Thus compassion morphs into coercion. Perhaps it is even true that the more violent the coercion the more validated her superiority becomes.

Ordinarily the real world restrains liberals' helpfulness, which must be frustrating to them. But during foreign interventions they can finally break free.  At last liberals are free to act as good as they are, free of apologies, and free of suspicions about their motives. Finally the intelligent people get to win. And if people don't like it, they can just blow the little morons up. What an emotional relief that must be.