cool [*] compassion

It would appear as though compassion has become the new cool.

Globalization has produced more than mere connectivity. The “shrinking of the globe” draws the impoverished and marginalized astonishing close to the privileged.

As a result, disparity and oppression is becoming more obvious. Western society appears to be gravitating toward the not-so-new ideas of altruism and justice. Regular, everyday citizens want to “get involved.” Even youth seem more interested in starting 501c3’s than a neighborhood garage band.

It’s as though it’s officially cool to care.

Cool Compassion, as it were, didn’t simply become. The infusion of bright, young people into the non-profit scene has led to smart and savvy cause-marketing. That blend has developed an entirely new sort of activism, where individuals do good while consuming goods. Special product lines promise purchases that will meet a consumer demand and simultaneously defeat AIDs, shoe an orphans feet, or simply make a difference. It’s a brilliant and subtle strategy designed to draw people into global philanthropy.

In one sense, I find myself donning my proverbial rally cap. I can’t help but think more people becoming more “involved” is necessarily good, and has the potential to lead to a kind of worldwide relief efforts on behalf of “the least of these” described in Matthew 25.

Yet, I also find myself invariably wary of the synthesis of contemporary compassion and modern consumerism. Cool Compassion – in its current form – embodies both the best and worst of globalization, consumerism, and the incomplete status of contemporary altruism.

Consider, for example, the stylistic of Cool Compassion, or what some call "aWEARness." A combination of fashion and philanthropy, aWEARness attaches peer-pressure coolness with the trendiness of combating poverty and human trafficking. Sure, you knew world hunger existed, but it didn’t coincide with your ache to belong until Joe tied aWEARness to his feet, Sally wrote it on her wrist, or GAP immortalized it on a red hoodie.

As a result, the causes with the coolest stuff – and, consequently, the hippest following – are the ones in which generate the greatest interest. As a result, you may actually give more because someone gave you something for giving something.

Sound a little shallow? Take a closer look.

Certainly, there is cause for suspicion, but at some level we’re all consumers, and aid-based goods provide a unique alternative to products of more contemptible origin. What’s more, Cool Compassion exposes consumers to a range of issues with which they might have otherwise had little to no interaction. An aWEARness purchase turns your wardrobe, your house, and even the bumper of your car into regularly reminder of a particular cause. If that extended exposure does bring about action, it would make that $20 t-shirt worth every pretty penny.

Then again, it’s difficult to determine which draw is hijacking which. Has compassion enlisted the support of savvy marketing, or have providers corned demand by manipulating consumer’s good intentions into a purchasing trend? And if Cool Compassion is a mere trend, then what distinguishes it from the other well-intentioned inconsistencies of our privileged society? After all, we prudently choose Diet Coke – with a Quarter Pounder and large fries. We chug gas-sucking SUVs to environmental awareness events. We’ll even arrive at the gym thrice a week – and subsequently take the elevator to the second floor exercise bikes. Our noble intentions are often misguided and inconsistent, addressing the symptoms rather than the source of trouble.

Ultimately, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to belong, purchasing apparel, or nifty designs. There’s just much more to true Christian benevolence than a mere monetary transaction. Indeed, Christian charity is a lifestyle characterized by sacrifice in inevitable response to the Gospel of Grace. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the Apostle Paul states in his first letter to the Corinthians, “that though he was rich, for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” Certainly, trendy aWEARness cannot stand in the shadow of Christ’s cross.

In the mean time, what if Cool Compassion challenged consumers to “earn” an aid-based product, rather than settle for and perpetuate the aWEARness status quo? What if we applied market principles of scarcity and required consumers to spend a week alongside freed prostitutes shaping jewelry before they kept some for themselves? Or turned a $15 t-shirt into 15 hours – or 15 days – of serving among the States’ urban poor? Can we create venues that that lead millions of people to own a cause rather than purchase its product?

Then, perhaps, Cool Compassion might begin to channel a deeper transformation of the consumer’s choice into a lifestyle of true charity.

[review] Life at the Bottom

In A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Jean Jacques Rousseau suggested that the conduct of a greedy and grasping few – men who had usurped more than their divinely allotted share of things – had promulgated the misery of the poor and downtrodden. In The Social Contract, Rousseau allowed that, in order to restore both socio-economic spectrums of society, it would be necessary to redistribute wealth: taxes for the propertied; government welfare for the property-less. August Comte, in the same vein and Rousseau, later contended for a revolutionary sociology, which postulated that individual human beings do not so much act on as react to external circumstances, and society must therefore cure the social environment of the poor’s vices and curses. Cure, yes, as Comte saw evil as sickness rather than sin, and misbehavior exterior of the agent’s responsibilities. Consequently, the just and humane prescription for crime must not be punishment but therapy; not judges but physicians. The contemporary welfare state and a "freedom from want," then, will eventually actualize a crime-free utopia, where individuals are provided all that they need.

Conversely, Theodore Dalrymple condemns such ideologically-driven vies are dangerous illusions. In his work, Life at the Bottom: the Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Dalrymple describes how the Weltanschauung – or, worldview – established by misguided ideologues has created and corrupted the British underclass, the group that was meant to be its main beneficiary. He illustrates, through poignant anecdotes, the world of the underclass as one wracked with crime, senseless violence, drug abuse, illegitimacy, nihilism and a complete refusal to accept personal responsibility of one's conduct. Additionally, he contends that these are simply byproducts of a system of "subsidized apathy" in which there is nothing for which to hope, nothing to fear, nothing to gain, and nothing to lose. Ultimately, Dalrymple emphasizes a poverty not of wealth, but of hope.

A psychiatrist of humble origins and the son of a militant Communist, Dalrymple served in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries and the east end of London before his retirement in 2005. An avid writer, Dalrymple spent his off duty hours scribing essays about the problems and pathologies of his patients. His work frequently appears in City Journal, The British Medical Journal, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph. He has also authored a number of books besides Life at the Bottom, including Our Culture: What's Left of It and Spoilt Rotten: the Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. In his writing, Dalrymple frequently argues that progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within rich countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Dalrymple's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill. Life at the Bottom is a specific collection twenty-two separately penned essays during his London working days, published from 1994 to 2001. Each of these diminutive masterpieces seamlessly weaves accounts of Dalrymple’s miserable patients with passionate indictments against social institutions which have worsened rather than improved the plight of the poor.

Dalrymple views the British underclass as suffering neither from poverty nor from oppression, as usually presumed, but from self-destructive habits fostered by policy makers and government bureaucrats guided by beliefs that have filtered down from ivory-towered intellectuals. To support this charge, Dalrymple provides anecdotes: heart-rending stories about the people with whom he served on a daily basis. Dalrymple acknowledges that these stories would prove little if taken singly, one by one, but he rightly believes that they acquire evidentiary force as well as emotional power when, told together, they begin to display a pattern. His aim is to assemble enough anecdotes to make the pattern manifest.

Dalrymple’s account of the British poor begins with anecdotes about violent criminals: murderers, rapists, thieves, burglars, drug addicts, and the abusers of women. Most notably, these criminals apparently manifest Comte’s theories and blame any resulting consequences on social construction, mental affliction and environmental circumstance. One man excused his chronic thievery on the grounds of “addiction.” Other men denied being the agents of their actions: “The knife went in” was stated by more than one murderer serviced by the doctor. As Dalrymple observes, sophisticated and convoluted rationalizations like these are not likely to have been thought of without the help of intellectuals, who have encouraged belief that, since the causes of conduct always lie outside the criminal, it is not he but “society” that should be made to answer.

What society is guilty of, sociologists often contend, is allowing the abusive rich drive people to crime by causing their poverty. The proper – and only – response is to eliminate poverty by redistributing wealth. Conversely, Dalrymple contends redistribution hardly mitigates crime. The virtual elimination of poverty in Britain and elsewhere has actually multiplied rather than reduced the rate of crime. Given any sensible definition of poverty, Dalrymple states, “the underclass in Britain is no longer poor” (54). As the government continues to provide housing, food, schooling, medical care, and monthly checks to nearly a third of the British population, citizens lacks neither basic comforts nor material necessities. By global standards, in fact, Dalrymple suggests the “poor” of Great Britain are rich. Yet, contrary to what would be predicted on the theory that crime is caused by poverty, Dalrymple points out that the crime rate in Britain is now several times higher than it was in generations past, when poverty was both real and extensive.

In Dalrymple’s view, the main cause of the spectacular rise in crime with the rise in prosperity is simple reluctance of the police to do their jobs. As Dalrymple angrily demonstrates with more stories, the police in modern day Britain often show less solicitous concern for the victims of crime than for its perpetrators. Frequently repeated offense against the law is not enough to get a man jailed where the police, afraid of being derided as tools of the dominant class, believe that hardened criminals have a special claim on victimhood status that entitles them to special tolerance. Thus, a man who successively assaulted the nurses in Dalrymple’s clinic and a physician in another hospital was not arrested but twice turned loose in the street outside. Similarly, a middle-aged woman’s pleas for protection went unheeded although she had been repeatedly robbed in the street near her regularly burglarized and frequently vandalized home. As Dalrymple observes, police practices – infiltrated the same problematic ideology that has demotivated the British poor – of this sort encourage criminals by sheltering them from both shame and fear of punishment, while denying basic security to their hapless victims.

Theme by theme, Dalrymple reminds the reader that the demoralized behavior displayed by such pitiable people is not the result of poverty. That they live in squalor he acknowledges, even emphasizes. The problem of the underclass, yet, is that their self-defeating habits are facilitated by public policies predicated upon false ideas created by distant intellectuals. He is right, of course; many domestic policies are the greatest incentives to broken families and impoverished living. He is wrong, though, in ignoring the many other socio-economic hindrances faced by many of the lowest socio-economic class. Be they goods provided, jobs offered, or neighborhood conditions, citizens of impoverished conditions undoubtedly struggle to stabilize in a manner worth of their middle-class peers. Dalrymple narrowly avoids the typical snob-nosed condemnation that both accumulates all underprivileged persons into a lethargic, ambivalent caricature and yet provides no alternative, remedying response. Indeed, many critics of the impoverished West launch their critiques from long-distance, entirely unwilling to engage the poor they pretend to understand. Dalrymple cannot be subject to this criticism, as he has devoted much of his life to serving those Christ described as “the least of these.” In fact, Dalrymple’s desire is to see “a proper adjudication” of the cotemporary poverty situation. Understood rightly, his work should inform effective response to the reality of Western poverty; it should not, as it undoubtedly will, provide ammunition to short-sighted politicians enamored with invisible hands and wealth accumulation.

It is commonly argued that philosophy is an idle pursuit which makes little difference to anyone’s workaday life. This apparition can survive only in the minds of people who take too shortsighted a view of human affairs. No one knowledgeable of the historical twentieth century can fail to be impressed by how thoroughly philosophies have permeated institutions and imbued the world views of its populations. Dalrymple’s work, though a bit cynical and shortsighted at times, states with emphasis the vast consequence of modern social philosophy on the poor: in effect, he ironically caricatures an ideological oppression of the underprivileged.