Self-Help and Selfishness, Part 4: A Postscript On Compassion
In the interest of clarity, I want to add a brief note summarizing what I'm saying in this series.
I believe there are two basic ways to think about compassion. The first is to see it as a way of acting. If you take certain actions in the world, in other words, that makes you a compassionate person.
People, of course, have vastly different ideas about which behaviors are compassionate and which aren't. Some think of compassion in terms of individual acts, such as giving to a person begging on the street. To others, compassion has more to do with a certain distribution of resources in society -- if we work toward a nation where people have roughly equal incomes, perhaps, we are compassionate people.
The second way of thinking about compassion is to see it as an emotion, or a sensation we experience in the body. For me, when I am feeling compassion, I experience a warm, open sensation in my heart area. Some might describe this in more mystical terms as a sense of "union with all that is."
Most People See It As A Behavior
It seems clear that, in Western culture at least, people usually take the first perspective -- that you are compassionate so long as you behave a certain way. It doesn't matter how you feel while you are doing the act. If you give to a charity, but only so that your name appears on the charity's website, you are being compassionate nonetheless.
I think this perspective is one reason why, in the West, we don't tend to see practices for cultivating a felt sense of compassion as particularly important. Why bother doing practices like Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, we might think, when we can go into the world and actually help people?
I think the trouble with this perspective is that it renders the concept of compassion vulnerable to abuse. It enables people who don't actually experience the felt sense of compassion to use the ideal of compassion as a weapon against others, for personal gain.
The Consequences
Look at typical political debates, for example. Each side accuses the other, in venomous and belittling terms, of lacking compassion, honesty, morality and so on. Ask yourself: would they make such accusations against each other if they actually experienced compassion as a feeling -- that sense of warmth and openness in the heart I described?
On a larger scale, many political and religious ideologies have claimed to be rooted in compassion. Christianity is said to be based on the compassionate teachings of Jesus. Marx claimed that communism was a compassionate political philosophy. And yet, of course, people have committed atrocities in the name of both worldviews.
Would these abuses have occurred if the people responsible had genuinely experienced the feeling of compassion, rather than simply believing in the abstract ideal? (I don't mean to pick on Christianity or communism per se -- I think any doctrine or philosophy, in the hands of someone who isn't actually feeling compassion, can be used to justify destructive behavior.)
In other words, when we're in touch with the felt sense of compassion -- not just the philosophical abstraction -- we become far less inclined to hurt others. This is why I think practices that help us actually experience the sensation of compassion are so important.
There are many practices aimed at this, and different approaches work better for different people. In my own case, I know that heart-opening exercises in yoga are particularly helpful. But the point is that these practices, far from being forms of "woo-woo navel gazing," are actually key to creating the kind of world many of us desire.
Other Posts In This Series:
Self-Help and Selfishness, Part 3: Compassion And Justice
We've been talking about the claim, commonly made by critics of personal growth, that self-development techniques are "selfish" because they only benefit the person using them. As I noted earlier, there's a good deal of evidence that effective personal growth practices actually help us develop more compassion and generosity toward others. So, it seems to me, personal development can actually serve as a source of positive social change.
Why don't the critics see it this way? Why do they often treat personal development as, in fact, an obstacle to "social justice"? My sense is that they, like much of Western political philosophy, think of justice as a set of abstract rules to follow. Our society, in this view, will be good and just once it starts complying with the right set of rules.
For people who are usually called conservatives, these rules are mostly concerned with preventing forms of violence like killing and theft. A just society, from this perspective, is one where that conduct is minimized. For those who tend to be called liberals, the rules are more about how resources are distributed -- to them, a just society is one where the right distribution of money, medical care, and so on exists.
Justice: Just A Philosophical Abstraction?
For all their differences, these models of justice have at least one thing in common, which is that they treat the way people feel about each other as irrelevant. Even if citizens of a given society don't care one whit about each other, that society is nonetheless just if it follows the correct rules -- whether through preventing violence, equitably parceling out resources, or something else.
Given these typical ways of thinking, it's no surprise that critics of personal growth see self-development practices as basically irrelevant to achieving justice. Meditating, for example, may well make people more compassionate, but that emotion alone does nothing to further the cause of a just society. If anything, practices like meditation waste time that could be better spent fighting real-world injustice. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it in Bright-Sided, "why spend so much time working on one’s self when there’s so much real work to be done?"
At best, if meditation causes people to be kinder, people may do more charitable giving, and thus advance the goal of equitably dividing resources. But that's hardly the most efficient path to a fair distribution of wealth. Why not simply have the government take some people's property and give it to others? Meditation, from this perspective, is an inadequate and unnecessary solution to the problem of inequality.
Abstract Justice In A Non-Abstract World
In the real world, we can see this mentality in communist countries' approach to achieving justice. To Marxist thinkers, practices for finding inner peace do nothing but distract people from the quest for equality. Thus, Marxist regimes banned religious and spiritual institutions and practices, from the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union to the Falun Gong movement in China.
These countries' history, I think, illustrates the danger of seeing justice as nothing more than a set of rules for preventing coercion or distributing wealth. These regimes treated abstract concepts of justice as more important than the lives of actual people, and killed and imprisoned millions they saw as standing in the way of their ideal society. I think this history shows that, when compassion our inner experience is taken as irrelevant to justice, justice itself becomes a monstrosity.
Compassion Is Critical To Justice
It's important to realize, I think, that compassion is not only relevant to justice -- it's actually the foundation of justice. Our rules of right and wrong stem from our instinctual concern and respect for each other. The reason people want a society without killing and stealing, or with a certain distribution of wealth, is because they see such a society as the best vehicle for relieving human suffering.
Of course, as human beings, we are not always in touch with our sense of compassion. We're also aggressive, competitive, and survival-oriented creatures. When those drives completely take over, we're unconcerned with others' suffering, and we think only of our own survival and power.
When we're under the sway of these instincts, no abstract principles will keep us from harming others. Reminding a mugger of the Golden Rule, for example, probably won't stop him from taking your money. What's more, as in the communist regimes I described, concepts of justice themselves can be used as a weapon, justifying mass murder in the name of "equality" and "fairness."
How Personal Growth Can Help
This is why, I think, merely following the right set of abstract principles isn't enough to create a just society. As legal scholar Robin West puts it in Caring For Justice, it's important to recognize the "injustice -- not the justice -- of divorcing the pursuit of justice from natural inclination, from the sentient, felt bonds of friendship, and from the moral dictates incident to the pull of fellow feeling."
Instead, we must experience -- firsthand, viscerally, in the body -- the emotions and instincts at the root of those principles. We must actually feel compassion for one another -- not simply make and follow a logically consistent set of rules.
At their best, I think, personal growth practices help us genuinely experience concern for each other. Techniques like meditation and yoga work to accomplish this goal at a level deeper than the rational mind, which is why intellectuals are often wary of them. But I think they're worth taking seriously if we truly want a more peaceful world.
Other Posts In This Series:
Is Self-Help Selfish?
Critics often put down personal growth practices on the ground that they're selfish, or at least self-absorbed. The time people spend meditating, saying affirmations, taking workshops, and so on, according to the critics, could be better spent helping others.
"The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all," writes Barbara Ehrenreich in Bright-Sided. "Why spend so much time working on one’s self when there’s so much real work to be done?" Similarly, in The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need, Paul Pearsall writes, in questioning the value of much self-help literature, that "most of the problems we think we have stem from too much self-focus rather than too little." The phrase "selfish help" has also become popular on blogs that are critical of personal development.
This criticism may have some appeal on the surface. After all, when I meditate, I'm the only one who gains calm and clarity. My meditation practice doesn't cause food to appear on the tables of impoverished people. Similarly, if I see a therapist, that can only help resolve my mental health concerns -- it does nothing for catatonic people in psychiatric hospitals.
But if we look a little deeper, I think it becomes clear that this critique has some flaws, and I'm going to discuss them in this post.
Does Self-Help Mean No "Other-Help"?
I think the most obvious problem with this argument is that it assumes that a person can't do both personal growth work and charitable work, or at least that people involved in personal development are less interested in helping others.
Clearly, the first of these is not true. It's surely possible for me to lead a life that includes both, say, meditation and volunteering at a homeless shelter.
I suppose one could argue that the time I spend doing personal growth activities detracts from the time I could spend being generous to others. But if we take that argument seriously, most of what we do in life -- apart from, I guess, eating and sleeping -- becomes "selfish" and unacceptable.
After all, every minute we spend hanging out with friends, watching a movie, hiking, and so on is one less minute we could spend serving others' needs (whatever that may mean to you). This argument holds people to an impossible moral standard that I doubt even the most generous critic of personal development could meet.
Nor have I seen any evidence that people who do self-development work are less inclined to help others. I've yet to see a study suggesting that, say, people who have read The Secret are less likely to give to charity.
Emotions Influence Actions
More importantly, I think the claim that "self-help is selfish" misses the deeper point that our emotional state affects how we act. If my personal growth practices put me in a happier or more peaceful state, that's likely to change -- for the better -- the way I relate to others.
It may be that, while I'm in the process of meditating, I'm the only one gaining peace and clarity. But when I'm done meditating, I take that peace and clarity out into the world. Doesn't it stand to reason that, if I'm feeling more peaceful, I'll behave more peacefully toward other people?
This idea is more than just common sense -- there's substantial research supporting it. You may remember that, in an earlier post, I pointed to several psychological studies suggesting that happiness actually causes people to be more giving toward others. I've also discussed the evidence showing that people who believe they're responsible for their life circumstances -- a belief often promoted in personal development -- behave more generously.
However, there is also research bearing more directly on the relationship between self-development practices and qualities like kindness and compassion. One study, "Mindfulness-Based Relationship Enhancement," found that couples who meditated reported more satisfaction with their relationships. Another found that Buddhist metta meditation "increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward novel individuals" in study participants.
On a subtler level, the way we feel affects those around us, even when we aren't doing or saying anything. Daniel Goleman's Social Intelligence, for instance, describes how our bodies instinctively detect and mimic the emotions of people we're with. Goleman, for example, points to studies of couples showing that one partner's anger or sadness induced the same emotions in the other person.
In other words, because humans are empathic creatures, it makes sense that the emotional benefits we get from personal growth would "rub off" on others. This is why, I think, one of my mentors says that "the greatest gift you can give to others is to work on yourself."
So, I think it's important to look not only at how a personal growth practice benefits its immediate "user," but also how it affects their actions toward others and the way they show up in the world.
The Promise of "Stealth Transformation"
I can imagine a critic of personal growth responding that I'm painting an unrealistic picture of self-help methods and the reasons people use them. People don't get involved in personal growth to cultivate compassion for others, they might say. They do it because they want more money, better relationships, improved health, and so on.
I think this actually points to one of the great social benefits of personal development -- what's sometimes called "stealth transformation." Yes, some people may meditate because they want to be calmer in business meetings; some may do yoga because they want a more attractive body; and so forth. However, no matter what their intentions are, the peace and happiness they gain from their practices can positively affect their behavior toward others.
In other words, even if people go into self-development practices for purely "self-interested" reasons, they may find their relationship with the world changing in ways they didn't expect or intend. I know this happened in my own meditation and yoga practices. I didn't begin them with serving others in mind, but the composure I got from those practices has helped people feel more relaxed and open around me.
Other Posts In This Series:
E-Book: Why Growth Is Good
Most Popular Posts
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Thoughts on the Mankind Project Lawsuit
Personal Development Politics, Part 2: The Elections and Self-Responsibility
Regulating Self-Help, Part 2: What Is a Benefit?
Rainbow Right-Wingers, and Other Myths About Personal Development Politics
Authenticity Answers, Part 1: How Deep Is Your Want?
