Tweet
Re: Science: Everything explained by PV=nRT, F=ma=Gm(1)•m(2)/r^2
LynahFan already fully anticipated my science rebuttal, so I'll handle the arts rebuttal.
There are two discrete concepts conflated in your statements. This means you are wrong in two interestingly different ways.
Compassion is the realization that every one of us is part of society and contributes to it. That is the ground of the genuine universal love that crops up again and again in human culture and which most of us in the West are most familiar with as Christian Universal Love, "agape." So, from the point of view of compassion, your statement is meaningless. No one does not deserve compassion, by definition. Compassion is a responsibility that is placed on us by our humanity -- we do not excel by demonstrating it, we can only fail to be strong enough to show it.
But I believe what you are describing is mercy. Mercy implies the object does not "deserve it." When we help the person who is by even our own estimation utterly unredeemable, that is mercy. You are arguing that mercy is anti-Darwinian and this frfom a species point of view a mistake.
I don't have a glib answer (JUST THIS ONCE) for why you are wrong. I have a really, really long one. I'm on about her a lot, I know, but my secret girlfriend Martha Nussbaum writes about this in her work, in particular The Fragility of Goodness and Anger, Mercy, Revenge: The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Somewhere in those thousands of pages, and other works by other authors, and personal contemplation, I found my answer to why you are wrong, and why mercy -- far from being stupid -- is indeed the smartest idea people have ever had.
Another, much more accessible, place to go is the Oresteia cycle by Aeschylus from the 5th century BCE, in particular the final play "The Eumenides," which is the Greek origin story of justice and the introduction into human institutions of a method of "impersonal" mercy. That's where I would go if I were you and interested in learning a perspective that contradicts yours. Note also that this work anticipates the strongest arguments against mercy, and does so in a fair and intellectually stimulating, not to mention poetically sublime, manner, so it's good to know even if you wish to persist in being wrongheaded.
Post scriptum: And by the way, everybody, this is why I'm such an "elitist." Contrary to the defensiveness it provokes, it's got nothing to do with rank ordering people or unhumble bragging. (That is an ancillary service provided free of charge strictly for my personal amusement.) It's the recognition that the parts of human life that I have found, by experimentation, as the deepest, most profound, most moving, most satisfying, and ultimately most "important," whatever that means, have come to me in large part because of elite education. But it's even more important to realize that this education is available to every person every day through autodidactism. I had only a moderate understanding of Greek tragedy in my actual college days. Everything I've read and learned on compassion and mercy has been subsequently as an adult on my own time and for the pure joy of it (or, more exactly, my utter boredom during 2000 hours of work per year), which means any person could do the same thing.
Originally posted by FredsDeadFriend
View Post
There are two discrete concepts conflated in your statements. This means you are wrong in two interestingly different ways.
Compassion is the realization that every one of us is part of society and contributes to it. That is the ground of the genuine universal love that crops up again and again in human culture and which most of us in the West are most familiar with as Christian Universal Love, "agape." So, from the point of view of compassion, your statement is meaningless. No one does not deserve compassion, by definition. Compassion is a responsibility that is placed on us by our humanity -- we do not excel by demonstrating it, we can only fail to be strong enough to show it.
But I believe what you are describing is mercy. Mercy implies the object does not "deserve it." When we help the person who is by even our own estimation utterly unredeemable, that is mercy. You are arguing that mercy is anti-Darwinian and this frfom a species point of view a mistake.
I don't have a glib answer (JUST THIS ONCE) for why you are wrong. I have a really, really long one. I'm on about her a lot, I know, but my secret girlfriend Martha Nussbaum writes about this in her work, in particular The Fragility of Goodness and Anger, Mercy, Revenge: The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Somewhere in those thousands of pages, and other works by other authors, and personal contemplation, I found my answer to why you are wrong, and why mercy -- far from being stupid -- is indeed the smartest idea people have ever had.
Another, much more accessible, place to go is the Oresteia cycle by Aeschylus from the 5th century BCE, in particular the final play "The Eumenides," which is the Greek origin story of justice and the introduction into human institutions of a method of "impersonal" mercy. That's where I would go if I were you and interested in learning a perspective that contradicts yours. Note also that this work anticipates the strongest arguments against mercy, and does so in a fair and intellectually stimulating, not to mention poetically sublime, manner, so it's good to know even if you wish to persist in being wrongheaded.
Post scriptum: And by the way, everybody, this is why I'm such an "elitist." Contrary to the defensiveness it provokes, it's got nothing to do with rank ordering people or unhumble bragging. (That is an ancillary service provided free of charge strictly for my personal amusement.) It's the recognition that the parts of human life that I have found, by experimentation, as the deepest, most profound, most moving, most satisfying, and ultimately most "important," whatever that means, have come to me in large part because of elite education. But it's even more important to realize that this education is available to every person every day through autodidactism. I had only a moderate understanding of Greek tragedy in my actual college days. Everything I've read and learned on compassion and mercy has been subsequently as an adult on my own time and for the pure joy of it (or, more exactly, my utter boredom during 2000 hours of work per year), which means any person could do the same thing.
Comment