The Wages of Conspicuous Compassion When we finance enemies who are sworn to our destruction. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wages-of-conspicuous-compassion/
One of the most feckless acts of “compassion” for the victims of a conflict has been the West’s decades-long provision of food, medicines, and other aid to Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip. These in-kind and cash donations come with an enormous moral hazard.
By now everyone knows that indeed the bulk of such aid is stolen by Hamas terrorists, who sell the goods and use the money to line the pockets of Hamas officials, pay their fighters, reward their “martyrs” killed while slaughtering mostly civilian Israelis, and buy weapons and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilian targets. These funds are on top of the billions provided by the UN–– nearly $4.5 billion just from 2014 to 2020––and billions more from EU and Muslim nations.
Given that moral hazard, Israel is planning to let the U.S. Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the IDF distribute the aid, removing Hamas and the UN from participating. In a display of their hatred of Israel, the Wall Street Journal reports, “Canada, the U.K. and France threatened Israel on Monday with ‘concrete actions’ unless it halts military operations and facilitates more aid, which ‘must include engaging with the UN’”––which recently spread the blood libel that Israel is preparing to starve to death 14000 babies in Gaza. Hamas sent Turtle Bay and the three “liberal democracies” a note of thanks.
This spectacle of Western nations libeling and browbeating Israelis into financing an enemy sworn to their destruction, and who ruthlessly targets civilians, including children, is another shameful marker of the decline of the West, especially the Europeans who morally preen about their “conspicuous compassion,” as Alan Bloom called such self-serving actions.
But in fact, such displays are morally idiotic camouflage for Europe’s failure of nerve and despicable political hatred of the region’s only free democracy. The “international community” has treated Israel like a pariah for 77 years––especially the UN, which has formally condemned Israel more than all the world’s nations combined.
This posturing, then, and the policies it engenders isn’t a question of rational calculations of national self-interests, but emotion. As Itu Díaz writes in The American Spectator, “Pro-Palestinian propaganda has always relied on emotional reasoning. They haven’t hesitated to use fake photos of children and burning hospitals to try to evoke empathy from the West. The repetition of messages like ‘genocide!’ over and over is a public opinion molding technique that wasn’t invented by Hamas but was extensively used by the Nazis and Soviet communists. It’s sentimental propaganda that’s highly permeable, and its reach is impossible to measure.” For Europeans relentlessly undergoing Islamification, such virtual antisemitism has become a talisman for warding off jihadist violence.
This transparent moral failure is in the main a cultural freak of Western Civilization, one of the malign effects of our civilizational revolt against the Enlightenment. It’s also a product of unrestrained critical consciousness that, as the old gag goes, makes one’s mind so open that one’s brains fall out.
This valorizing of uncritical sentimentalism and theatrical feelings began in the 18th century with the cult of “feeling” and “sensitivity.” Particularly in regard to compassion and the pathos of suffering, it was popularized in novels like Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), whose hero bursts into tears every ten pages.
These novels marked the point when showy displays of “feelings” like compassion, often called “luxurious” at the time, became a virtue-signaling status symbol and high-toned entertainment. As many critics at the time pointed out, such “compassion” was the justifying virtue that masked what often was nothing more than emotional solipsism and hedonism for those whose concern for others seldom led to action that improved their lot.
By the mid-19th century even a master of sentimentalism like Charles Dickens could recognize that such public displays of compassion for the poor or native peoples abroad were a self-indulgence. In Bleak House, he created Mrs. Jellyby, the archetype of today’s purveyors of virtue-signaling compassion, whose hearts bleed for distant suffering but neglect the victims in their own backyard. Mrs. Jellyby strives to settle impoverished Londoners among heathen Africans they will convert to Christianity, all the while her shabby household and neglected children continue to fall into ruin.
Dickens called this “telescopic philanthropy,” in our times the spurious, politicized “compassion” for people whose “suffering” provides political leverage, but whose company their benefactors have no intentions of sharing. Minorities who are anointed as victims of racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes, and other “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton smeared Donald Trump’s supporters in 2016, are bribed with entitlements and the redistribution of money.
The “man of feeling” cultural trope continued to be mocked and satirized in the 19th century. Especially easy targets for satire were those who made criminals an object of “conspicuous compassion” for their travails and misery, a spill-over from Romanticism’s soft spot for lawbreakers and rebels.
In Tom Sawyer, for example, Mark Twain satirized the “committee of sappy women” who are petitioning the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe: “If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanent leaky water-works.”
Of course, this moral idiocy has long been proliferating into our politics and culture both high and low, encouraged by scientism like behaviorism, radical moral relativism (“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”), and therapeutic psychology, as well as political factions trolling for votes and demonizing opponents. And don’t forget the rampant oikophobia, the hatred of one’s own country, fellow citizens, principles, history, and values, that has turned a significant number of citizens against not just the U.S., but also Western Civilization and its Judeo-Christian foundations, which shaped our Constitution and gave us our morals and virtues.
Just in the last few decades this fad has become more toxic, and led to policies that are dangerous. The obvious example is the support for the savage terrorists of Hamas on the part of some of the country’s most privileged university students, professors, and administrators, which has encouraged global jihadism and its illiberal tenets. And the fallout continues: two employees of the Israeli embassy were recently gunned down by an assailant who shouted “Free free Palestine,” a chant common on college campuses for the past two years.
Another example comprises those oikophobes who over the last four years turned compassion-signalers into supporters of open borders, which led to 10 million illegal aliens pouring into our country, and taxpaying citizens dragooned into providing money for their upkeep. Nor have these Mrs. Jellybys stopped their activism on behalf of unvetted alien lawbreakers, with district court judges helping out with universal injunctions against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport them.
Finally, this combination of conspicuous compassion and ostentatious oikophobia is the essence of Third-Worldism, that idealization of the non-Western “other” combined with self-flagellation over our supposed original sins of imperialism, colonialism, and all of Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of “-phobes.” French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote a brilliant analysis of this cultural neurosis in Tears of the White Man. Bruckner describes how Third-World suffering has become a lucrative commodity for the modern media, who provide the images that we consume in order to enjoy cost-free pathos and smug superiority about our righteous compassion. In this way, we compensate for our “certain essential evil,” as Bruckner calls the West’s original sin, “that must be atoned for.”
This brings us to the malign wages of “conspicuous compassion”: the further erosion of our compromised justice system, which should honor enforcing accountability for criminal acts, and bestowing on our citizens “equal protection of the law,” the essence of which is, as Aeschylus put it, “the doer suffers.” Making such justified suffering a tool of political leverage violates not only justice, but our morality upon which justice depends.
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