The Brutalization of Compassion

Lockdown sceptics have wrestled since the beginning with the ‘conspiracy question’

• How far was all of this coordinated and arranged?
• Future historians will likely ascribe the madness of the Covid era to something much more prosaic and accidental: the power statistics have to motivate action.
• Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, elucidated this facet of our nature: once we have made our fellow men objects of enlightened interest, something within us causes us to then 'go on and make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.'
• It is this chain of causation - from knowledge to compassion, from compassion to the application of expertise, and from expertise to the imposition of control - that is most important in understanding lockdown and associated measures.

Dig into the deeper forces which motivate social action and imbue it with meaning

• The connection between statistical measurement and the impulse to act, motivated chiefly by compassion (often misplaced, but genuine), seems to be the most sensible area in which to search
• We need to get to the bottom of how this mess was made
• Statistical measures alone cannot explain the root cause
  1. What is left, of course, is coercion, and we do not need to look far to identify it in the many means by which the modern state subjects the population to a kind of Tocquevillian ‘soft despotism,’ constantly manipulating, cajoling and maneuvering it this way and that for its own good, whether through compulsory state education or ‘sin taxes’ or anything in between.
  2. ‘When once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest,’ he put it, something within us causes us to then ‘go on and make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’ It is this chain of causation – from knowledge to compassion, from compassion to the application of expertise, and from expertise to the imposition of control – that is most important in understanding lockdown and associated measures.
  3. What happened as a consequence was almost inevitable: the arousal of compassion, or ‘pity,’ for those who were dying; the application of ‘wisdom’ to prevent suffering, in the form of the vast array of ‘expertise’ (I use the word advisedly) deployed to help us ‘socially distance,’ and later to jab, jab and jab again; and, of course, ultimately coercion, in the lockdowns, the vaccine mandates, the travel restrictions, and so on.
  4. To put words in his mouth somewhat, the reason why the growing state bureaucracy sees a statistical measurement such as, say, the suicide rate in the population and seeks to ‘improve’ it (by reducing it, in this case), was because a population with a high suicide rate is one which is weaker than it would otherwise be vis-à-vis its competitor states.
  5. The conceptualisation of the population as a field of action, and the measurement of statistical phenomenon within it – the taking of an ‘enlightened interest’ in it – gives rise to both ‘pity,’ or compassion, and the application of ‘wisdom’ to resolve its problems.
  6. This was, of course, contingent upon the idea that there was such a thing as the ‘population’ of a territory, and that there were features of that population – its poverty rate, its suicide rate, its health, its literacy, and so on – that could be improved.
  7. The development of statistics was bound up, therefore, in the conception of population as something which did not just exist as a kind of ‘natural phenomenon’ – the bunch of people happening to live in a territory – but could be opened up and exposed to the knowledge of the ruler, and then acted upon so as to make it better.
  8. Himmelfarb, however, is able to marshal her vast range of philosophical, political, literary and historical sources to demonstrate that the desire to ‘improve’ the poverty rate (by making it decline) did not derive to any great extent from a need to make the nation stronger versus its rivals.
  9. In her two masterpieces, The Idea of Poverty and Poverty and Compassion, Himmelfarb sheds more light on the connection between knowledge and action, and in particular the role which compassion played in the process.
  10. One can think of this as a positive feedback mechanism in which statistical measures give rise to bureaucracies whose job is to make improvements in the underlying phenomena being measured – which causes them to generate more statistics, and thus identify further need for improvement, and so on.
  11. There were of course many such causes, but one of the most important was the discovery that there was such a thing as a territory’s ‘population’ – and, crucially, that the population could itself be a field of action. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-brutalization-of-compassion/