compassion & terror

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Compassion & terror Martha C. Nussbaum Daedalus Winter 2003

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Page 1: Compassion & Terror

Compassion & terror

Martha C. Nussbaum

Daedalus Winter 2003

Page 2: Compassion & Terror

The name of our land has been wiped out.

–Euripides, Trojan Women

Not to be a fan of the Greens or Blues atthe races, or the light-armed or heavy-armed gladiators at the Circus.

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

1The towers of Troy are burning. All thatis left of the once-proud city is a group ofragged women, bound for slavery, their

husbands dead in battle, their sons mur-dered by the conquering Greeks, theirdaughters raped. Hecuba their queen in-vokes the king of the gods, using, re-markably, the language of democraticcitizenship: “Son of Kronus, Council-President [prytanis] of Troy, father whogave us birth, do you see these unde-served sufferings that your Trojan peoplebear?” The Chorus answers grimly, “Hesees, and yet the great city is no city. Ithas perished, and Troy exists no longer.”Hecuba and the Chorus conclude thatthe gods are not worth calling on, andthat the very name of their land has beenwiped out.

This ending is as bleak as any in thehistory of tragic drama–death, rape,slavery, ½re destroying the towers, thecity’s very name effaced from the recordof history by the acts of rapacious andmurderous Greeks. And yet, of course, itdid not happen that way, not exactly:this story of Troy’s fall is being enacted,some six hundred years after the event,by a company of Greek actors, in theGreek language of a Greek poet, in thepresence of the citizens of Athens, mostpowerful of Greek cities. Hecuba’s cry tothe gods even casts Zeus as a peculiarlyAthenian of½cial–president of the citycouncil.

So the name of Troy wasn’t wiped outafter all. The imagination of its con-

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Compassion & terror

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distin-guished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at theUniversity of Chicago, is appointed in the philoso-phy department, Law School, and DivinitySchool. A Fellow of the American Academy since1988, Nussbaum is the author of numerous books,including “The Fragility of Goodness: Luck andEthics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy” (1986),“The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice inHellenistic Ethics” (1994), and “Upheavals ofThought: The Intelligence of Emotions”(2001).This essay was originally delivered as the ½rstKristeller Memorial Lecture at Columbia Uni-versity in April of 2002. Nussbaum writes,“Although I am sure Paul Kristeller would havetaken issue with some aspects of its approach toclassical texts, it is offered as a sincere tribute to hislife of committed scholarship, which did so muchto keep these texts alive in and for our time.”

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querors was haunted by it, transmittedit, and mourned it. Obsessively theGreek poets returned to this scene of de-struction, typically inviting, as here, theaudience’s compassion for the women ofTroy and blame for their assailants. In itsvery structure the play makes a claim forthe moral value of compassionate imag-ining, as it asks its audience to partake inthe terror of a burning city, of murderand rape and slavery. Insofar as mem-bers of the audience are engaged by thisdrama, feeling fear and grief for the con-quered city, they demonstrate the abilityof compassion to cross lines of time,place, and nation–and also, in the caseof many audience members, the line ofsex, perhaps more dif½cult yet to cross.

Nor was the play a purely aestheticevent divorced from political reality. Thedramatic festivals of Athens were sacredcelebrations strongly connected to theidea of democratic deliberation, and theplays of Euripides were particularly well-known for their engagement with con-temporary events. The Trojan Women’s½rst audience had recently voted to putto death the men of the rebellious col-ony of Melos and to enslave its womenand children. Euripides invited this audi-ence to contemplate the real humanmeaning of its actions. Compassion forthe women of Troy should at least causemoral unease, reminding Athenians ofthe full and equal humanity of peoplewho live in distant places, their fully hu-man capacity for suffering.

But did those imaginations really crossthose lines? Think again of that invoca-tion of Zeus. Trojans, if they worshippedZeus as king of gods at all, surely did notrefer to him as the president of the citycouncil; prytanis is strictly an Athenianlegal term. So it would appear that Hecu-ba is not a Trojan but a Greek. And herimagination is a Greek democratic (and,we might add, mostly male) imagina-

tion. Maybe that’s a good thing, in thesense that the audience is surely invitedto view her as their fellow and equal. Butit still should give us pause.

Did compassion really enable thoseGreeks to comprehend the real humani-ty of others, or did it stop short, allowingthem to reaf½rm the essential Greeknessof everything that’s human? Of coursecompassion required making the Tro-jans somehow familiar, so that Greekscould see their own vulnerability inthem, and feel terror and pity, as fortheir own relations. But it’s easy for thefamiliarization to go too far: they arejust us, and we are the ones who sufferhumanly. Not those other ones, overthere in Melos.

America’s towers, too, have burned.Compassion and terror now inform thefabric of our lives. And in those lives wesee evidence of the good work of com-passion, as Americans make real tothemselves the sufferings of so manypeople whom they never would other-wise have thought about: New York ½re-½ghters, that gay rugby player whohelped bring down the fourth plane, be-reaved families of so many national andethnic origins. More rarely our compas-sion even crosses national boundaries:the tragedy led an unprecedented num-ber of Americans to sympathize withthe plight of Afghan women under theTaliban.

Yet at the same time, we also see evi-dence of how narrow and self-servingour sense of compassion can sometimesbe. Some of us may notice with new ap-preciation the lives of Arab Americansamong us–but others regard the Mus-lims in our midst with increasing wari-ness and mistrust. I am reminded of aSikh taxi driver describing how often hewas told to go home to ‘his own coun-try’–even though he came to the United

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States as a political refugee from themiseries of police repression in the Pun-jab. And while our leaders have preachedthe virtues of tolerance, they have alsoresorted to the polarizing language of‘us’ versus ‘them,’ as they marshal popu-lar opinion to pursue a war on terrorism.

Indeed, the events of September 11make vivid a philosophical problem thathas been debated from the time of Eu-ripides through much of the history ofthe Western philosophical tradition.This is the question of what to do aboutcompassion, given its obvious impor-tance in shaping the civic imagination,but given, too, its obvious propensity forself-serving narrowness. Is compassion,with all its limits, our best hope as we tryto educate citizens to think well abouthuman relations both inside the nationand across national boundaries? Sosome thinkers have suggested. I countEuripides among them, and would alsoinclude in this category Aristotle,Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith. Or iscompassion a threat to good politicalthinking and the foundations of a trulyjust world community? So the Greekand Roman Stoics thought, and beforethem Plato, and after them Spinoza and(again) Adam Smith.

The enemies of compassion hold thatwe cannot build a stable and lasting con-cern for humanity on the basis of such aslippery and uneven motive; impartialmotives based on ideas of dignity and re-spect should take its place. The friendsof compassion reply that without build-ing political morality on what we knowand on what has deep roots in our child-hood attachments, we will be left with amorality that is empty of urgency–a‘watery’ concern, as Aristotle put it.

This debate continues in contempo-rary political and legal thought. In a re-cent exchange about animal rights, J. M.Coetzee invented a character who argues

that the capacity for sympathetic imagi-nation is our best hope for moral good-ness in this area. Peter Singer replies,with much plausibility, that the sympa-thetic imagination is all too anthropo-centric and we had better not rely on itto win rights for creatures whose livesare very different from our own.1

I shall not trace the history of the de-bate in this essay. Instead, I shall focuson its central philosophical ideas and tryto sort them out, offering a limited de-fense of compassion and the tragic imag-ination, and then making some sugges-tions about how its pernicious tenden-cies can best be countered–with partic-ular reference throughout to our currentpolitical situation.

2Let me set the stage for the analysis tofollow by turning to Smith, who, as youwill have noticed, turns up in my taxon-omy on both sides of the debate. Smithoffers one of the best accounts we haveof compassion, and of the ethicalachievements of which this moral senti-ment is capable. But later, in a section ofThe Theory of Moral Sentiments entitled“Of the Sense of Duty,” he solemnlywarns against trusting this imperfectsentiment too far when duty is what weare trying to get clear.

Smith’s concern, like mine, is with ourdif½culty keeping our minds ½xed on thesufferings of people who live on the oth-er side of the world:

Let us suppose that the great empire ofChina, with all its myriads of inhabitants,was suddenly swallowed up by an earth-quake, and let us consider how a man ofhumanity in Europe, who had no sort of

1 J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. AmyGutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universi-ty Press, 1999).

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connexion with that part of the world,would be affected upon receiving intelli-gence of this dreadful calamity. He would,I imagine, ½rst of all, express very stronglyhis sorrow for the misfortune of that un-happy people, he would make many mel-ancholy reflections upon the precarious-ness of human life, and the vanity of allthe labours of man, which could thus beannihilated in a moment . . . . And when allthis ½ne philosophy was over, when allthese humane sentiments had been oncefairly expressed, he would pursue his busi-ness or his pleasure, take his repose or hisdiversion, with the same ease and tran-quility, as if no such accident had hap-pened. The most frivolous disaster whichcould befal himself would occasion a morereal disturbance. If he was to lose his little½nger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them,he will snore with the more profoundsecurity over the ruin of a hundred mil-lions of his brethren, and the destructionof that immense multitude seems plainlyan object less interesting to him, than thispaltry misfortune of his own.

That’s just the issue that should troubleus as we think about American reactionsto September 11. We see a lot of ‘humanesentiments’ around us, and extensionsof sympathy beyond people’s usualsphere of concern. But more often thannot, those sentiments stop short at thenational boundary.

We think the events of September 11are bad because they involved us and ournation. Not just human lives, but Ameri-can lives. The world came to a stop–in away that it rarely has for Americanswhen disaster has befallen human be-ings in other places. The genocide inRwanda didn’t even work up enoughemotion in us to prompt humanitarianintervention. The plight of innocent ci-vilians in Iraq never made it onto ournational radar screen. Floods, earth-

quakes, cyclones, the daily deaths ofthousands from preventable malnutri-tion and disease– none of these makesthe American world come to a standstill,none elicits a tremendous outpouring ofgrief and compassion. At most we getwhat Smith so trenchantly described: amomentary flicker of feeling, quicklydissipated by more pressing concernsclose to home.

Frequently, however, we get a compas-sion that is not only narrow, failing to in-clude the distant, but also polarizing, di-viding the world into an ‘us’ and a‘them.’ Compassion for our own chil-dren can so easily slip over into a desireto promote the well-being of our chil-dren at the expense of other people’schildren. Similarly, compassion for ourfellow Americans can all too easily slipover into a desire to make America comeout on top and to subordinate othernations.

One vivid example of this slip tookplace at a baseball game I went to atComiskey Park, the ½rst game played inChicago after September 11–and a gameagainst the Yankees, so there was height-ened awareness of the situation of NewYork and its people. Things began well,with a moving ceremony commemorat-ing the ½re½ghters who had lost theirlives and honoring local ½re½ghters whohad gone to New York afterwards to helpout. There was even a lot of cheeringwhen the Yankees took the ½eld, a highlyunusual transcendence of local attach-ments. But as the game went on and thebeer began flowing, one heard, increas-ingly, the chant “U-S-A. U-S-A,” a chant½rst heard in 1980 during an Olympichockey match in which the UnitedStates defeated Russia. In that context,the chant had expressed a wish forAmerica to humiliate its Cold War ene-my; as time passed, it became a generalway of expressing the desire to crush an

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opponent, whoever it might be. Whenthe umpire made a bad call against theSox, a group in the bleachers turned onhim, chanting “U-S-A.” From ‘humanesentiments’ we had turned back to thepain in our little ½nger.

With such examples before us, howcan we trust compassion and the imagi-nation of the other that it contains? Butif we don’t trust that, what else can weplausibly rely on to transform horrorinto a shared sense of ethical responsi-bility?

I shall proceed as follows. First, I shalloffer an analysis of the emotion of com-passion, focusing on the thoughts andimaginings on which it is based. Thiswill give us a clearer perspective on howand where it is likely to go wrong. Sec-ond, I shall examine the countertradi-tion’s proposal that we can base politicalmorality on respect for dignity, doingaway with appeals to compassion. Thisproposal, at ½rst attractive, contains, oncloser inspection, some deep dif½culties.Third, I will return to compassion, ask-ing how, if we feel we need it as a publicmotive, we might educate it so as toovercome, as far as we can, the problemthat Smith identi½ed.

More than a warm feeling in the gut,compassion involves a set of thoughts,often quite complex.2 We need to dissectthem, if we are to make progress in un-derstanding how it goes wrong and howit may be steered aright. There is a gooddeal of agreement about this among phi-losophers as otherwise diverse as Aristo-tle and Rousseau, and also among con-temporary psychologists and sociolo-

gists who have done empirical work onthe emotion.3

Compassion is an emotion directed atanother person’s suffering or lack ofwell-being. It requires the thought thatthe other person is in a bad way, and apretty seriously bad way. (Thus we don’tfeel compassion for people’s loss of triv-ial items like toothbrushes and paperclips.) It contains within itself an ap-praisal of the seriousness of various pre-dicaments. Let us call this the judgment ofseriousness.

Notice that this assessment is madefrom the point of view of the personwho has the emotion. It does not neglectthe actual suffering of the other, whichcertainly should be estimated in takingthe measure of the person’s predica-ment. And yet it does not necessarilytake at face value the estimate of the pre-dicament this person will be able toform. As Smith emphasized, we fre-quently have great compassion for peo-ple whose predicament is that they havelost their powers of thought; even if theyseem like happy children, we regard thisas a terrible catastrophe. On the otherside, when people moan and groan aboutsomething, we don’t necessarily havecompassion for them: for we may thinkthat they are not really in a bad predica-ment. Thus when very rich people grum-ble about taxes, many of us don’t havethe slightest compassion for them: for

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2 I am drawing on an analysis of compassionfor which I argue at greater length in Nuss-baum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence ofEmotions (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), chaps. 6–8.

3 C. Daniel Batson of the University of Kansasshould be mentioned with honor here, becausehe has not only done remarkable empiricalwork, but has also combined it with a concep-tual and analytic clarity that is rare in social sci-ence research of this type. See in particular TheAltruism Question (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erl-baum, 1991). Candace Clark’s sociological studyis also exemplary: Misery and Company: Sympa-thy in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1997).

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we judge that it is only right and properthat they should pay what they are pay-ing–and probably a lot more than that.So the judgment of seriousness alreadyinvolves quite a complex feat of imagi-nation: it involves both trying to lookout at the situation from the sufferingperson’s own viewpoint and then assess-ing the person’s own assessment. Com-plex though the feat is, young childreneasily learn it, feeling sympathy with thesuffering of animals and other children,but soon learning, as well, to withholdsympathy if they judge that the person isjust a crybaby, or spoiled–and, ofcourse, to have sympathy for the pre-dicament of an animal who is dead orunconscious, even if it is not actuallysuffering.

Next comes the judgment of nondesert.Hecuba asked Zeus to witness the unde-served sufferings of the Trojan women,using the Greek word anaxia, which ap-pears in Aristotle’s de½nition of tragiccompassion. Hecuba’s plea, like Aristo-tle’s de½nition, implies that we will nothave compassion if we believe the per-son fully deserves the suffering. Theremay be a measure of blame, but then inour compassion we typically register thethought that the suffering exceeds themeasure of the fault. The Trojan womenare an unusually clear case, because,more than most tragic ½gures, they en-dure the consequences of events inwhich they had no active part at all. Butwe can see that nondesert is a salientpart of our compassion even when we doalso blame the person: typically we feelcompassion at the punishment of crimi-nal offenders, to the extent that we thinkcircumstances beyond their control areat least in good measure responsible fortheir becoming the bad people they are.People who have the idea that the poorbrought their poverty upon themselves

by laziness fail, for that reason, to havecompassion for them.4

Next there is a thought much stressedin the tradition that I shall call the judg-ment of similar possibilities: Aristotle,Rousseau, and others suggest that wehave compassion only insofar as we be-lieve that the suffering person sharesvulnerabilities and possibilities with us. Ithink we can clearly see that this judg-ment is not strictly necessary for theemotion, as the other two seem to be.We have compassion for nonhuman ani-mals, without basing it on any imaginedsimilarity–although, of course, we needsomehow to make sense of their predica-ment as serious and bad. We also imag-ine that an invulnerable god can havecompassion for mortals, and it doesn’tseem that this idea is conceptually con-fused. For the ½nite imaginations of hu-man beings, however, the thought ofsimilar possibilities is a very importantpsychological mechanism throughwhich we get clear about the seriousnessof another person’s plight. This thoughtis often accompanied by empatheticimagining, in which we put ourselves inthe suffering person’s place, imaginetheir predicament as our own.

Finally, there is one thing more, notmentioned in the tradition, which I be-lieve must be added in order to make theaccount complete. This is what, in writ-ing on the emotions, I have called the eu-daimonistic judgment, namely, a judgmentthat places the suffering person or per-sons among the important parts of thelife of the person who feels the emotion.In my more general analysis of emo-tions, I argue that they are always eudai-monistic, meaning focused on theagent’s most important goals and proj-

4 Clark’s empirical survey of American atti-tudes ½nds this a prominent reason for therefusal of compassion for the poor.

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ects. Thus we feel fear about damagesthat we see as signi½cant for our ownwell-being and our other goals; we feelgrief at the loss of someone who is al-ready invested with a certain importancein our scheme of things. Eudaimonism isnot egoism. I am not claiming that emo-tions always view events and peoplemerely as means to the agent’s own sat-isfaction or happiness. But I do meanthat the things that occasion a strongemotion in us are things that correspondto what we have invested with impor-tance in our account to ourselves ofwhat is worth pursuing in life.

Compassion can evidently go wrong inseveral different ways. It can get thejudgment of nondesert wrong, sympa-thizing with people who actually don’tdeserve sympathy and withholding sym-pathy from those who do. Even morefrequently, it can get the judgment ofseriousness wrong, ascribing too muchimportance to the wrong things or toolittle to things that have great weight.Notice that this problem is closely con-nected to obtuseness about social jus-tice, in the sense, for example, that if wedon’t think a social order unjust for de-nying women the vote, or subordinatingAfrican Americans, then we won’t seethe predicament of women and AfricanAmericans as bad, and we won’t havecompassion for them. We’ll think thatthings are just as they ought to be.Again, if we think it’s unjust to requirerich people to pay capital gains tax, wewill have a misplaced compassion to-ward them. Finally, and obviously, com-passion can get the eudaimonistic judg-ment wrong, putting too few people intothe circle of concern. By my account,then, we won’t have compassion with-out a moral achievement that is at leastcoeval with it.

My account, I think, is able to explainthe unevenness of compassion betterthan other more standard accounts.Compassion begins from where we are,from the circle of our cares and con-cerns. It will be felt only toward thosethings and persons we see as important,and of course most of us most of thetime ascribe importance in a very un-even and inconstant way. Empatheticimagining can sometimes extend the cir-cle of concern. Thus Batson has shownexperimentally that when the story ofanother person’s plight is vividly told,subjects will tend to experience compas-sion toward the person and form proj-ects of helping. This is why I say that themoral achievement of extending con-cern to others needn’t antedate compas-sion, but can be coeval with it. Still,there is a recalcitrance in our emotions,given their link to our daily scheme ofgoals and ends. Smith is right: thinkingthat the poor victims of the disaster inChina are important is easy to do for ashort time, but hard to sustain in thefabric of our daily life; there are so manythings closer to home to distract us, andthese things are likely to be so muchmore thoroughly woven into our schemeof goals.

Let us return to September 11 armedwith this analysis. The astonishingevents made many Americans recognizewith a new vividness the nation itself aspart of their circle of concern. MostAmericans rely on the safety of our insti-tutions and our cities, and don’t reallynotice how much they value them untilthey prove vulnerable–in just the waythat lovers often don’t see how muchthey love until their loved one is ill orthreatened. So our antecedent concernemerged with a new clarity in the emo-tions we experienced. At the same time,we actually extended concern, in many

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cases, to people in America who had notpreviously been part of our circle of con-cern at all: the New York ½re½ghters, thevictims of the disasters. We extendedconcern to them both because we heardtheir stories and also, especially, becausewe were encouraged to see them as apart of the America we already loved andfor which we now intensely feared.When disaster struck in Rwanda, we didnot similarly extend concern, or not sta-bly, because there was no antecedent ba-sis for it: suffering Rwandans could notbe seen as part of the larger ‘us’ forwhose fate we trembled. Vivid storiescan create a temporary sense of commu-nity, but they are unlikely to sustain con-cern for long, if there is no pattern ofinteraction that would make the sense ofan ‘us’ an ongoing part of our daily lives.

Things are of course still worse withany group that ½gures in our imagina-tions as a ‘them’ against the ‘us.’ Suchgroups are not only by de½nition non-us,they are also, by threatening the safety ofthe ‘us,’ implicitly bad, deserving of anymisfortune that might strike them. Thisaccounts for the sports-fan mentality soneatly depicted in my baseball story.Compassion for a member of the oppos-ing team? You’ve got to be kidding. “U-S-A” just means kill the ump.

3In light of these dif½culties, it is easy tosee why much of the philosophical tradi-tion has wanted to do away with com-passion as a basis for public choice andto turn, instead, to detached moral prin-ciples whose evenhandedness can be re-lied on. The main candidate for a centralmoral notion has been the idea of hu-man worth and dignity, a principle thathas been put to work from the Stoics andCicero on through Kant and beyond. Weare to recognize that all humans have

dignity, and that this dignity is both in-alienable and equal, not affected by dif-ferences of class, caste, wealth, honor,status, or even sex. The recognition ofhuman dignity is supposed to imposeobligations on all moral agents, whetherthe humans in question are conationalsor foreigners. In general, it enjoins us torefrain from all aggression and fraud,since both are seen as violations of hu-man dignity, ways of fashioning humanbeings into tools for one’s own ends.Out of this basic idea Cicero developedmuch of the basis for modern interna-tional law in the areas of war, punish-ment, and hospitality.5 Other Stoicsused it to criticize conventional normsof patriarchal marriage, the physicalabuse of servants, and many other as-pects of Roman social life.

This Stoic tradition was quite clearthat respect for human dignity couldmove us to appropriate action, both per-sonal and social, without our having torely at all on the messier and more in-constant motive of compassion. Indeed,for separate reasons, which I shall get toshortly, Stoics thought compassion wasnever appropriate, so they could not relyon it.

What I now want to ask is whetherthis countertradition was correct. Re-spect for human dignity looks like theright thing to focus on, something thatcan plausibly be seen as of boundlessworth, constraining all actions in pursuitof well-being, and also as equal, creatinga kingdom of ends in which humans areranked horizontally, so to speak, ratherthan vertically. Why should we not fol-low the countertradition, as in many re-spects we do already–as when constitu-tions make the notion of human dignitycentral to the analysis of constitutional

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5 See my “Duties of Justice, Duties of MaterialAid: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,” Journal ofPolitical Philosophy 7 (1999): 1–31.

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rights,6 as when international humanrights documents apply similar notions.

Now it must be admitted that humandignity is not an altogether clear notion.In what does it consist? Why should wethink that all human life has it? Theminute the Stoic tradition tries to an-swer such questions, problems arise. Inparticular, the answer almost alwaystakes the form of saying, Look at how farwe are above the beasts. Reason, lan-guage, moral capacity–all these are seenas worthy of respect and awe at least inpart because the beasts, so-called, don’thave them, because they make us betterthan others. Of course they wouldn’tseem to make us better if they didn’thave some attraction in themselves. Butthe claim that this dignity resides equal-ly in all humanity all too often relies onthe better-than-the-beasts idea. No mat-ter how we humans vary in our rationaland moral capacities, the idea seems tobe, the weakest among us is light-yearsbeyond those beasts down there, so thedifferences that exist among us in basicpowers become not worth adverting toat all, not sources of differential worth atall. Dignity thus comes to look not like ascalar matter but like an all-or-nothingmatter. You either have it, or, bestially,you don’t.

This view has its moral problems,clearly. Richard Sorabji has shown howit was linked with a tendency to deni-grate the intelligence of animals;7 and ofcourse it has been used, too, not only by

the Stoics but also by Kant and moderncontractarians to deny that we have anyobligations of justice toward nonhumanforms of life. Compassion, if slippery, isat least not dichotomous in this way; itis capable of reaching sympatheticallyinto multiple directions simultaneously,capable, as Coetzee said, of imaginingthe sufferings of animals in the squalidconditions we create for them.

There is another more subtle problemwith the dignity idea. It was crucial, ac-cording to the Stoics, to make dignityradically independent of fortune: all hu-mans have it, no matter where they areborn and how they are treated. It exertsits claim everywhere, and it can never belost. If dignity went up or down with for-tune, it would create ranks of humanbeings: the well-born and healthy will beworth more than the ill-born and hun-gry. So the Stoics understood their proj-ect of making dignity self-suf½cient asessential for the notion of equal respectand regard.

But this move leads to a problem: howcan we give a suf½ciently importantplace to the goods of fortune for politicalpurposes once we admit that the trulyimportant thing, the thing that lies at thecore of our humanity, doesn’t need thegoods of fortune at all? How can we pro-vide suf½cient incentive for politicalplanners to arrange for an adequate dis-tribution of food and shelter and evenpolitical rights and liberties if we saythat dignity is undiminished by the lackof such things?8 Stoic texts thus lookoddly quietistic: respect human dignity,they say. But it doesn’t matter at all what

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6 Germany is one salient example. In a forth-coming book, James Whitman describes theway this central notion has constrained legalpractices in Europe generally, especially in thearea of criminal punishment. Dignity, he ar-gues, is a nonhierarchical notion that has re-placed hierarchical orders of rank.

7 Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and HumanMorals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Itha-ca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).

8 I deal with this question at greater length in“Duties of Justice,” and also in “The Worth ofHuman Dignity: Two Tensions in Stoic Cos-mopolitanism,” in Philosophy and Power in theGraeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of MiriamGrif½n, ed. Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31–49.

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conditions we give people to live in,since dignity is complete and immutableanyway. Seneca, for example, gives mas-ters stern instructions not to beat slavesor use them as sexual tools (Moral Epistle47). But as for the institution of slaveryitself? Well, this does not really matterso much, for the only thing that mattersis the free soul within, and that cannotbe touched by any contingency. Thus,having begun his letter on slavery on anapparently radical note, Seneca slides in-to quietism in the end, when his masterscornfully says, “He is a slave,” and Sen-eca calmly replies, “Will this do him anyharm? [Hoc illi nocebit?]”

Things are actually even worse thanthis. For the minute we start examiningthis reasoning closely, we see that it isnot only quietistic–it is actually inco-herent. Either people need externalthings or they do not. But if they do not,if dignity is utterly unaffected by rapeand physical abuse, then it is not veryeasy, after all, to say what the harm ofbeating or raping a slave is. If thesethings are no harm to the victim, why isit wrong to do them? They seem not dif-ferent from the institution of slavery it-self: will they really do him any harm, ifone maintains that dignity is suf½cientfor eudaimonia, and that dignity is total-ly independent of fortune? So Senecalacks not only a basis for criticizing theinstitution of slavery, but also for thecriticism his letter actually makes, ofcruel and inhumane practices towardslaves.

Kant had a way of confronting thisquestion, and it is a plausible one, withinthe con½nes of what I have called thecountertradition. Kant grants that hu-manity itself, or human worth, is inde-pendent of fortune: under the blows of“step-motherly nature” goodwill stillshines like a jewel for its own sake. Butexternal goods such as money, health,

and social position are still required forhappiness, which we all reasonably pur-sue. So there are still very weighty moralreasons for promoting the happiness ofothers, reasons that can supply both in-dividuals and states with a basis for goodthoughts about the distribution ofgoods.

The Stoics notoriously deny this, hold-ing that virtue is suf½cient for eudaimo-nia. What I want to suggest now is thattheir position on human dignity pushesthem strongly in this direction. Think ofthe person who suffers poverty andhardship. Now either this person hassomething that is beyond price, by com-parison to which all the money andhealth and shelter in the world is asnothing–or she does not have some-thing that is beyond price. Her dignity isjust one part of her happiness–a pieceof it that can itself be victimized andheld hostage to fortune; her human dig-nity is being weighed in the balance withother goods and it no longer looks likethe thing of surpassing, even in½niteworth, that we took it to be. There are,after all, ranks and orders of humanbeings; slavery and abuse can actuallychange people’s situation with regard totheir most important and inclusive end,eudaimonia itself.

Because the Stoics do not want to beforced to that conclusion, they insistthat external goods are not required foreudaimonia: virtue is suf½cient. And ba-sic human dignity, in turn, is suf½cientfor becoming virtuous, if one appliesoneself in the right way. It is for thisdeep reason that the Stoics reject com-passion as a basic social motive, not justbecause it is slippery and uneven. Com-passion gets the world wrong, because itis always wrong to think that a personwho has been hit by misfortune is in abad or even tragic predicament. “Beholdhow tragedy comes about,” writes Epic-

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tetus, “when chance events befall fools.”In other words, only a fool would mindthe events depicted in Euripides’ play,and only fools in the audience wouldview these events as tragic.

So there is a real problem in how, andhow far, the appeal to equal human dig-nity motivates. Looked at super½cially,the idea of respect for human dignity ap-pears to provide a principled, evenhand-ed motive for good treatment of all hu-man beings, no matter where they areplaced. Looked at more deeply, it seemsto license quietism and indifference tothings in the world, on the grounds thatnothing that merely happens to people isreally bad.

We have now seen two grave problemswith the countertradition: what I shallcall the animal problem and what I shallcall the external goods problem. Neither ofthese problems is easy to solve withinthe countertradition. By contrast, theEuripidean tradition of focusing on com-passion as a basic social motive has nosuch problems. Compassion can anddoes cross the species boundary, andwhatever good there may be in our cur-rent treatment of animals is likely to beits work; we are able to extend our imag-inations to understand the sufferings ofanimals who are cruelly treated and tosee that suffering as signi½cant, as unde-served, and to see its potential termina-tion as part of our scheme of goals andprojects.9

As for the problem of external goods,compassion has no such problem, for itis intrinsically focused on the damagesof fortune: its most common objects, as

Aristotle listed them in the Rhetoric, arethe classic tragic predicaments: loss ofcountry, loss of friends, old age, illness,and so on.

But let us suppose that the countertra-dition can solve these two problems,providing people with adequate motivesto address the tragic predicaments. Kantmakes a good start on the external goodsproblem, at least. So let us imagine thatwe have a reliable way of motivatingconduct that addresses human predica-ments, without the uneven partialitythat so often characterizes compassion.A third problem now awaits us. I shallcall it the problem of watery motivation,though we might well call it the problemof death within life.

The term ‘watery motivation’ comesfrom Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s idealcity. Plato tried to remove partiality byremoving family ties and asking all citi-zens to care equally for all other citizens.Aristotle says that the dif½culty with thisstrategy is that “there are two thingsabove all that make people love and carefor something, the thought that it is alltheirs, and the thought that it is the onlyone they have. Neither of these will bepresent in that city” (Pol. 1262b22-3).Because nobody will think of a child thatit is all theirs, entirely their own respon-sibility, the city will, he says, resemble ahousehold in which there are too manyservants so nobody takes responsibilityfor any task. Because nobody will thinkof any child or children that they are theonly ones they have, the intensity of carethat characterizes real families will sim-ply not materialize, and we will have in-stead, he says, a ‘watery’ kind of care allround (Pol. 1262b15).

If we now examine the nature of Stoicmotivation, I think we will see that Aris-totle is very likely to be correct. I shallfocus here on Marcus Aurelius, in manyways the most psychologically profound

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9 See Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 35: “Thereare people who have the capacity to imaginethemselves as someone else, there are peoplewho have no such capacity (when the lack isextreme, we call them psychopaths), and thereare people who have the capacity but choosenot to exercise it.”

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of Stoic thinkers. Marcus tells us that the½rst lesson he learned from his tutor was“not to be a fan of the Greens or Blues atthe races, or the light-armed or heavy-armed gladiators at the Circus” (I.5). Hisimagination had to unlearn its intensepartiality and localism; his tutor appar-ently assumed that already as youngchildren we have learned narrow sectari-an types of loyalty. And it is signi½cant,I think, that the paradigmatic negativeimage for the moral imagination is thatof sports fandom: for in all ages, per-haps, such fandom has been a naturalway for human beings to express vicari-ously their sectarian loyalties to family,city, and nation. It was no accident thatthose White Sox fans invoked the hock-ey chant to express their distress aboutthe fate of the nation.

The question is whether this negativelesson leaves the personality enough re-sources to motivate intense concern forpeople anywhere. For Marcus, unlearn-ing partiality requires an elaborate andsystematic program of uprooting con-cern for all people and things in thisworld. He tells us of the meditative exer-cises that he regularly performs in orderto get himself to the point at which thethings that divide people from one an-other no longer matter. One side of thistraining looks benign and helpful: wetell ourselves that our enemies are reallynot enemies, but part of a common hu-man project:

Say to yourself in the morning: I shallmeet people who are interfering, ungra-cious, insolent, full of guile, deceitful andantisocial . . . . But I, . . . who know that thenature of the wrongdoer is of one kin withmine–not indeed of the same blood orseed but sharing the same kind, the sameportion of the divine–I cannot be harmedby any one of them, and no one can in-volve me in shame. I cannot feel angeragainst him who is of my kin, nor hate

him. We were born to labor together, likethe feet, the hands, the eyes, and the rowsof upper and lower teeth. To work againstone another is therefore contrary to na-ture, and to be angry against a man or turnone’s back on him is to work againsthim.10

Notice how close these thoughts are tothe thought-content of a greatly extend-ed sort of compassion. Passages such asthese suggest that a strong kind of even-handed concern can be meted out to allhuman beings, without divisive jealousyand partiality; that we should see our-selves not as team players, not as familymembers, not as loyal citizens of a na-tion, but, most essentially, as membersof the humankind with the advancementof our kind as our highest goal.

Now even in this good case problemsare lurking: for we notice that this exer-cise relies on the thoughts that give riseto the animal problem and the externalgoods problem. We are asked to imaginehuman solidarity and community bythinking of a ‘portion of the divine’ thatresides in all and only humans: we looklike we have a lot in common because weare so sharply divided from the rest ofnature. And the idea that we have a com-mon work relies, to at least some extent,on Marcus’s prior denigration of exter-nal goods: for if we ascribed value to ex-ternal goods we would be in principlecompeting with one another, and itwould be dif½cult to conceive of thecommon enterprise without runninginto that competition.

But I have resolved to waive those twodif½culties, so let me do so. Even then,the good example is actually very com-plex. For getting to the point where wecan give such concern evenhandedly toall human beings requires, as Marcus

10 II.1, trans. G. Grube (Hackett edition). Cf.also VI.6: “The best method of defense is not tobecome like your enemy.”

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makes abundantly clear, the systematicextirpation of intense cares and attach-ments directed at the local: one’s family,one’s city, the objects of one’s love anddesire. Thus Marcus needs to learn notonly not to be a sports fan, but also notto be a lover. Consider the following ex-traordinary passage:

How important it is to represent to one-self, when it comes to fancy dishes andother such foods, “This is the corpse of a½sh, this other thing the corpse of a birdor a pig.” Similarly, “This Falernian wineis just some grape juice,” and “This purplevestment is some sheep’s hair moistenedin the blood of some shell½sh.” When itcomes to sexual intercourse, we must say,“This is the rubbing together of mem-branes, accompanied by the spasmodicejaculation of a sticky liquid.” How im-portant are these representations, whichreach the thing itself and penetrate rightthrough it, so that one can see what it is inreality. (VI.13)11

Now, of course, these exercises are ad-dressed to the problem of externalgoods. Here as elsewhere, Marcus is de-termined to unlearn the unwise attach-ments to externals that he has learnedfrom his culture. This project is closelyconnected to the question of partiality,because learning not to be a sports fan isgreatly aided by learning not to careabout the things over which people typi-cally ½ght. (Indeed, it is a little hard tosee how a Kantian project can be stable,insofar as it teaches equal respect for hu-man dignity while at the same timeteaching intense concern for the exter-nals that go to produce happiness, exter-nals that strongly motivate people not to

treat all human beings equally.) In theMarcus passage, however, the link topartiality seems even more direct: forlearning to think of sex as just the rub-bing of membranes really is learning notto ½nd special value or delight in a par-ticular, and this extirpation of eroticismreally does seem to be required by a re-gime of impartiality.

But getting rid of our erotic invest-ment, not just in bodies, but in families,nations, sports teams–all this leads usinto a strange world, a world that is gen-tle and unaggressive, but also strangelylonely and hollow. To unlearn the habitsof the sports fan we must unlearn ourerotic investment in the world, our at-tachments to our own team, our ownlove, our own children, our own life.

Marcus suggests that we have twochoices only: the world of real-lifeRome, which resembles a large gladiato-rial contest (see Seneca De Ira 2.8), eachperson striving to outdo others in vaincompetition for externals, a world ex-ploding with rage and poisoned by mal-ice; or the world of Marcus’s gentlesympathy, in which we respect all hu-man beings and view all as our partnersin a common project whose terms don’tseem to matter very much, thus render-ing the whole point of living in theworld increasingly unclear.12

And this means something like a deathwithin life. For only in a condition closeto death, in effect, is moral rectitudepossible. Marcus repeatedly casts life asa kind of death already, a procession ofmeaningless occurrences:

The vain solemnity of a procession; dra-mas played out on the stage; troops of

11 Based on the translation in Pierre Hadot, TheInner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1998), with some modi-½cations.

12 It is signi½cant that this adopted emperordid not, as the movie Gladiator shows us, makea principled rational choice of the best man torun the empire. In real life, Marcus chose hisworthless son Commodus, tripped up yet oncemore by the love of the near.

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sheep or goats; ½ghts with spears; a littlebone thrown to dogs; a chunk of breadthrown into a ½sh-pond; the exhaustinglabor and heavy burdens under which antsmust bear up; crazed mice running forshelter; puppets pulled by strings . . . .(VII.3)13

(This, by an emperor who was at thatvery time on campaign in Parthia, lead-ing the ½ght for his nation.) And the bestconsolation for his bleak conclusion alsooriginates in his contemplation of death:

Think all the time about how humanbeings of all sorts, and from all walks oflife and all peoples, are dead . . . . We mustarrive at the same condition where somany clever orators have ended up, somany grave philosophers, Heraclitus, Py-thagoras, Socrates; so many heroes of theold days, so many recent generals and ty-rants. And besides these, Eudoxus, Hip-parchus, Archimedes, other highly intelli-gent minds, thinkers of large thoughts,hard workers, versatile in ability, daringpeople, even mockers of the perishableand transitory character of human life,like Menippus. Think about all of thesethat they are long since in the ground . . . .And what of those whose very names areforgotten? So: one thing is worth a lot, tolive out one’s life with truth and justice,and with kindliness toward liars andwrongdoers. (VI.47)

Because we shall die, we must recognizethat everything particular about us willeventually be wiped out: family, city,sex, children–all will pass into oblivion.So really, giving up those attachments isnot such a big deal. What remains, andall that remains, is truth and justice, themoral order of the world. So only thetrue city should claim our allegiance.

Marcus is alarming because he hasgone deep into the foundations of cos-mopolitan moral principle. What he has

seen is that impartiality, fully and con-sistently cultivated, requires the extirpa-tion of the eroticism that makes life thelife we know–unfair, uneven, full ofwar, full of me-½rst nationalism and di-vided loyalty.14 So, if that ordinary erot-ic humanity is unjust, get rid of it. Butcan we live like this, once we see the goalwith Marcus’s naked clarity? Isn’t jus-tice something that must be about andfor the living?

4Let me proceed on the hypothesis thatMarcus is correct: extirpating attach-ments to the local and the particular de-livers us to a death within life. Let me al-so proceed on the hypothesis that wewill reject this course as an unacceptableroute to the goal of justice, or even asone that makes the very idea of justice ahollow fantasy. (This is Adam Smith’sconclusion as well: enamored as he is ofStoic doctrine, he thinks we must rejectit when it tells us not to love our ownfamilies.) Where are we then?

It looks as if we are back where Aris-totle and Adam Smith leave us: with theunreliability of compassion, and yet theneed to rely on it, since we have no moreperfect motive.

This does not mean that we need giveup on the idea of equal human dignity,or respect for it. But insofar as we retain,as well, our local erotic attachments, ourrelation to that motive must always re-main complex and dialectical, a dif½cultconversation within ourselves as we askhow much humanity requires of us, andhow much we are entitled to give to our

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13 Translation from Hadot/Chase.

14 One might compare the imagery of ancientGreek skepticism. Pyrrho, frightened by a dog(and thus betraying a residual human attach-ment to his own safety) says, “How dif½cult itis entirely to divest oneself of the humanbeing.” Elsewhere he speaks of the skeptic as aeunuch, because he lacks the very source of dis-turbance.

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own. Any such dif½cult conversationwill require, for its success, the work ofthe imagination. If we don’t have excep-tionless principles, if, instead, we needto negotiate our lives with a complexcombination of moral reverence anderotic attachment, we need to have akeen imaginative and emotional under-standing of what our choices mean forpeople in many different conditions, andthe ability to move resourcefully backand forth from the perspective of ourpersonal loves and cares to the perspec-tive of the distant. Not the extirpation ofcompassion, then, but its extension andeducation. Compassion within the limitsof respect.

The philosophical tradition helps usidentify places where compassion goeswrong: by making errors of fault, seri-ousness, and the circle of concern. Butthe ancient tradition, not being very in-terested in childhood, does not help ussee clearly how and why it goes especial-ly wrong. So to begin the task of educat-ing compassion as best we can, we needto ask how and why local loyalties andattachments come to take in some in-stances an especially virulent and ag-gressive form, militating against a moregeneral sympathy. To answer this ques-tion we need a level of psychological un-derstanding that was not available in theancient Greek and Roman world, or notcompletely. I would suggest (and haveargued elsewhere) that one problem weparticularly need to watch out for is atype of pathological narcissism in whichthe person demands complete controlover all the sources of good, and a com-plete self-suf½ciency in consequence.

Nancy Chodorow long ago argued thatthis narcissism colors the developmentof males in many cultures in the world.15

Recent studies of teenage boys in Ameri-

ca, particularly the impressive work ofDan Kindlon and Michael Thompson intheir book Raising Cain, have givenstrong local support to this idea.16 Theboys that Kindlon and Thompson studyhave learned from their cultures thatmen should be self-suf½cient, control-ling, dominant. They should never have,and certainly never admit to, fear andweakness. The consequence of this de-formed expectation, Kindlon andThompson show, is that these boys cometo lack an understanding of their ownvulnerabilities, needs, and fears–weak-nesses that all human beings share. Theydon’t have the language to describe theirown inner worlds and are by the sametoken clumsy interpreters of the emo-tions and inner lives of others. Thisemotional illiteracy is closely connectedto aggression, as fear is turned outward,with little understanding of the implica-tions of aggressive words and actions forothers. Kindlon and Thompson’s boysbecome the sports fans who chant “U-S-A” at the ump, who think of allobstacles to American supremacy andself-suf½ciency as opponents to be hu-miliated.

So the ½rst recommendation I wouldmake for a culture of respectful compas-sion is a Rousseauian one: it is, that aneducation in common human weaknessand vulnerability should be a very pro-found part of the education of all chil-dren. Children should learn to be tragicspectators and to understand with sub-tlety and responsiveness the predica-ments to which human life is prone.Through stories and dramas, they shouldlearn to decode the suffering of others,and this decoding should deliberatelylead them into lives both near and far,including the lives of distant humansand the lives of animals.

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15 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Moth-ering (Berkeley, Calif.: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978).

16 Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Rais-ing Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys(New York: Ballentine Books, 1999).

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As children learn to imagine the emo-tions of another, they should at the sametime learn the many obstacles to suchunderstanding, the many pitfalls of theself-centered imagination as it attemptsto be just. Thus, one should not supposethat one can understand a family mem-ber, without confronting and continual-ly criticizing the envy and jealousy inoneself that pose powerful obstacles tothat understanding. One should notimagine that one can understand the lifeof a person in an ethnic or racial groupdifferent from one’s own, or a sex differ-ent from one’s own, or a nation, withoutconfronting and continually criticizingthe fear and greed and the demand forpower that make such interactions solikely to produce misunderstanding andworse. What I am suggesting, then, isthat the education of emotion, to suc-ceed at all, needs to take place in a cul-ture of ethical criticism, and especiallyself-criticism, in which ideas of equal re-spect for humanity will be active playersin the effort to curtail the excesses of thegreedy self.

At the same time, we can also see thatthe chances of success in this enterprisewill be greater if the society in questiondoes not overvalue external goods of thesort that cause envy and competition.The Stoics are correct when they suggestthat overvaluation of external goods is amajor source of destructive aggressionin society. If we criticize the overvalua-tion of money, honor, status, and famethat Seneca saw at Rome and that we seein America now, then we may encouragepeople to pursue other, less problematicexternal goods, including love of family,of friends, of work, even, to a certain ex-tent, of country. If people care primarilyfor friendship, good work, and–let’seven hope–social justice, then they areless likely to see everything in terms ofthe hockey match and more likely to use

Marcus’s image of the common project.Because my vision is not a Stoic one,there will still be important sources ofgood to be protected from harm, andthere will still be justi½ed anger at dam-age to those good things. But a lot of oc-casions for anger in real life are not goodor just, and we can do a lot as a society toprune away the greedy attachments thatunderpin them.

After Raising Cain, Kindlon wrote abook on rich teenagers in America.17 Itis an alarming portrait of the greed andovervaluations of a certain class in ournation, and its tales of children who hu-miliate others because they don’t go onthe same expensive ski vacations or havethe same expensive designer clothes area chilling illustration of how overvalua-tion is connected to destructive violence.There is a great deal to say about howeducation could address such problems,but I shall not go into that here.

Instead, I want to turn back to Euripi-des, reflecting, in concluding, on the roleof tragic spectatorship, and tragic artgenerally, in promoting good citizenshipof the sort I have been advocating here.Tragedies are not Stoic: they start withus ‘fools’ and the chance events that be-fall us. At the same time, they tend to gettheir priorities straight.

Thus, the overvaluations I have justmentioned are usually not validated intragic works of art. The great Atheniantragic dramas, for example, revolvearound attachments that seem essential-ly reasonable: to one’s children, city,loved ones, bodily integrity, health, free-dom from pain, status as a free personrather than a slave, ability to speak andpersuade others, the very friendship andcompany of others. The loss of any of

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17 Dan Kindlon, Too Much of a Good Thing:Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age(New York: Miramax, 2001).

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these is worthy of lamentation, and thetragic dramas encourage us to under-stand the depth of such loss and, withthe protagonists, to fear it. In exercisingcompassion the audience is learning itsown possibilities and vulnerabilities–what Aristotle called “things such asmight happen”–and learning that peo-ple different in sex, race, age, and nationexperience suffering in a way that is likeour way, and that suffering is as crip-pling for them as it would be for us.

Such recognitions have their pitfalls,and I have identi½ed some of them intalking about The Trojan Women. We al-ways risk error in bringing the distantperson close to us; we ignore differencesof language and of cultural context, andthe manifold ways in which these differ-ences shape one’s inner world. But thereare dangers in any act of imagining, andwe should not let these particular dan-gers cause us to admit defeat premature-ly, surrendering before an allegedly insu-perable barrier of otherness.

When I was out in the rural areas ofRajasthan, visiting an education projectfor girls, I asked the Indian woman whoran the project (herself an urban womanwith a Ph.D.) how she would answer thefrequent complaint that a foreigner cannever understand the situation of a per-son in another nation. She thought for awhile and said ½nally, “I have the great-est dif½culty understanding my own sis-ter.”

There are barriers to understanding inany human relationship. As Proust said,any real person imposes on us a “deadweight” that our “sensitivity cannot re-move.” The obstacles to understanding asister may in some instances be greater

than those to understanding a stranger.At least they are different. All we can dois trust our imaginations, and then criti-cize them (listening if possible to thecritical voices of those we are trying tounderstand), and then trust them again.Perhaps out of this dialectic betweencriticism and trust something like un-derstanding may eventually grow. Atleast the product will very likely be bet-ter than the obtuseness that so generallyreigns in international relations.

As Euripides knew, terror has thisgood thing about it: it makes us sit upand take notice. Tragic dramas can’t pre-cisely teach anything new, since theywill be moving only to people who atsome level already understand how badthese predicaments are. But they canawaken the sleepers by reminding themof human realities they are neglecting intheir daily political lives.

The experience of terror and grief forour towers might be just that–an expe-rience of terror and grief for our towers.One step worse, it could be a stimulusfor blind rage and aggression against allthe opposing hockey teams and bad um-pires in the world. But if we cultivate aculture of critical compassion, such anevent may, like Hecuba’s Trojan cry, pos-sibly awaken a larger sense of the hu-manity of suffering, a patriotism con-strained by respect for human dignityand by a vivid sense of the real lossesand needs of others.

And in that case, it really would turnout that Euripides was right and Hecubawas wrong: the name of the Trojan landwas not wiped out. It lives, in a work ofthe imagination to which we can chal-lenge ourselves, again and again.