kathleenstock.com/the-pity-party… "One factor not talked about enough is a performative turn towards kindness. Recently, the UK Left has made “be kind” a political mantra. The perverse effect is that many are now smugger, meaner, and – perhaps most importantly – less politically effective"
"everyone agrees that things like “justice, humanity, magnanimity, prudence” are great. But this isn’t because we’re all morally marvellous. The reason is much more banal: it’s that the meanings of these concepts have a measure of approval built in...
...To understand, at least roughly, what “justice” or “prudence” are, is already to know they are supposed to be positive things..it remains very difficult to agree what concrete course of actions actually count, in practice, as just or prudent – or, for that matter, kind."
"Should I prioritise your immediate feelings and desires, or prioritise your ultimate well-being even if it makes you unhappy now? What’s the kind decision to make, where two people have strongly clashing interests? There’s little agreement about that."
"The capacity to attract superficial agreement is why exhortations like “be kind” are useful to politicians; as, of course, are their negative counterparts (“don’t be unkind!”), when talking about the sort of world we don’t want...
...You get to say something with which no-one could reasonably disagree, appearing to occupy the moral high ground in the process. For the same reason, bland virtue-extolling is attractive to institutions and companies looking for a competitive edge."
"When companies or individuals ostentatiously promote the value of kindness like this, they aren’t interested in helping people navigate the complex work of how to manifest kindness in everyday interactions. What they mostly mean is: feel kindly towards others...
...Demonstrating kindness essentially involves definite action. In contrast, kindliness seems to involve only emitting a vague feeling of warmth towards other humans. Yet promoting something so vague and underspecified as a political value carries with it certain risks...
...In practice, kindly feelings can quickly transmute into the dangerously sentimental emotion of pity, or else into a passivity which daren’t risk saying or thinking anything critical at all."
"Compassion, unlike pity, is directed towards recognition of, and mental engagement, with someone’s individual and highly particular circumstances. Strictly speaking, compassion is suffering with someone–which requires you to know concrete detail about the plight of the person...
.... Pity..requires no such detailed information. According to Arendt, pity “depersonalizes” and “lumps” people together “the suffering masses, et cetera.” It’s generic. This lack of interest in specifics is presumably why pity always feels the same, regardless of context."
"this sameness is reflected in the language of pity, which flattens out differences between situations and makes them all “tragic”, “heartbreaking” and “devastating”. Only hyperbole can adequately express the intense, short-lived, and homogenous feelings that are pity’s source."
"the elite leaders of the French Revolution had little in common with the poverty-stricken masses in whose name they grandstanded. Adopting the language of pity for the poor camouflaged material differences..generating the impression of a shared political goal..for a while"
"Many of the Guardian writers keen to preach the virtues of kindness to readers are similarly drawn from inherited wealth and elite education. In this context, the confidence with which they promote the value of kindly feelings towards complete strangers makes more sense...
...Where resources are scarce, showing kindness to unknown others can involve a degree of self-denial rarely experienced by the financially insulated."
"As well as giving a cosmetic impression of solidarity, kindly and pitying feelings towards others have another personal benefit: they can make you feel good. But this fact makes it more likely the feelings will be politically ineffective..why try to fix what’s enjoyably broken?"
"feeling pity for the homeless person in the TV news report is easier than for the one you encounter on your daily commute, for the latter veers dangerously close to developing into concrete practical action...
...Pity flies most volubly towards those we don’t really know and can’t really help; the relatively blank screens upon which we can project fantasies without cost."
"Presumably, kindly feelings towards others are pleasant partly because they allow their possessor to bask in a sense of being a good person. Needless to say, this impression is often wrong...
...It also seems likely that self-consciously trying to be kind to others produces the phenomenon known as moral self-licensing: the more you think of yourself as a good person, the more you let yourself get away with."
"It’s..worth remembering that the stated goal for progressives is not just to be kind, but..perhaps more importantly–to get others to be kind too. It’s one thing to try, unobtrusively, to model kindness in your own life, and quite another to start telling other people to do it...
...In the latter case, you’ve moved squarely into the missionary zone; and from there it seems but a short step for some to zealously policing others’ attitudes and speech more generally. In particular, it’s seems a short step to policing the attitudes and speech of women...
...As feminists have long pointed out, women are stereotypically expected to be kinder, more compassionate, and more self-abnegating than men. This makes the bar for public perception of women’s “unkindness” far lower than for men."
"The best medium for generating pity is the personal anecdote, reporting an archetypally simple tale of suffering, with no accompanying ambiguity or complexity. This story is then taken to stand for a whole group’s experience...
...Where such stories aren’t easily generated, there tends to be public indifference..Equally, the logic of pity requires that where there’s a hero, there has to be a villain..there’s an economy of pity: pity for one group tends to produce blame for another."
"the call to kindness on the Left seems to be fuelling the culture wars, encouraging simplistic psychological splitting between “good” groups and “bad” groups on a rampant scale."
"Thanks to a litany of heart-rending anecdotes and dodgy statistics supplied by mainstream LGBT organisations, trans people have become synonymous in many minds with people automatically deserving of pity...
...It swiftly follows that those who criticise trans activist organisations, or even particular trans people – again, for whatever reason – are automatically seen as badly motivated and “anti-trans”."
"On the internet at least, it’s not hard to find people who apparently see themselves as pitiable, and who seek to manipulate this response from others. Incels are the most egregious example, but the phenomenon seems widespread."
"There are many virtues, both moral and epistemic, which the current Left could publicly endorse, if it wished. Fairness is an obvious substitute for kindness, requiring more thought and less feeling to hit the mark...
...Equally, the Left could try to foster courage, in order to face moral complexity; or self-discipline, in order to have civil, open conversations with ideological opponents...
... In an age apparently rife with narcissists, it could even aim for a bit of selflessness and modesty. Kindness isn’t one of the virtues it should explicitly aim at, however. And pity – kindness’s self-indulgent, lazy child – should be left out of politics completely."
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