Compassion is the Foundation of Faith and Civilization April 30, 2023
Dr. Roger Ray
I don’t believe that this story that I am about share with you is historically accurate because it really doesn’t sound like Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist. It functions a little too conveniently as a “preacher story” and, I traced the original source to a book by the evangelical author, Phillip Yancy, who claims to have heard it repeated by a physician who had heard Mead’s lecture. But folks, things that are not historically accurate can still be true. Two things can be true at the same time. But apocryphal or historical, I like it and so let me share it with you:
ACCORDING TO A commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There are many variations of the anecdote, but the general details are similar: To the student’s surprise, Mead replied that the first sign of civilization is a healed human femur—the long bone that connects the hip to the knee.
Mead proceeded to explain, as the story goes, that wounded animals in the wild would be hunted and eaten before their broken bones could heal. Thus, a healed femur is a sign that a wounded person must have received help from others. Mead is said to have concluded, “Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.” By GIDEON LASCO, 16 JUN 2022
Anthropologists are sort of like archaeological detectives, looking for early signs of baked pottery, stone tools, and especially for signs of collective living, like a walled village or some kind of written language. This sotry seems a little too tender hearted to think that Margaret Mead would have pointed to a healed femur as the earliest sign of civilization, but I find the idea to be sufficiently compelling that I will consider it as possible that even the most objective of anthropologists might think that this was a significant find.
We evolve to instinctually care for our young but just as we see in wolf packs and dog packs, when a pup reaches the equivalent of human adolescense, you know, being disrespectful and a nuisance, the pup’s own mother will bite and growl to make it go away to what is the equivalent of being sent to wolf or K9 college. But giving that kind of care to an injured adult, that begins to speak to a more sophisticated relationship than just a shared goal of species survival.
And, in fact, anthropologists will point to a tribe that is failing to care for the elderly or to nurture the injured as being sure signs of a breakdown of civilization. After all, it is one thing to bring food back to the elderly and injured when there is plenty of food, it is quite another thing to put yourself at risk in order to take this very civilized extra measure.
In Viktor Frankl’s brilliant reflections on his time in a Nazi Concentration Camp, he talked about how Freud had predicted that, under the right circumstances, everyone would resort to being a beast. Deprive people from basic food, water, shelter, sleep, and safety, long enough, and we will all become monstrously self-centered. Frankl was forced to live in that kind of depravation along with thousands of other Jews during the Holocaust. His wife and children were killed, his life’s work was destroyed in front of his own eyes. He knew what it was to be hungry and cold as thousands of fellow Jews were being executed in the gas ovens in his camp.
But he said that though the depravations in the camp did cause many people to become monsters, the same depravations also revealed the angelic, the saintly, in those who would share their rations with a sick person, even their shoes with someone who was freezing.
This is not a survival instinct, this is a choice to both feel and to act on compassion, empathy. There are several overlapping terms and values here, we use compassion as a sign of civilization or the lack of it as a sign of a break down in civilization. And, if you have paid much attention to the history of my preaching you know that I equate compassion with spirituality, with lots of kudos given to Jesus Seminar founding scholars, Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong. The late Marcus Borg very succinctly boils down the mission of Jesus’ ministry to being a teacher of radical compassion. If you have never read his early work, “Meeting Jesus, Again, For the First Time” I highly recommend it as a key to escaping formal creedal religion and into understanding the real significance of the teaching of the Jesus tradition.
Karen Armstrong, almost certainly the world’s leading scholar in western religions, started the Charter for Compassion, trying to give spiritual people of all faith traditions a place to find a meaningful purpose in life. Again, I would encourage anyone to just google the Charter for Compassion and sign up to receive updates on lectures and articles. I don’t think that there is anyone alive today who can hold a candle to Armstrong’s credibility as a religious scholar.
That being said, I will not belabor the point further, I think that over my history of teaching, writing, and preaching, that I’ve said enough to assume that compassion is central to spirituality, to being civilized, and to being mentally healthy.
Last week I bemoaned the fact that fewer and fewer people really want to make the effort to be a genuinely good person. I cited the Zoroastrian tradition, that is key to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that teaches the three-fold path to becoming spiritually enlightened, which are: good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.
One listener immediately wrote in to challenge my use of the word “good.” How, he asks, do we determine what is good and what is not good. I don’t know this person’s background, but I recognize the question as being right at the doorway where a person would like to move on from traditional religion into a more progressive way of thinking.
What traditional religion offers people, right or wrong, is a sense of certainty. If you believe, very specifically, in traditional Judaism, Christianity, or Islam then you are in possession of a belief in a God who is absolute, the judge of the world and every individual in it. And you have a religious text which you hold up as being a reliable expression of truth by which you can confidently know right from wrong.
You may recall me having said that progressives have to make the choice of giving up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. When you acknowledge that all religions, their supernatural theistic image of God and their human created sacred texts, are ancient ideas but not actual facts, then you have to search for truth in more relative terms.
Not to wander too far afield into a philosophical word soup, but there is a field of philosophy that concerns itself with how we know what we know. Lots of philosophers wander into conversations about this but the most famous or most familiar to us would be Rene Descartes, most remembered for his “cogito,” “I think, therefore, I am.” “Cogito, ergo sum.” That is, the fact that I am aware of my own thinking makes it obvious that I must, in some form, exist. That simple interpretation is, actually, debatable but not here and not now.
There are three ways of knowing: We can know things from revealed truths, like scripture or from God, we can know things through reason, the way that you know what “equal” is even when you have never seen any two things that are exactly equal, but you know what equal is by reason, and, thirdly, we know things through experience. I understand that a hot stove can burn me due to the fact that I have had brief but memorable experiences of having touched a hot stove.
Once we accept that revealed knowledge is entirely unreliable then we are left with only two ways that we know anything, induction and deduction. Descartes’ cogito is an example of deduction, I am thinking, and even if I am thinking that I might not exist, there mere fact that I am aware of my own cognition means that I must exist. Or, the example given to freshmen in their first logic class:
All Men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Unless of course, some clown with a degree in philosophy, like Woody Allen, shows up to try to mess with your head, saying: All men are mortal, Socrates was mortal, therefore, all men are Socrates. . . which, of course, does not stand up to either deduction or induction.
Induction has more to do with analysis, that is, we see that some 90% of the people in the world are right-handed so there is a high probability that any one person in the room will be right handed, but we will be wrong about that at least 10% of the time.
Don’t be too worried about it if you have trouble remembering the difference between deduction and induction, the most famous fictional character who claimed to use logical deduction was Sir Arthur Conan Dole’s creation, Sherlock Holmes, who often exclaims to the bewildered Dr. Watson that he reached his conclusion using deduction was more often actually using induction, so if even Sherlock Holmes could not solve this mystery, go easy on yourselves.
The point being that there is no revealed truth from God or scripture, nor from horoscopes, psychics, crystal balls or tea leaves. We have no absolutes. We have, through reason and observation, the application of critical thinking, reason to have higher or lesser confidence in some truths.
So, when we are asked, “How do you know what is good?” we are left to inductive reasoning to make a choice. I am tempted to reference the Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart, who in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio case said, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.”
Unless you have been living in a cave for the past couple of months, you know that such subjective conclusions cannot be universally applied. For more than 500 years, Michelangelo’s David has been lauded as one of the world’s most outstanding pieces of art. But in Florida, a couple of families have raised a legal stink about the statue being used in a public-school classroom because they see it as being a pornographic nude.
It seems silly to almost all of us, especially the city officials in Florence, Italy where the statue is on display, but truth about something like this can be slippery. When I was a young teen more than 50 years ago, National Geographic or even the underwear section of the Sears catalogue was potentially pornographic . . . clearly, a lot of parents in Florida still have the perspective of a child and that’s something we just have to deal with.
We have debates about what is good because the judgement of good depends upon the perspective of the individual.
Many people whose livelihoods have derived from mining coal insist that using coal as an energy source is a good thing while most of us who have to deal with the effects of pollution but whose personal wealth is not derived from burning coal, see it as being universally a bad thing.
When President Eisenhour appointed former GM president, Charlie Wilson, to be the Secretary of Defense, in his congressional hearings to approve of that appointment, some legislators were concerned that Wilson still owned millions of dollars’ worth of GM stock and that he might be biased towards GM in awarding defense contracts. Mr. Wilson boldly proclaimed that “What is good for GM is good for the country.” While it may have been evidently true that what was good for GM was certainly good for Mr. Wilson, for the rest of us, we have repeatedly seen that what is good for the bottom line of the automobile industry is bad for people who breath air, drink water, or eat agricultural products.
To say “what is good” means that we have to make a judgement between individual good and corporate good. Because what may be good for one person may cause harm to many others. And so we are constantly in debate about individual rights and country or community, and sometimes, global obligation.
There is always a tension between individual and corporate good. We preserve private property so that the profit motive will inspire invention, hard work, creativity, and productivity but we cannot ignore the obvious social ills such as poverty, crime, domestic violence, and instability caused by the hoarding of the world’s goods by the wealthy.
As I have previously noted, those of us who take a progressive view of spirituality always come down on compassion as a matter of first importance.
I hope that we will stop mining and burning coal as a fuel source, but I also hope that we will offer job training and alternative employment to those who become unemployed when we shut down coal mines.
I will cite, once again, the second century Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who said, “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.” And so, if burning coal hurts the hive, the individual bees that own coal mine stock cannot make the decision to dig deeper and burn more.
Still, one of the sermons that you will probably never hear is one based on the Jesus saying found in both Matthew and Luke where Jesus says, “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;” It sounds compassionate, radically compassionate, but it is also clearly rather impractical. If you sell all that you own, you will become one of the world’s destitute in need of charity from others. Which is why Jesus is rarely used as a resource in economics classes.
What we’re looking for here is a level of compassion which leads to the greatest good for the largest number of people. I don’t foresee a time when we would be in danger of droves of people deciding to sell all they own and give it away, thereby wrecking the global economy, but we are in danger of people tilting the balance between individual good and corporate good more and more, every year in the direction of individualism, hoarding all of the world’s goods that they can sock away in their own bank account every dime they can get their grubby little hands on.
The United States now has the highest level of income inequality in the developed world, as the rich get a larger and larger piece of the pie in income and that’s without even looking at wealth inequality where only eight families have more wealth than the bottom half of this nation of over 300 million people. Having poverty in the richest nation of the world in the richest period in the history of the world can only mean that our real poverty is in a lack of compassion.
As Gandhi famously said, “The world has enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.” It is in coming to recognize the difference between need and greed that our real work of deductive and inductive reasoning is needed. And if you have to err on one side or the other, you can’t go wrong by erring on the side of compassion.
Why has our world become so heartless? Why is there such a shortage of compassion? How have we tolerated an economic system that makes some people fabulously wealthy while leaving so many in poverty?
I think that at least a huge portion of the problem is the scale of civilization. There are 8 billion people in the world. Industrialization has caused a massive population shift from rural agricultural areas to large cities. As nations became more industrial, actual ownership of manufacturing became more and more distant from the front lines where real people are doing the manufacturing.
In the late 19th century, Andrew Carnegie became one of the most wealthy people in the world through the steel industry. This city and the little town where I grew up in Kentucky and thousands of other cities and towns were given libraries by Andrew Carnegie who became one of the most lauded philanthropists of all time but he made that money through the cruel exploitation of his employees in the steel factories were he was anything but philanthropic.
It isn’t that he invented cruel exploitation of employees, but he did raise it to a level never seen before. He owned the steel mills, but he didn’t work there. He didn’t know the people who were making him rich. The more distant we are from the suffering we cause, the harder it is for us to feel compassion for them.
The stock market insulates us from knowing where our pension money is really invested. When a cheese company also owns a cigarette company, and a clothing brand or a coffee company can directly or indirectly use slave labor at the foundation of their production but do it in a way where we never see it, it is easy to live blissfully unaware of the suffering that lies behind the two dozen pairs of shoes we have in our closets.
If the early human with a broken femur had lived alone in a house on my street, he might have died from starvation lying on the floor of his kitchen before anyone realized that he was injured. It isn’t that there are not cruel and greedy people in every kind of civilization but I want to believe that most people are inclined towards being good, that is, at least at a base level, compassionate in the face of real need.
In our world of 8 billion people, 15% of us are obese while 1% among us is literally starving. If we were living on an island with only 100 people on it, we would not tolerate 15 people becoming obese while a child in the village starved. We would not tolerate someone having three houses while ten people didn’t have shelter. It is only because of the distance we put between ourselves and others that allows for greedy self-indulgence at one end of the spectrum and chronic suffering at the other.
I think that the major reason for religion to exist in the 21st century is the creation of compassionate communities. This happens in two ways, the moral instruction given in spiritual communities heightens our awareness of compassion and the actual physical gathering of people together gives them opportunity and awareness of those who are in need of compassion. But need and the willingness to meet that need is not a one way street, because a life lived in compassion is its own reward.
Many of you know that for the past several years I have been increasingly involved in the care of an older member of our church who had no family members, no children, no siblings and no one close enough to be involved in her life when she really needed help.
A few years ago we began to notice that Pat would sometimes get lost on the way to a church lunch outing, even at places where she had been before. Little by little, I and others began to pay more attention to her lapses of memory and cognitive decline. When the pandemic arrived, I began to pay particular attention to her needs to protect her from exposure.
Over time, she decided to make me her executor and she gave me power of attorney to help make both medical and business decisions to protect her as she got older. Eventually she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and though many other church members were involved in Pat’s care, she became a daily concern of mine, to the point where I was realizing that I was either going to have to move into her home with her or place her in residential care.
A month ago, however, her slow decline came to an end when she suddenly and very unexpectedly died. In the sudden shock of her death many people started saying, “She was so lucky to have you in her life,” and things like, “She loved you like a son.” And even, “Where would she have been without you?” But what I kept hearing in my own head was an unspoken response that I would now like to say out loud: I was so lucky to have her in my life. I loved her like a mother, a friend, a companion who was happy to go anywhere I was going, whether that was to get a haircut or out to a hole-in-the-wall bar to hear a blues band.
And now that she is gone, I am wondering what will become of me without her daily loving friendship. My relationship with her started out as a kind of pastoral obligation, my time was given to her as a gift, but the exchange doesn’t stay at that point. Compassion is not something that is given by the fit and well fixed to those who have a broken femur and no food. The man who survived the broken femur was not the only one who experienced civilization by being cared for by a healthy member of the tribe. The person who brought food to the wounded was also changed. And speaking existentially, I can say that he or she was probably changed in very profound ways.
There is nothing like that on FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, or SnapChat. And I will add as a parting thought, please don’t let a weekly YouTube video or podcast become your church. I hope that you can find inspiration and encouragement here, but this is not community. Community takes effort. You have to get out of the house at a set time, go into a room where there will be people you probably won’t like and even the ones you do like will require a degree of tolerance and a few servings of forgiveness. Don’t be fooled, every day with Pat was not a bowl of cherries, and she would regularly remind me that I wasn’t necessarily easy to get along with either.
Compassion is not only shown to the deserving. Sometimes it is given to the difficult and the demanding and the ungrateful. And now, I realize, that I even miss that.
You cannot love 8 billion people. You will probably continue to eat fruit grown in slave labor conditions and wear shoes sewn together by children, even when you try not to. But find your tribe, narrow it down to twenty or thirty people, and be aware of their lives, their needs, their strengths and the weaknesses. Be as ready to show compassion as to receive it; to listen as much as you want to be heard. To give people a second chance as much as you believe that you deserve a second chance.
It may not make you a saint, but it will at least make us appear to be a bit more civilized.
