Pity As The Toilet Brush

For the first time in the lives of many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic is conflating private pain with large-scale, public suffering. Now, the entire country participates in a conjunction of misery that was before limited to Americans who lacked privilege, or were unlucky. The anger we feel at the utter collapse of responsible governance isn’t abstract and, for the most part, it isn’t ideological; it is personal, because now our lives are in danger and family members are dying. Pain and suffering are no longer isolated or remote or contained; they are universal, and with that, there is an uncanny realization that this suffering is no longer a drama on television or a headline in the newspaper. We suffer in the midst of history.

That makes the processing of pity even more complicated, because while we may resist self-pity, it seems there may be no going forward, no hope for the country at all, if we can’t take pity on ourselves as a nation. Unless we can see ourselves as the world sees us — including those who say we are broken, corrupt and failing — we may not be able to survive, rebuild and reclaim anything of our past sense of national identity. Unless we can say to ourselves collectively what we say to ourselves individually — we are sick — there’s no hope of any kind of return to health.

And we can trace a lot of the pity, memorably expressed by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times (paywall, but available at other locations for free), to the poor decisions many of us have made individually since, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Enumerating them all would be a chore, and it’s hard to balance them ideologically, but here’s a few:

• The invasion of Iraq
• The Lewinsky / Clinton blowjob
• The Bush Election and re-election, and all the fraudulent hijinks that went with it (Swiftboat Veterans ad, for one example)
• The use of torture during the invasion of Iraq
• The uninhibited worship of the dollar sign, and the Great Recession that was the consequence
• The removal of laws designed to inhibit recessions that may have led to the Great Recession
• The decision of voters to elect Donald Trump

And there’s many more, some political, some economic. I’d even put NAFTA on the list, if only to provoke thought. It was, after all, a treaty meant to do away with redundancy by allowing countries to specialize more and more, thus increasing efficiency and, BTW, profits.

Shame, a word currently unpopular due to its overuse over the last, oh, two millenia, has a useful effect as a corrective to activities not desired by the leaders of a community. Notice I don’t say “bad actions,” but merely those community leaders disapprove – or, if you prefer, loathe, hate, and many other negative adjectives. When community leaders substitute their personal dislikes and biases for community good, which is an easy thing to do, then we often get shameful uses of the concept of shame.

But it’s important to separate the functionality from its appropriate use. One does not flow from the other, or at best, weakly. Its strength comes from collective use and childhood training to consider something shameful.

But how does shame work nation to nation? In a word, it doesn’t.

But pity, now, pity’s an interesting word. It’s one thing to cry shame down on another nation, because shame is an aggressive concept, easily seen as manipulable, as well as not applicable from one nation to another, no matter how loud it’s cried. But pity? Pity can be brought about by many things, some beyond a community’s control, such as plague. But it can also be elicited by bad decision making, now can’t it?

Look at these people, we told them they were wrong but they ignored us, and now look at the mess they’re in!

One can easily imagine a bunch of Neanderthals looking across the La Brea Tar Pits at their erstwhile neighbors, now sinking under the bubbly surface, where once they tried to run their plows …

Pity is, in a sense, a step beyond shame. The consequences of actions motivated by ideologies, of theologies and philosophies, will finally come to into view, and if those consequences, rather than exciting admiration, instead elicit pity, that throws understandable doubt upon those ideologies, theologies, and philosophies as valid and good selections. Just as we pity the anti-vaxxer who loses their child to the measles, but know that they brought this upon themselves, so a nation’s people, brought up against the publicly expressed pity – not anger, but pity – of foreigners for their contretemps may realize something’s gone amiss. It’s the recognition that their straits are sore, and if the pitied don’t realize it yet, it may only be a matter of time.

Pity may turn out to be the toilet brush we will need to begin scrubbing our lives of those ideologies, theologies, and philosophies that are hurting us. From relatively superfluous crap like anti-vaxxers, who trade in nothing more than congruencies to conspiracy theories, to anthropogenic climate change doubters, whose theology won’t let them acknowledge that our very civilization is poisoning itself, the pity of the majority of humanity for us may be the thing that finally prompts those not wed to those pathological institutions to realize that they are destructive to our individual and collective lives, and as we absorb these lessons, those words, anti-vaxxers and climate change doubters and anti-evolutionists – all positions for which the evidence is, at best, junk science – will become code words to the uncommitted to stay away.

For example: That politician, who is asking for your vote, doubts evolution and climate change? Easy decision, vote for their opponent, even if they hold policy positions I don’t like – but admit might be reasonable. It’s that concept that we have to comprehend – some clashes of ideas are truly clashes in which opinion, even learned opinion, can legitimately differ, while others are just fringe characters trying to make their ludicrous ideas seem reasonable, even acceptable.

Perhaps this is what others’ pity will teach us.