The Pity Party (17 page)

Sontag would later qualify this remark by saying she had been unfair . . . to cancer patients. Her accusation offered no path to salvation, either through faith or good works. “This is a doomed country,” she wrote. “I only pray that when America founders, it doesn't drag the rest of the planet down, too.”
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Sontag's formulation was more strident than the one put forward by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the “Kerner Commission”) in 1968, but shared a similar political orientation. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” the report stated. “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Upon examining race riots in the summers of 1965, '66, and '67, the commission stated that without “a commitment to national action—compassionate, massive and sustained,” requiring “unprecedented levels of funding and performance” for programs that “produce quick and visible progress” in black inner-city neighborhoods, the riots would continue and intensify. One did not need to read between the lines very intently to gather that the failure to commit to the agenda of massive compassion would render future riots not only impossible to prevent, but impossible to deplore.

The Kerner Commission report proved to be highly questionable, both as a sociological analysis and as a political manifesto. Its reduction of American race relations to the proposition that white racism causes black riots disregarded abundant evidence that would, at least, complicate this narrative. The commission ignored some obvious questions: “why liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other southern cities—where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse—did not,” as Stephan Thernstrom asked on the report's thirtieth anniversary. “Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn't the riots occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?”
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The Kerner Commission made the same political calculation as Robert Kennedy, who started his presidential campaign less than three weeks after the report on the rioting was released. Both hoped that white fear and guilt would compound the political force of compassion, a calculation that presupposed the moral credits blacks had amassed through centuries of slavery and discrimination were inexhaustible. This assessment was less implausible during the most heroic days of the civil rights era than it had become by 1968, following the rise of the Black Power movement and the long, hot summers the Kerner Commission examined. As it turned out, the political challenge of convincing whites they had an enormous, unqualified obligation to help blacks became harder, not easier, after television news coverage of riots in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit, and other cities showed blacks helping themselves—to groceries, furniture, and television sets carried away from looted stores.

It seems, then, that getting compassion right—determining and then discharging empathizers' moral and political obligations to empathizees—is necessarily bound up with assessments about empathizees' capacity and duty to help themselves. We can express the moral equation this way: if X is the amount of goods/services/opportunities/purchasing power we think people need and deserve; and Y is the amount we think they can and should be able to secure through their own efforts; then X - Y = Z, the amount a decent, compassionate society is obligated to provide for them, assuming it has the practical capacity to meet that obligation. The question of how much and what exactly X comprises will be contested, of course. Even those who agree with Adam Smith about the necessity of possessing no less than would be shameful for the lowest rank of people in a particular time and place, may disagree about what exactly that means. In one sense, then, the absolute value of Y and Z will always fluctuate with the prevailing ideas about X. For any given X, however, Y and Z will always be in a perfect zero-sum relation: The more we think people can and should do for themselves, the less we think we ought to do for them. Conversely, the less we expect people to do on their own, the more we think should be done for them.

To argue for a larger Z, more government support for the poor, which liberals have done every day since the start of the New Deal, necessarily commits them to the proposition that it's unrealistic and unfair to expect too much Y, individuals' efforts to alleviate their own suffering. To the campaign ongoing since the 1930s to insist on the helplessness of sufferers, liberals in the 1960s added the contention that large classes of sufferers could not be justly expected to help themselves. The understanding before Dallas was that it was unfair, because unrealistic, to expect the poor to do very much to overcome their poverty. Compassion dictated a generous welfare state because the poor lacked the practical capacity to help themselves. The understanding after Dallas was that compassion dictated a
really
generous welfare state because Americans who weren't poor lacked the moral capacity to tell the poor to help themselves, since the poor
were
poor as a result of what had been done to them, rather than because of anything they had failed to do for themselves. Marian Wright Edelman's strategic decision in 1973 to make children rather than blacks the face of victimhood argues that these different imperatives can be emphasized or deemphasized as political circumstances dictate.

In either case, though, empathizers relate to empathizees in terms of how little the former can expect of the latter. There are good reasons to doubt that this is a healthy relationship, or to the benefit of either party. If the poor are not to be blamed for their poverty, then the dispositions and habits that have done the most throughout human history to lift people
from
poverty end up discarded and scorned. This amounts to a compassionate formula to keep the objects of our compassion permanently dependent and aggrieved.

To regard the perpetuation of dependency as a problem presupposes the ultimate goal of the politics of kindness is for as many of the poor as possible to become
formerly
poor, and do so through their own efforts rather than be propped up indefinitely like Britain's Susan Moore. This may not be a safe assumption, as one of compassion's risks is politicized codependence. “The aim of liberal government should be not to increase the incidence of compassion but to reduce the opportunity for it,” Mickey Kaus found it necessary to remind
New Republic
readers. “Compassion isn't politics. . . . Charity is a noble impulse. But it is not the relation of free, equal citizens.”
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Empathizers who get to feel like good people because of their empathy, however, may prefer to regard empathizees' sufferings as chronic conditions to be managed rather than transitory ones to be solved. “Pity is about how deeply I can feel,” Elshtain argued. “And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.”
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Assessing Bill Clinton's presidency as it was ending, economist Glenn Loury (a onetime Reagan conservative who moved to the left of Third Way Democrats during the 1990s) lamented that because of the 1996 welfare law, “the conservative distinction between ‘deserving' and ‘undeserving' poor people has now been written into national policy—and by a Democratic Administration.” Under Clinton,

[t]he Democrats' mantra became “If you work hard and play by the rules, you shouldn't be poor.” But where does that leave the great number of people who are unable (or unwilling) to “work hard and play by the rules”? By implication, they (and their children) deserve to be poor.
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According to Loury, the difference between being poor because you're unable to work and being poor because you're unwilling to work is, literally, parenthetical. Such thinking is Rawlsian in the sense it places
every
quality that can affect the trajectory of our lives behind the veil of ignorance. No one deserves to be ugly or beautiful, sick or healthy, stupid or smart. Even qualities we believe integral to moral character—such as industry, honesty, and judiciousness—do not reveal who we are but depend on such contingencies of social circumstance as how we were raised and socialized. Those who had the unmerited good fortune to grow up in stable, loving families, attend good schools, and belong to nurturing communities have the inside track to the acquisition of habits and dispositions that will serve them well throughout their lives, not least by eliciting the admiration of others. Conversely, no one deserves to grow up in a dysfunctional or abusive family, attend crappy schools, and be raised on mean streets. The shortcomings we discern in the products of those environments reflect forces that have worked on them from the outside in, rather than facets of character that manifest themselves from the inside out.

But exempting the poor from otherwise widely applicable standards of conduct, like sparing them the strain of personal initiative and responsibility, calls into question how there can be moral agents in the pews capable of being inspired or abashed by liberals' sermons. Being diligent and sober isn't to A's credit, just a reflection of the good hand he happens to have been dealt. Similarly, B can't be blamed for being a lazy drunk, because those qualities reflect the bad hand
he
was dealt. It would seem to follow that whether any of us is empathetic or stone-hearted regarding others' travails is simply the result of accidents of our natural endowment and the contingencies of our social circumstances. Some people, by virtue of disposition and upbringing, lie awake at night, distraught, as their thoughts turn to hungry children in distant countries. Other people, also as a result of forces having no relation to their moral worth, sleep peacefully despite knowing of acute suffering in their own city.

But the whole point of liberalism is that people
are
capable of being swayed—by reason, evidence, and an inexhaustible stockpile of sad stories—to vote for liberal measures and politicians. Liberalism seeks to give government the “vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.” This principle was put forward not in an arid philosophical treatise, but in a politician's campaign speech—specifically, Franklin Roosevelt's acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic convention.
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Liberals are wasting their time and everyone else's if people are incapable of being moved, persuaded, and galvanized by admonitions to be more compassionate. And liberalism is vindictive, not righteous, if it stigmatizes people for insensitivity that results from their accidents of natural endowment and contingencies of social circumstance. Being “appalled” by Mitt Romney's “inability to empathize with people who are less advantaged than he is,” as was one journalist who denounced the Republican presidential nominee, makes no sense if Romney's empathetic shortcomings manifest genetic or biographical causes over which he had no control.
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Liberalism presupposes, then, that people are capable of responding to compassionate appeals, and can be justly blamed and criticized if they fail to heed them. One kind of exhortation is worth making, then, and a corresponding moral shortcoming worth deploring. But if one, why not others? If it is possible to induce and expect people to be more compassionate in order to alleviate the suffering of others, it should also be possible to induce and expect people to be more disciplined, responsible, and provident to prevent and alleviate their own suffering.

The question of self-reliance affects the relationship between empathizers and empathizees in a further way. If compassion rules out expecting much from those who suffer, then the moral and political leverage that empathizees wield against those who feel sorry for them will come to depend on their own incapacity. This correlation of moral forces operates with particular strength when empathizers and empathizees unite in the belief that the historic grievances of those who suffer preclude anyone else from calling on them to be self-reliant. The basic choice open to blacks after the landmark legislation and court decisions of the civil rights era, according to the Hoover Institution's Shelby Steele, was between advancing “through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism,” or “pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion's share of the responsibility for resurrecting us.” The second course became all but inevitable when the post–civil rights narrative of white guilt and black victimhood decreed “that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems.”
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And with that choice came the imperative not to let whites off the hook, not to do or say anything that would encourage whites to believe that black problems were black responsibilities, not white ones. In 2013, after George Zimmerman's acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin, for example, the question of race and crime was debated vehemently. One writer, John McWhorter, a black professor of literature at Columbia, took to
Time
magazine's website to rebut those who “pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air.”
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The evidence is, indeed, unambiguous. “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008,” issued by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, shows clearly that Murder Inc. is not an equal opportunity employer. It discriminates against the aged: people under the age of 35 committed 76.5 percent of all murders in that twenty-nine-year span, though they accounted for 47.3 percent of the national population in the 2010 census. It discriminates against women: males accounted for 89.5 percent of all “homicide offenders” between 1980 and 2008, but were 49.2 percent of the population in 2010. And it discriminates against whites: blacks accounted for 52.5 percent of homicide offenders despite being 12.6 percent of the population in 2010. In particular, the report found that white males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 6 percent of the national population in 2008 but 16 percent of the population of homicide offenders. They were, then, 2.67 times as likely to commit a murder as they would be if homicide offenders were drawn randomly from the overall population. Young black males that year accounted for 1 percent of the national population but 27 percent of all homicide offenders, making them 27 times more likely to commit a homicide than a random selection would predict, or 10.1 times more likely than their white peers.
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