If you start looking into the concept of compassion, you’ll come across a lot of abstract religious and philosophical arguments about what compassion is, and what it ought to be. The tricky thing about compassion, though, is that it doesn’t arise out of a belief system.
Compassion is not an intellectual response activated according to a rational philosophical analysis of the interplay of ethical considerations. Compassion is an impulse, an emotional response to the suffering of other people.
People feel compassion not because they’ve attended religious services at a temple, and not because they’ve read a dusty old book by Immanuel Kant. People feel compassion because they identify with other living beings, they understand what it means to suffer, and they feel better when they believe that others’ suffering has been reduced.
It would be a mistake to regard compassion as a universal human experience. People are inherently social animals, but society can be as easily cruel as it can be kind. Organizations that profess to cherish compassion typically abandon it when their power is threatened, as the Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, and overwhelming, enduring Christian support for Donald Trump illustrate. The rules of what counts of compassion differ widely according to cultural context.
Compassion is felt most often in spite of formal ethical education, rather than because of it. As an emotion, it exists most authentically because of what we feel to be right, regardless of what we’ve been taught to think.
