What does it take to be sensitive to the plight of another? “Nothing,” says an imaginary interlocutor, “one naturally feels the pain of another.” She pauses, then adds: “Or doesn’t.” The addendum strikes this author as a chilling rebuke, a reminder of all the times that one failed to feel something when one ought to have. Then come the pragmatic arguments. “There’s so much suffering! There isn’t much you can do about it all.” “You would go mad if you felt sorry for each person that suffers. You’ve got to preserve your sanity.”
These pragmatic arguments are wrong. The question is not one about feeling sorry for every unfortunate person all of the time; it is about one’s capacity for empathy. It is about having a trait of character, from which might flow conduct aimed at alleviating suffering. Now, traits of character are not easy to come by. Stories about workers walking absurd distances back to their homes may fill one with compassion, but those few times that you felt compassion does not quite make you a compassionate person.
It is said that Siddhartha clapped eyes on one sick man, a single corpse, and a yogi, and knew right away what he needed to do. But that is only part of the story. The remaining bit is carefully worked out in the Jataka stories, which can, of course, all be ignored if one doesn’t believe in rebirth. So let us treat Buddha, that most sensitive of souls, as an exception to the present account.
In The Religion of Man, Rabindranath Tagore writes:
To be able to take a considerable amount of trouble in order to supply water to a passing stranger and yet never claim merit or reward for it seems absurdly and negligibly simple compared with a capacity to produce an amazing number of things per minute. Yet, it is simple, as simple as it is for a gentleman to be a gentleman; but that simplicity is the product of centuries of culture. Simplicity takes no account of its own value, claims no wages, and therefore those who are enamoured of power do not realise that simplicity of spiritual expression is the highest product of civilization.
Locals providing water for the walking migrants. Photo: Ismat Ara
Tagore wrote these words against the backdrop of a story about the erosion of human values in the city compared to the villages, where life was much harder, and yet the people more generous. But his remarks can be generalised beyond that particular case.
Any community of people develops certain values to live by. Efforts are made to preserve them in the life of the community through the conduct of the individuals that constitute it. If this is done wrong, you get sati, ‘honour killing’ and other practices that distort the idea of what is valuable, and perpetuate the vested interests of a few who crave power over others.
However, a community that does it right exercises “eternal vigilance” of a certain kind. It takes cognizance of failures to uphold the chosen value, e.g., empathy or non-violence, and encourages its young to engage with it in a spirit of enquiry, making available numerous examples of empathetic (or: non-violent) conduct to ease their transition into the moral life of the community.
Thus it takes not a village, but the selfless work of generations to weave the moral fibre of a single human being, and by extension, that of the community. Only then does a “gentleman” (or, if you prefer, a samurai) enact gentlemanliness “simply”, as Rabindranath puts it; only then does non-violence, or empathy, or compassion seem a natural responses to the other.
The preserving of values in the second way demands constant reflection on one’s own conduct, and upon the nature of the values themselves. The latter is portrayed in the Mahabharata as an inter-generational dialogue, with Yudhishthira (among others) inquiring about the nature of dharma of every significant elder in the story. The possibility of such work on the self presupposes an enquiring mind, and the intention to act morally. Those things do not come “naturally” to our species. Serious educational effort goes into producing human beings who are reflective and morally vigilant.
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What Tagore means by “the simplicity of spiritual expression” is the expression of one’s self to another that comes across as “simple” or artless, but is undergirded by layers of refinement over generations. In Bengali, he often uses the term aatmiiya, literally, “of the self” for the other, in contexts where he speaks of drawing the other to oneself in an acknowledgement of their humanity. Each time we are receptive to the need or suffering of the other, we simultaneously express our humanity and value that of another. “Spiritual expression” is simple also in the sense that aatmiiyataa is really not so hard to come by—we love our pets as “simply” as children talk to inanimate objects as if they were people—but as we grow older, it is eclipsed by consistently self-interested conduct and the subsequent tendency to treat the other as a mere instrument.
On May 20, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee exclaimed that cyclone Amphan had spelt disaster for her state (sarbanaash hoye gelo). The “top comment” under an article about the aftermath of the cyclone in a national daily read: ‘Didi, why don’t you give your state to Modi-ji and take a rest?’ This throwaway remark captures the failure of the community of free, democratic Indians to preserve the values that it lays claim to: its children are “enamoured of power”: they prefer it to “womanly” expressions of a sense of loss. They have so trained their vision that it glides smoothly off the suffering of their fellow-beings and comes to rest on something evanescent and of far inferior value. Such effort to divorce themselves from their humanity would perhaps be laughable if it were not so tragic –both for ourselves and for future generations of Indians.
Indrani Bhattacharjee teaches philosophy at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.