The “Crisis of Pity” and the Radicalization of Solidarity: Toward Critical Pedagogies of Compassion

Abstract

This article joins discussions concerning education as a means of cultivating compassion and pays explicit attention to the emotional complexities of teaching for/with compassion to help students become active and critical compassionate citizens. After reviewing the emotional aspects that establish feelings of pity and a sentimental relationship between the student as spectator and the ‘other’ who suffers, the article suggests that a politics of compassion is both necessary and valuable, albeit situated in practices that attend to the needs of vulnerable people and address structural inequalities. The article explores the conditions within which compassion in the classroom can be translated into protest at injustice or transmuted into action that radicalizes solidarity. For this purpose, the author proposes what he calls critical pedagogies of compassion, that is, critical pedagogies that interrogate the trappings of narratives of pity and seek to make a concrete difference in sufferers’ lives. This is not a proposition for a new form of critical pedagogy, but rather a call to recognize in existing critical pedagogies the need to explicitly interrogate pity and cultivate critical compassion.

Notes

1. The term distant others who suffer is borrowed from Chouliaraki (2004, 2008, 2010) and is used here to mark the spatial and symbolic distance between a spectator and the other who suffers. Throughout the article, the spectator refers to Western individuals who are privileged or less privileged to various degrees and view the other's suffering from a distance. Because of this distance, the sufferer is often othered by the spectator and thus teaching for/with compassion constitutes a move from othering to empathy through understanding. The ultimate aim of any pedagogy of compassion is to problematize and eventually overcome this othering. Whenever the term other is used in this article, it is done so to denote the contextual differences between the spectator and the other who suffers, without implying that the spectator himself or herself is devoid of suffering.

2. Needless to say, the politicization of suffering and the encouragement of compassionate action do not happen without invoking moral principles and values. However, the invocation of moral language does not necessarily lead to narratives of suffering and a politics of pity; it can also lead to outrage and anger, rather than a sentimental relation to others’ suffering, when coupled with an understanding of the structural conditions that produce suffering (for more details on this argument see Zembylas 2007; Silber, 2011). This clarification is important at the outset of this article to avoid assumptions that the politics of pity is ultimately inevitable.

3. Radicalization of solidarity requires that teachers and students oppose the tendency to narrow the borders of caring for the other into the comfort and safety of one's home. At the same time, solidarity is not radicalized from one day to another, but rather it is constructed gradually to exceed normative expectations. Further analysis of the notion of radicalization of solidarity is offered in the last part of the article. For the time being, it is sufficient to emphasize that the ideas offered here problematize the view of the White, middle-class student who believes that she/he is empowering the vulnerable. Radicalization of solidarity cannot happen if power relations are not systematically interrogated.

4. As it is discussed later in the article, critical pedagogies of compassion are fused with anger at the injustices that underlie suffering. Anger is appropriate in a conversation about compassion because anger at injustice can be valuable in overcoming some manifestations of the crisis of pity—such as self-pity, blaming others or feelings of guilt. Students can learn to channel anger into action that may respond to injustice, but they have to learn how to make use of these emotions.

5. This article adopts this important distinction between pity and compassion, with pity being passive and sentimental and compassion being more active. Although adopting the distinction between pity and compassion, however, it is not suggested that compassion does not entail the dangers of being sentimentalized (Berlant 2004) or of reaching a point of fatigue (Tester 2002); both of these dangers are discussed later in the article. Unless noted otherwise, I use pity in this article to refer to passive and sentimental empathy, and compassion is used in reference to empathetic feelings accompanied with action.

6. In light of the previous note, the adoption of the term compassion fatigue may sound confusing to some readers, because most the characteristics discussed here are reminders of pity, rather than compassion—e.g., passivity and sentimentality. However, the article uses the term that is widely adopted in the literature, while focusing on the analysis of the absence of criticality that leads to compassion fatigue.

7. For example, this denial may surface in many forms, such as the refusal to participate in a schoolwide campaign that raises money for poor inner-city people, because students may believe that these people will spend the money on drugs.

8. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out.

9. It is important to acknowledge at this point that the question of the relationship between justice and care or justice and compassion has absorbed many debates (see Nussbaum 2001). It is outside the scope of this article to address all of these debates, however, it is sufficient to emphasize that compassion is “intimately related to justice” and “makes us see the importance of the person's lack, and consider with keen interest the claims that such a person might have” (Nussbaum 1996, 37). As Hoggett also notes, “It is only an intelligent compassion which can feel the pain and think critically about the injustice, thereby fusing an ethic of care to an ethic of justice” (2006, 161; author's emphasis).

10. Ellsworth's (1989) well-known critique of the limitations of critical pedagogy to instill transformations in students comes to mind at this point. My argument here highlights that classrooms are not homogeneous environments with a common understanding of oppression or injustice, but deeply divided places where contested narratives are steeped in the politics of emotions to create complex emotional and intellectual challenges for educators. Needless to say, this is not to deny the systemic and institutionalized character of oppression and social injustice. However, the value of the view put forward here lies in acknowledging that students and teachers are often carriers of troubled knowledge (Jansen 2009), an idea that has serious implications for the strategic formation that critical pedagogies may take.

11. An obvious suggestion for future work at this point is to explore the kind of narratives, discourses, and educational experiences that make it possible for students to simultaneously identify and disidentify with the other-sufferer. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this idea.