Contemporary Compassion is not Christian Compassion

When you read or sing the Psalms you cannot help but notice how frequently God is described as being “full of compassion”. In the Authorized Version this expression occurs no less than five times in Psalms 78, 86, 111, 112, and 145. Furthermore, the Psalms are hardly the only place in the Bible where the word compassion is used as an attribute of God. The Synoptic Gospels frequently speak of Jesus being “moved with compassion” or “having compassion” on someone or some group of people.

These are verses which are very difficult for contemporary readers to understand for the reason that the word “compassion” has become completely and utterly debased in our day and age. It has been stripped of all that made “full of compassion” an expression of praise in the Psalms and reduced to a mere sentiment.

Something similar could be said about the word “charity”. In the Authorized Version of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians charity is the greatest of what are traditionally known as the three theological virtues – the other two being faith and hope – of which a famous, extended description is given in the thirteenth chapter. The English word charity is derived, through the French, from the Latin word for this virtue, caritas, which in Latin versions of the Scriptures is frequently used to translate the Greek agape. Today, however, the first thought the English word suggests is that of “giving to the needy” and it seldom expresses anything beyond that. Organizations that provide help and relief to those who are poor, sick, or otherwise in need are called charities. No-one, unless he is reading the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians in the old AV, is likely to associate charity with long-suffering, seemliness, bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things, and all the other qualities listed in the fourth through seventh verses, and verse three which reads “ And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” would be incomprehensible to anyone reading it with the contemporary meaning of charity in mind.

It is for this reason that the translators of most of the more recent English versions of the Holy Scriptures use the word love instead. This can hardly be said to be an improvement, however, as the word love has been as debased as the words charity and compassion. In Greek and Latin, the basic word for love was closely related to the word for friend and Greek had several other words when a more precise concept of love was called for. In English today, the word love would almost never be used of friendships – at least male friendships – thanks mostly to the imposed new acceptance of homosexuality. Sexual love has eclipsed all other concepts of love – and not the exalted eros discussed in Plato’s Symposium, either, but a version of the latter that has been stripped of all of its higher connotations, and reduced to a romantic affection tacked on to animal lust. So substituting love for charity in translations of 1 Corinthians 13 produces no net gain in comprehensibility.

While the decay of the English language is obviously what I have been describing here, it is also the rot and ruin of Western ethical thought and, for that matter, Western thought in general. That thinking and language stand and fall together ought to go without saying. Language is the medium through which we communicate our thoughts and, what is more, words are the very building blocks out of which we build our thoughts in the first place, at least if we are talking about the kind of thinking necessary for a civilized life that goes beyond the merely animal and mechanical. The Cultural Marxists, who have been so effective over the last sixty years or so, in tearing down Western civilization from the inside out, clearly understand this, which is why there is so much emphasis on linguistic theory and literary criticism on the intellectual side of what was accurately called the New Left forty-five years ago, and why their most devastating instruments, such as the phenomenon of so-called “political correctness”, involve the manipulation of language.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré who became a godfather of sorts to American neoconservatives, and George Grant, Canada’s greatest conservative thinker and patriot of the old British Canada as she was before the evil Trudeau gang first got their hands on her, were among those who a generation or two ago observed that Western ethical thought had taken a turn for the worse in the twentieth century, as modern Western man had come to think in terms of “values” rather than “virtues”, and traced this shift back to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. Virtues were central to the old, pre-modern, Western tradition of ethical thinking, with roots in both the ancient Athens of Plato and Aristotle and Jerusalem, birthplace of Christianity. Virtues, were praiseworthy habits of behaviour, that manifested themselves in praiseworthy acts or deed, and which presupposed the existence of an established, transcendent, hierarchical order of good, that was not created by man, but to which man must conform himself through the cultivation of virtue, to achieve happiness. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of the modern philosophers who had preceded him and the discoveries of modern science had rendered belief in this order impossible and had left man with two paths open to him, that of a “last man”, content to live out his mediocre existence as a cog in the great societal machine modernity is building, or that of an “overman” who will create a new set of values to fill the void left by the collapse of the old order. That we have come to speak of values rather than virtues, demonstrates how pervasive the Nietzschean version of modern thought has been. Virtues, point to an unchanging order beyond ourselves, values we create for ourselves.

This can clearly be seen in the “Canadian values” of the Trudeau Liberals. People have been driven from their careers, in Canada, for expressing ideas on immigration and multiculturalism that were no different from those held by Stephen Leacock, Conservative economist, social critic and humourist, W. L. Mackenzie King, Liberal Prime Minister, and J. S. Woodsworth, Methodist clergyman and founder of the CCF, the predecessor to today’s NDP, on the grounds that these ideas are contrary to “Canadian values”. “Canadian values”, therefore, have little to do with what real Canadians thought or think, but are rather what Pierre Trudeau decided and declared they would be.

Social conservatives, tend to express their opposition to abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and the like as a defence of “family values.” George Grant, himself an outspoken opponent of this kind of moral decay, argued that this was a mistake, because it is self-defeating to use the language by which the modern replacement for the old moral order has been effected, to defend the old order.

If the replacement of virtues, grounded in a transcendent order, with man-created values, was a step down the stairway of moral and ethical decay, their further replacement with sentiments, of the sorts represented by the current meanings of “compassion”, “charity” and “love”, was a slide down the bannister in comparison.

When the Psalmist says that God is “full of compassion” he is not singing about God’s feelings so much as about His actions. Similarly, whenever the Gospel writers speak of Jesus “having compassion” or being “moved by compassion” they are describing something He does, whether it be healing the sick (Matt. 14:14), casting out a demon (Mk. 5:19), or feeding the multitude (Mk. 8:2). Compassion in the Bible is that within God which motivates Him to act in a benevolent way towards people. It is far more, then, than a mere feeling. This is further evident in the way the Scriptures enjoin compassion upon men. They are clearly telling people how to act, not how to feel, because it would be pointless to do the latter, as feelings cannot be produced at will or in obedience to commands.

Today, however, the word compassion denotes a feeling. Worse, it is a feeling for which people demand and expect all of the praise and credit that is due to a virtue. Jesus in His earthly ministry condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. In His famous Sermon on the Mount, after going through three pairs of Old Testament verses and expounding them in such a way as to show that the righteousness God demands of people is an internal righteousness and not just an external adherence to His Commandments, Jesus warned those assembled to hear Him against practicing their alms “before men, to be seen of them”, as the hypocrites do, drawing an amusing hyperbolic picture of a hypocritical Pharisee walking into the synagogue blowing a trumpet to announce that he was giving alms, but to give their alms in secret, for “thy Father which seeth in secret Himself shall reward thee openly.” What He was here condemning in the Pharisees, was doing something good – giving alms, for the wrong reason – to be praised by men. The Pharisee who was blowing his own horn, was at least doing the alms-giving for which he received the praise he wanted. Today, the “caring” and “compassionate” expect credit for shedding a few tears for the plight of the unfortunate and having warm fuzzy feelings towards them, whether or not they actually do anything to alleviate their condition. The Pharisees had nothing on them when it comes to hypocrisy.

Perhaps, however, I am being too hard on them. When you look at what has actually been done in the name of the huggy-feely type of compassion these days, you will find that much of it falls into two basic categories. One of these is harm done under the guise of helping, such as all the “poverty relief” money that was funnelled into the support of Third World Marxist guerillas in the twentieth century by the kind of churches who have reduced the “Christian” message to nothing but the debased, sentimental, kind of compassion by getting rid of more trivial aspects of the faith, such as the idea that the Son of the true and living God, came down to earth from heaven, was born a man by the Virgin Mary, died on the cross to take away the sins of the world and reconcile fallen man to God, descended to hell, shattering its gates and releasing the captive spirits of the saints, before rising in triumph from the grave and ascending back into heaven, to sit at His Father’s right hand. The other is to make other people pay the costs of your supposed “compassion” while you get all the credit. Most, if not all, government policies and programs that are labelled “compassionate” are examples of this.

If this is what modern “compassion” looks like in action, perhaps it were better that it be nothing more than a feeling after all.

Liberalism and the Inevitability of War

For as long as human societies have existed upon this planet they have fought wars against one another.

This is a statement that I believe most people would agree with. The same consensus, however, does not exist with regards to the following statement:

Wars will continue to be fought for as long as human societies continue to exist upon this planet.

This second statement is as true as the first. While specific wars have specific causes, the cause of war in general is to be found in human nature. The only way to eliminate war, therefore, is to eliminate human beings. As long as men live upon this planet they will from time to time go to war against one another.

Consider what the history of the 20th Century has to teach us. Conflicts in the Balkan region in the first decade of that century, broke out into a world-wide conflict between the great powers in the second decade. This conflict was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by those who continued to hold to the progressive optimism of the 19th Century. A little over two decades after it ended, however, it broke out again, this time to be conducted on an even larger, costlier, and more destructive scale. This time, it was brought to end by a technological innovation, the development of which would have, if anything ever could, permanently checked man’s propensity for war. That innovation was the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb. The development of nuclear weaponry raised the potential cost of war to what should have been a prohibitive level by making the extinction of the species a real possibility as an outcome of war. This did not, however, prevent the outbreak of future wars. Major, multi-national conflicts were fought in Korea in the 1950’s and Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s and if the large nuclear arsenals of the United States of America and the Soviet Union prevented the superpowers from directly confronting each other in war, it did not prevent them from using smaller allies, all over the globe, like pawns on a giant chessboard. The second half of the century saw conflict after conflict in the Middle East between the Arab nations and Israel and there is no end to those hostilities in sight. In the final decade of the 20th Century, the nations of the Balkans resumed the fighting that had led to the first World War earlier in the century.

That war will be around for as long as human beings inhabit the earth is not universally recognized, however, and liberals in particular are inclined to reject this truth. In fact, liberalism’s primary error concerning war, is the idea that it can be eliminated and a permanently peaceful world order established. This is not the same thing as pacifism. Far too many conservatives make the mistake of associating liberalism with pacifism. Pacifism is the refusal to participate in war on the grounds of a belief that war is always morally wrong. Pacifists are susceptible to the charges of cowardice and free-riding (1) and for this reason accusing one’s opponents of pacifism makes for effective rhetoric. Liberals, however, are not pacifists. Indeed, history would seem to demonstrate that they are more likely than conservatives to involve their country in a war.

Consider the major wars the United States of America was involved in during the 20th Century. It was liberal Democrat Presidents who led the United States into the four largest of these wars. It was a liberal Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who led the United States into World War I declaring that they needed to “make the world safe for democracy”. It was another liberal Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought the United States into the second World War. (2) Liberal Democrat Harry Truman was the president who got the United States into the Korean War and Liberal Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson got the United States into the Vietnam War. In contrast, conservative Republican President ordered the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, countless covert-ops and the support of anti-communist contras in Latin America, but he did not get his country involved in anything on the scale of World Wars I and II, Korea or Vietnam and, in fact, negotiated an end to the arms race and the 40 year Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Similarly, here in Canada, after the Statute of Westminster declared that our own Parliament would decide from then on whether or not we were at war, it was Liberal Prime Ministers who led our country into World War II (William Lyon Mackenzie King), Korea (Louis St. Laurent), and Afghanistan (Jean Chretien).

Clearly liberals are not pacifists. Liberals and conservatives have different ideas about war but those differences are not the same differences which distinguish doves from hawks. Liberalism’s error is to believe that mankind can build a world that is free of war.

This idea lies behind several significant liberal projects of the last couple of centuries. Liberals began calling for free trade – the elimination of tariffs, quotas, and other protectionist measures so as to merge the economies of all countries into one big market – as far back as the eighteenth century, arguing that the economic interdependence that free trade would bring, would merge the nations of the world into one, bringing about universal brotherhood and peace. Richard Cobden, the 19th Century British “Apostle of Free Trade”, proclaimed that free trade:

[A]rms its votaries by its own pacific nature, in that eternal truth—the more any nation trafficks abroad upon free and honest principles, the less it will be in danger of wars.(3)

In a speech given on January 15, 1846 he declared:

I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.(4)

Similar utopian sentiments can be found in the speeches and writings of many other 18th and 19th century free traders.

When Woodrow Wilson asked the American Congress to declare the United States’ entry into World War I, he told Congress that “The world must be made safe for democracy”. This goal was connected in his mind with that of world peace. He immediately went on to say “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty”. (5)

Wilson’s idea of world peace is very similar to that of free traders such as Richard Cobden. The difference is that Wilson saw elected government as being the means to world peace rather than international commerce.

The idea that democratic governments are more likely to be peaceful government is not borne out by history. The roots of democracy go back to ancient Athens and Athenian democracy is widely regarded as having reached its peak during the years of Pericles, which are often spoken of as Athens’ Golden Age. This was not, however, an era in which Athens lived in peace and harmony with its neighbors, but the era of the Peloponnesian War fought by Athens and her allies against Sparta and her allies. This war, the history of which we know from an account written by Athenian general Thucydides, was not a conflict in which a democratic state, desiring peace, was forced to defend herself against the aggression of her non-democratic neighbors. Athens was as belligerent and ambitious as Sparta. From that day to this, democracies have been no less likely to go to war than any other kind of country. Nor is it true that democracies do not go to war with each other. Historians often refer to the War of Southern Independence (6) as the “first modern war.” Both sides in that conflict, however, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, were democratic republics. Furthermore, this was a particularly bloody war in which more Americans died than in any other war they have ever participated, including both World Wars and Vietnam combined.

At the end of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Emperor Karl von Hapsburg I of Austria were both forced off of their thrones and Germany and Austria became democratic republics. By Wilson’s logic, this should have made these countries less likely to want to resume the conflict at a later date. In fact it had the exact opposite effect. In the 1930’s Germany and Austria came under the control of Adolf Hitler who launched a second war that was far worse from the first. Now the point might be made that under Hitler, Germany and Austria ceased to be democratic. However true that might be it is very much the case that had the German Kaiser and the Austrian Emperor kept their thrones, Hitler would never have had the opportunity to rise to power. Hitler was a demagogue and democracy is the ladder a demagogue climbs to achieve power.

The spread of democracy was not the only part of Wilson’s plan for world peace. The last of his famous Fourteen Points was that:

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike. (7)

This association took the form of the League of Nations. Although it was proposed by the American President, the United States never joined it. The countries that did join need not have bothered because it failed completely in its appointed task.

The failure of the League of Nations did not prevent a second liberal American President from repeating the experiment at the end of the second World War. FDR’s United Nations was conceived of as a forum in which the nations of the world could voice their grievances with each other and resolve those grievances without resorting to war. If the League of Nations was useless, the United Nations was worse than useless. The General Assembly simply became a platform upon which the representatives of every Soviet vassal state, Third World dictatorship, and Islamic theocracy in the world, were invited to stand and espouse their poisonous drivel to the world. The Security Council is powerless to oppose wrongdoing on the part of any of its permanent members, each of which has a veto. Since the Soviet Union was one of those permanent members the Security Council was powerless against Communist aggression in the Cold War, just as it is powerless to stop the sole remaining superpower, the United States of America, from doing whatever she wants. The only thing the United Nations has proven effective at doing has been wasting the money it receives from its member states as it tries, thankfully less effectively, to tell them how to manage their own affairs, usually in the name of some inane left-wing agenda. It has not made the world a more peaceful place.

These examples, I believe, are sufficient to establish the truth of my contention that there is a strong tendency in liberalism to believe that it is possible to construct a peaceful world order in which war is eliminated and that this belief lies behind several of liberalism’s most important projects. They also demonstrate that whatever the scheme the liberal comes up with his goal of world peace continues to elude him. (8) Today the economies of the world have been integrated into a global market, democracy is widespread, and the United Nations has been established for almost seven decades, yet perpetual universal peace is nowhere in sight.


(1) A free rider is someone who benefits from participation in a group without paying his fair share of the dues. A pacifist is susceptible to the charge of free-riding because he enjoys the benefits of living in his country, including the security provided by his country’s military, although he is not willing to serve his country militarily if called upon to do so.

(2) Granted, the Japanese empire attacked the United States first. However, FDR was in favour of the United States entering the second World War long before Pearl Harbor. He and his advisors in the year leading up to Pearl Harbor talked about war with Japan as a “backdoor” into the war with Germany. At the time, public opinion in the United States was strongly against American involvement in the war with Germany. See Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Robert Stinnett Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: The Free Press, 1999).

(3) Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, (London: William Ridgway, 1878) p. 126.

(4) http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Cobden/cbdSPP20.html

(5) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4943/

(6) This is usually called the “American Civil War”. Ordinarily, the phrase “civil war” refers to an internal struggle for control of a state. In the English Civil War, the Roundheads fought to turn England into a Puritan republic against the Cavaliers who fought to keep it an Anglican monarchy. In the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans and the Nationalists fought each other for the control of Spain. In American history, however, the North and South did not struggle for control of the United States, but over whether the secession of the Southern states and their independence from Washington D. C. would be allowed.

(7) http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62

(8) If permanent world peace is an unattainable goal and it is inevitable that men will from time to time go to war with each other it does not follow from this that any particular conflict is inevitable and that attempts to prevent particular wars are always foolish and doomed to fail.