I came across an opinion piece in the Indian Express by Pratab Bhanu Mehta, a reputed academic with a number of acclaimed publications to his credit. The piece can be found here.
I found a point made by the author where he says "The widespread cooperation with the gruelling demands of the lockdown (countering COVID-19 in India), on some interpretations, can also be seen as expressions of solidarity. But this should not blind us to the fact that solidarity, in the true meaning of the term, is failing us, just at the moment we need it most. It is failing us because at the core of the idea of solidarity is not pity, compassion, or even care. It is justice.
Compassion and pity has been given a bad name in modernity's emancipatory discourse because it apparently fails to address the issue of power relations. I think it is slanderous. I am not going in depth into the reasons of why I think so. Partly because it is something that I am basing more on intuition rather than a carefully thought out argument.
Before I go into why I think so, I must also say that my own personal evaluation has been from justice to compassion. When I was working with Social Initiatives Group, ICICI Bank which later transformed into ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, we had the opportunity to define a vision statement for the Foundation. I can claim credit for introducing the word Justice into the vision statement as I had brought in the word into the discussion by the group working on the vision statement. (The vision statement was later changed after a few years, but that is a different story.) Later, when I was heading Zyxware Technologies, where I am currently, again, an organisation with an ambitious social vision along with its business vision, I was in two minds between what I felt where the competing pulls of the ideas of justice and compassion. This time, I included both the ideas into the statement. But the more I live, the more I feel that it is the latter that is at the heart of justice itself.
Now coming to my claim of giving compassion a bad name being slanderous. Justice usually requires a complex political, social and economic construct in ones mind and often two agents which can be individuals or formal and informal institutions who have a shared understanding of responsibilities. This understanding that is agreed upon can be called as a social contract. There are plenty of instances in human experience - of past and present - that suggest that human beings still have to act on behalf of others and for others in the absence of such a social contract. For instance, a war zone, a place under a civil war, dysfunctional state etc. Most of us ignore such experiences or treat that as temporary or as of the too distant past to be worthy of serious intellectual consideration in the context of ideas of justice (War Crimes Tribunals notwithstanding). But we are making a fundamental mistake there. We forget that the undergirding for social contract is compassion. It is compassion which gives us the idea of justice. Extreme situations reveal that to us. In normal times, we forget about compassion. Forgetting compassion is dangerous. Giving it a bad name is slanderous.
I found a point made by the author where he says "The widespread cooperation with the gruelling demands of the lockdown (countering COVID-19 in India), on some interpretations, can also be seen as expressions of solidarity. But this should not blind us to the fact that solidarity, in the true meaning of the term, is failing us, just at the moment we need it most. It is failing us because at the core of the idea of solidarity is not pity, compassion, or even care. It is justice.
Compassion and pity has been given a bad name in modernity's emancipatory discourse because it apparently fails to address the issue of power relations. I think it is slanderous. I am not going in depth into the reasons of why I think so. Partly because it is something that I am basing more on intuition rather than a carefully thought out argument.
Before I go into why I think so, I must also say that my own personal evaluation has been from justice to compassion. When I was working with Social Initiatives Group, ICICI Bank which later transformed into ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, we had the opportunity to define a vision statement for the Foundation. I can claim credit for introducing the word Justice into the vision statement as I had brought in the word into the discussion by the group working on the vision statement. (The vision statement was later changed after a few years, but that is a different story.) Later, when I was heading Zyxware Technologies, where I am currently, again, an organisation with an ambitious social vision along with its business vision, I was in two minds between what I felt where the competing pulls of the ideas of justice and compassion. This time, I included both the ideas into the statement. But the more I live, the more I feel that it is the latter that is at the heart of justice itself.
Now coming to my claim of giving compassion a bad name being slanderous. Justice usually requires a complex political, social and economic construct in ones mind and often two agents which can be individuals or formal and informal institutions who have a shared understanding of responsibilities. This understanding that is agreed upon can be called as a social contract. There are plenty of instances in human experience - of past and present - that suggest that human beings still have to act on behalf of others and for others in the absence of such a social contract. For instance, a war zone, a place under a civil war, dysfunctional state etc. Most of us ignore such experiences or treat that as temporary or as of the too distant past to be worthy of serious intellectual consideration in the context of ideas of justice (War Crimes Tribunals notwithstanding). But we are making a fundamental mistake there. We forget that the undergirding for social contract is compassion. It is compassion which gives us the idea of justice. Extreme situations reveal that to us. In normal times, we forget about compassion. Forgetting compassion is dangerous. Giving it a bad name is slanderous.
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