Jason ‘Radical’ Russell is probably not the only Evangelical Christian father-of-two ever to have had unprotected sex with concrete. He is, however, one of the very few to provide us with a demonstration video of the act. Shot on a San Diego street corner in the days that followed its subject’s elevator ride to fame, this film is useful in understanding an emerging kind of Stupid.
Which is to say, compassion has become no more effective but every bit as pleasurable as a sex act with oneself. Compassion, which many people will argue leads us to the light of understanding, increasingly leads us to the darkness of public self-embrace.
And no further.
I appreciate it might seem cruel and unreasonable to declare compassion unproductive, and even unconsciously self-serving. Do understand, however, that this is an observation that itself derives from thinking that could, at a pinch, be seen as compassionate. This argument may be more palatable to you if you believe it is foundationally compassionate. If one believes—and I do—that the billions of people in the world who do not enjoy what could be reasonably called a good life are deserving of better, then one could be said to be compassionate. Of course, there are arguments, and one is made by Immanuel Kant and another by Nietzsche and others still by Peter Singer, that this is not a conclusion to which compassion necessarily draws us. But let’s allow ourselves to pretend that it is; if only to agree that a foundational compassion informs this critique of compassion itself.
Compassion could be said to be a fairly atomistic thing. Which is to say, it works fine in the individual mind, but when it attempts to move towards actual social solutions—and its presence is certainly demanded daily as a political tool in news editorials and Facebook feeds which scream ‘Why doesn’t my government have more compassion?’—it actually slows and even impedes the process. Compassion can even become a bit totalitarian. Yes, I know that is an outrageous claim. But some things that work well when one is alone start to function quite differently when they are applied on a broader scale than ‘me’. Compassionate reason is one of these things.
The practise of my individual and ethical reason might lead me to an individually reasonable conclusion that ends up gainsaying all of my ethical and reasonable intent. Say I want to eat the pseudo-cereal quinoa. I want to do this because it is one of the very few protein-rich vegetables in the world and its consumption diminishes my meat and dairy consumption, which in turn supports an industry that is both unsustainable and inhumane. Further, I want to support new and non-corporate growth in a nation like Bolivia because, as a consumer, I am tired of giving my dollar to major agribusiness. So, I buy quinoa for these informed reasons. But, everyone else with my compassionate reason has come to the same conclusion. Within months of the birth of the quinoa craze, the revenue of farmers has soared.
However, consumption in Bolivia of this Incan crop which has been a staple of Bolivian diets falls 34 per cent in 2011, the year I said goodbye to cracked wheat and brown rice. Although foreign aid organisations had worked with Bolivian farmers to make this food-fetish item such a regular feature of my compassionate dining, its nutritional benefits were no longer available to many Bolivians. According to a piece in the New York Times, malnutrition among children in quinoa-growing areas had escalated.
Now the sort of tosser, such as myself, who stocks their larder with protein-rich ethics must face another problem. Since news of this disaster brought about by what we’ll call instrumental compassion—I’m stealing this from critics of what is called instrumental reason; if you want to learn how this idea of individual reason turned into collective Stupid, go to Heidegger or Horkheimer—the West’s ethical cooks withdrew some of their custom. And then, OMG, many Bolivian farmers were sent spiralling into financial chaos.
It was an entirely reasonable decision to buy quinoa, which actually tastes pretty good for a ‘super food’. When the decision is individual, it is a good one. When it becomes instrumental and happens on a massive scale, it ends up being pretty shitty. I rather imagine Bolivians make justifiably nasty jokes about me, my cooking and my instrumental compassion.
The quinoa example is a fascinating one that has drawn wide attention. An entire series of good, ethical and compassionate decisions produced a crap result. ‘Radical’, however, is a far less nuanced matter. His was an entire series of crap decisions that produced both crap and Stupid.
Not to be all I Told You So—after all, I have three kilograms of quinoa in my pantry—but I saw pretty much from the start that this Kony thing was a load of shit. I watched it unfold on Twitter when a prominent self-described humanist said something along the lines of ‘This has to be a good thing.’ I watched this dude contrast vision of his own happy, healthy white kid with jump-cut horror endured by African children. It was all very ‘we are one’ and ‘why can’t we see these poor dark children as important?’ You know the deal. One world. All that shit. Set to a sort of empty and hysterical soundtrack that was kind of the depressed relative of the sort of thing you might hear spouted by a ‘new age’ therapist, this video made me feel like I was being manipulated by an especially bad chiropractor. And just as I suspected that the spine of my charity was about to be snapped by a self-important wellness practitioner, there was KONY, his face in the frame as the centre of all evil.
Seriously. Mate. Are you telling me that by tut-tutting at one dude, we are going to solve all the problems in Africa? And, yes, I know that Africa is a diverse continent that contains more nations than Uganda. But the Stupid who made this video didn’t seem to share my basic knowledge of maps. Perhaps it was the great grain controversy of 2011 that had me on high alert. Or perhaps I just don’t have enough ‘compassion’. But it was pretty plain to me that this was some discount Stupid.
Compassion is a requisite thing in private interactions but it is no longer a useful thing in public discussion. Its everyday personal exercise, of course, is essential and inevitable between adequately social human adults. But the broadly accepted idea that compassion is a necessary and foundational practice in any policy discussion is total pants. Moreover, its public expression has become a total wank.
Before we saw this YouTube video of a guy apparently flogging his log on a California sidewalk outside Sea World, that same guy had just attained nearly 100 million clicks and saturation news coverage in less than a week for his campaign against a warlord. His video was very, very compassionate.
Jason ‘Radical’ Russell (yes, he really calls himself that) was the guy who gave us one of the world’s most apparently effective moments of activism. Appended with the social media hashtag #KONY2012, this awareness-raising campaign was a remarkable moment in the history of, um, awareness-raising campaigns. The object was, according to its chief architect, to ‘Make Kony Famous’. Because he was, like, the most evil guy.
Actually, Joseph Kony is the sort of man to whom the descriptor ‘total dick’ could be effortlessly applied. Or he was. At the time of writing, it is reported that Kony is gravely ill. Strangely, his poor health and subsequent inactivity has not changed all the shit that goes on daily in his home country of Uganda. The fact that he had left Uganda some years before Radical’s exercise in ‘awareness’ does make this harder to measure. But we can say that people are still dying of malaria, AIDS-related illnesses and ethnic and government-endorsed murder. It’s a horrible place that produces some horrible people.
But Russell’s focus was not on drawing Uganda systematically out of the many large problems it continues to face. Medical, economic and political disaster were not his thing. Instead, he wanted to ‘get Kony’ by means of an emotional video and related merchandise sales. Which would go on to fund more emotional videos.
Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a strange and violent cult, believes himself to be an instrument of God. Call me an old-fashioned atheist, but I never think that’s a good thing. Kony was sort of like a Charles Manson–Jerry Falwell amalgam. Except with even more guns and in a nation already rogered by seventeen kinds of devastation. Worse kinds of hell tend to produce more cartoonish devils and Kony, known to recruit children into his militia and said to endorse rape, was a pretty colourful demon.
A Radical angel came to vanquish him. And the world watched on, for a day at least, in rapturous approval. ‘Let’s make Kony famous,’ said Radical. Within hours, he really was.
Russell had himself become very, very famous in a very short time for his work in highlighting the atrocities committed by this loony thug. To say that Russell’s immensely popular promotional video was politically naive is bit like saying the early work of Britney Spears was lyrically simple. Which is to say, oops, not only had Joseph Kony fled Uganda several years before Radical dived in to save the children, but, oops, the International Criminal Court had indicted him for war crimes in 2005, the United States had decried his army as a terrorist organisation in 2001 and the Ugandan government, itself known to soak in the odd luxurious bloodbath filled with the limbs of dismembered children, had declared him a wanted man. (Russell was working with the approval of the Ugandan government. Perhaps, like most of the people who saw and were moved by his YouTube video, he hadn’t bothered to type ‘Uganda State Sanctioned Death Abduction Horror Show’ into Google.)
But some really strange Stupid began to unfold when Radical—a man who is far better suited to making Christian musicals than he is instructing the world in political action—released his video. I have never seen a more ‘shared’ item on social media. Normally sane people of my actual real-life acquaintance seemed compelled to offer up their endorsement for a video that was as artless as it was politically naive. I don’t know if we can say this is instrumental compassion; it was just too Stupid and crap for such a careful account. Maybe it was false consensus. Maybe people just like to see evil personified. Or maybe there are just more fans of amateur Christian musical theatre than I had previously thought.
Maybe it was more a case of what is called pluralistic ignorance; that thing where people might privately disapprove of something—and again this video was so bad I don’t know how they couldn’t smell its central cheese—but are too afraid to say it in public. I have begun to suspect that there is a real terror of being seen as less than compassionate. In a time that produces complex problems that exceed even quite considered individual ethics such as that which fuelled the quinoa craze, I think there is a romantic return to ‘feeling’.
NGOs and charitable organisations are plainly aware that this need to be seen as compassionate fuels an awful lot of giving. Recently, I was asked by a young man in a shopping centre for a donation to an organisation that funds diversionary activities for teenagers with cancer. I actually don’t mind the organisation and I understand that diversion is an effective way to deal with pain. But I was shocked by the strong compassion-producing visual technique he employed, which was to appear as though he was a cancer patient. The chap was wearing a printed bandana of the sort we broadly associate with chemotherapy patients. My immediate thought on seeing him was: ‘You shouldn’t be in a shopping centre with such compromised immunity.’ My next thought was entirely compassionate and I gave him some money.
I was troubled for several days after the exchange. I just couldn’t believe that they would compromise the health of a young oncology patient. Also, I’d had a bit of a cold and I was concerned that he would catch it. So I called them to ask about their policy (I know this isn’t how a normal human behaves, but I am a writer and therefore perversely entitled to make these sorts of queries). They told me not to worry as these paid employees were, in fact, perfectly healthy. They were just wearing the bandanas ‘in solidarity’.
In solidarity with whom and by whose explicit permission? I was actually pretty appalled. I imagine if I had cancer to the degree it would require an immune-compromising toxic treatment such as chemo or radiotherapy, I would not want anyone representing me in fucking cancer drag. What is this? Leukaemia cosplay? What makes it okay to do near-death fancy dress and what the fuck is happening to my actual compassion when it is induced so often by imposters?
What happens is one of two things. You either get so fucking angry about the demands on your emotion and the road to Stupid, you write a book about it. Or, you accept the totalitarian view that public compassion is not only useful but compulsory. And then you buy a ribbon, change your Facebook picture for ‘awareness’ and accept that everything in the repertoire of compassionate protest is just dandy because it ‘shows I care’.
Now, I did this in the case of Bolivian farmers and my participation in instrumental compassion showed me that maybe It Doesn’t All Start With Me. It was a useful lesson that it is entire systems and not small, atomised practice that need revision. This was very difficult to predict while making high-end salads. But it is not so difficult to see when one is buying an awareness ribbon.
Think about the famous pink ribbon. October is annually awash with the optimism of pink. But more lately, it is full with the impatience of some breast cancer survivors it purports to assist. Some current and former patients are exasperated with the use of pink as a disingenuous marketing tool, notably the glorious Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the world tears happy-clappy pinkwashing a new rectum. Other survivors have become convinced that pink month is less about awareness than it is obfuscation; many critique what they regard as bad medical information. Growing medical opinion has it that mammograms, which pink month encourages, are a poor diagnostic tool.
But even if they’re not, pink month doesn’t encourage women to get them. One 2013 study released in the Journal of Marketing Research set out to examine the pink campaign’s effectiveness. Researcher Stefano Puntoni unexpectedly found that the pink brand made women perceive their risk of breast cancer as lower and tended to dissuade them from donating to breast cancer charities. While it is almost certainly true that the month affords comfort to many breast cancer survivors, it is also almost certainly untrue that it does much more than that. October is a month in which some women get to feel individually good.
I expressed these views on a news site and was privately contacted by a friend whom I had last seen at the funeral for a lovely young woman whose life had been claimed by breast cancer. She was very angry with me and mentioned that her dead friend loved pink month and that I needed to practise greater compassion. Of course, I used the foundational compassion argument I did at the beginning of this chapter; to wit, I care about solutions and will therefore proceed only from that single moment of concern and not be distracted by my emotions, if possible, en route to that solution. She didn’t buy it.
Even very bright people buy the idea of compassion as an essential force. When the impressive leader and soldier Nelson Mandela died in 2013, he was eulogised by quite respectable writers as a man who had shown both ‘forgiveness’ and ‘compassion’. This was surprising to me as I, as a young anti-Apartheid activist, had first come to know of this man—then classified as a terrorist by many liberal democracies, including my own—as a leader of armed resistance. Of course, he went on to become a politically astute negotiator and then a president who never quite lost his fondness for buying guns; perhaps everyone but me has forgotten the South African Arms Deal. But there was this great Oprahfication of his legacy that rewrote his life as one that was lived not in battle but in compassion. This keen politician and military mastermind is somehow the only dude in history that has shown us how LOVE can change the law. It wasn’t the threat of an unwinnable war that turned South Africa into a (still terribly uneven and violent) democracy. It was a big, cuddly compassionate black teddy bear with guns made out of candy.
Ugh. What a horrible way to remember such an effective individual.
But we ascribe to much-loved leaders those qualities we most value and one of those, right now, is compassion. As quinoa demonstrates before it is artfully thrown through a beet and goat-cheese salad, effective action is difficult. And, yes, people want to feel like they’re doing something. And compassion is something. So let’s do this.
Let’s Show We Care.
Let’s Show We Care about being seen to care.
Okay, that’s a bit mean. I do understand the despair and have suffered the contradiction carried along in instrumental compassion many times. I don’t know what to do about the state of the world, so I choose just to document it and mock it into the possibility of change. This, I think, may be a slightly more effective technique than wearing a ribbon or lighting a candle. But I don’t doubt that anyone cares less than me; they may care more. I do doubt the effectiveness of the caring, however. And I do see that there is a certain pleasure taken in the act of care itself.
I’m not the only one with this opinion. Of course, grumpy old Nietzsche said that compassion is the self-indulgent ‘multiplication of human suffering’; he’s basically calling compassion misery porn. In The Antichrist he said of compassion: ‘It wants to give birth to its god and see all mankind at his feet.’ I think that’s maybe a bit harsh, especially coming from a man who was so moved by compassion towards the end of his life that he famously threw himself upon a suffering horse and cried uncontrollably. I know compassion is real. I also know that it needs to be subjugated to reason. Individual will can lead us to a quinoa crisis.
Perhaps we should look at someone with a better rep than Nietzsche. In 2014, a former migration officer who had seen first-hand the rationalised horror of an Australian offshore detention camp for refugees became a ‘whistleblower’. In an interview, she explained the horror and protest she had seen within the centre. This came days after the death of Kurdish Iranian detainee Reza Berati.
The day before migration officer Liz Thompson’s television interview, candles had been lit in Berati’s honour. Of course, when this unusually courageous, and disarmingly eloquent, person spoke of the place where he had died, she became a hero to the many people troubled by conditions on Manus Island. She was asked to speak at another protest and initially agreed. Then she refused. She had been troubled by the lighting of candles for Berati. She was troubled by the widespread practice of individual compassion. On the blog Crossborder Operational Matters, she wrote, ‘I am grateful for the support I have received and acknowledge that people are expressing solidarity for a variety of admirable reasons, [but] there is something deeply discomforting about the adulation and the focus on me.’
Thompson was quite Nietzschean in her impatience with those who had been so eager to show their compassion. ‘“Not in our name” is a self-referential slogan, it speaks about us, not about those behind the wire.’ She suggested: ‘If you want to close the camps, think about what you can do where you are that will be effective.’ She was very clear that lighting a candle and crying for a man who had died was not effective action.
Of course, such critiques are always met with the question: ‘Well what can we do, then?’ The answer is: use your fucking noggin. Outrun the Stupid and instead of instrumental compassion, try instrumental thinking. Compassion will not close Manus Island, itself a deterrent ‘solution’ said to be derived from compassion. Compassionate conservatives regularly argue that their wish to stop unauthorised maritime arrivals by dangerous vessels has its origin in care. And there is no argument I can think of to ‘prove’ that they might not, actually, be motivated by compassion.
Compassion does not lead us to the best and most considered solutions. It can lead us to buy ribbons, light candles and open detention centres.
Compassion becomes the kind of Stupid which supplants the act of giving with Facebook sharing.
This is the kind of Stupid where one is led to ethical ends not by ethical thinking but by something more like ethical shopping.
This is the kind of Stupid that empties us of the urge to do social good by turning social good into social capital. You give because you expect to get.
We’ve spoken before about how the transactional nature of the market tends to govern our everyday exchange, such as it might be in the trade of ‘raising awareness’ with a ribbon and receiving plaudits for your visible compassion. It is perhaps worth remembering that ‘giving’ was not always enacted with the hope of a return.
Charity, let it be plainly said, is not the worst product of Christian thought. There are far worse things to do than good-doing, and benevolence has been a subject for some truly great theologians. (I can hear the atheists sniggering up the back and I remind them once more: for more than a millennium, theology was the only game in town. If you wanted to think about ethics, the nature of reality or even mathematics and keep most of your limbs, you had to do this within the margins of Mother Church. Please let me mention Christian thinkers or I will turn this car around and confiscate your Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt.) The theologian Thomas Aquinas thought charity the ‘most excellent of the virtues’ (Summa: 1265). And recounted St Augustine on the quality as one ‘which, when our affections are perfectly ordered, unites us to God’ and to others. So, you could say that there is an implied reward here, but it is one that is a bit better than Facebook likes. Charity unites us to our neighbours by means of God. It connects us to humanity.
And I don’t think Russell’s Kony video did that at all. This late-capitalist Christian had a very different view of charity. Here, charity was something that could keep funding his Stupid organisation to make more Stupid and misleading videos. Although, the SeaWorld video is perhaps less misleading. Here, a naked white man appears to be taking tap-and-kick instruction from an unseen panel of reality TV dance sadists. If you have not viewed the film, briefly imagine what RuPaul’s Drag Race might look like if shot on a sunny day at the mouth of hell. This YouTube moment is at once cruel and well-choreographed; Russell—whom we would later learn had been suffering the ‘dehydration’ diagnosed in the newly famous by imaginary doctors—may have temporarily lost the use of his mind but not of his jazz hands.
To naturally unpleasant persons such as me, the emergence of this peculiar pornography made absolute sense. There could be no postscript more appropriate to Russell’s KONY2012 campaign than one that had its star apparently spending himself at a major intersection. One can hate the sexual and military enslavement of African children as much as the next guy. This doesn’t mean one cannot be equally troubled by a man who seemed less eager to end injustice than he did to audition for the next season of Glee. The campaign had begun and ended in self-embrace.
Of course, this is not for a moment to say that Russell or any of the persons behind the clicks on his YouTube offering did not care for the fortunes of Ugandan orphans. It is, however, to suggest that by 2012, charity had become very non-Aquinas. These days, even Christians out to save African babies from sex slavery would rather spend time with Oprah than with God. Russell would get his time with Oprah, by the way. He talked of his ‘struggle’. As people from nice countries often do. Because feelings are important! After all they can change the world.
They have. The primacy of feelings has made our world extraordinarily Stupid. Feelings are fine in private and sometimes inevitable in public, but it seems to me they have become the raison d’être of protest. Some things in the world need changing. Not for our own comfort. Just because they’re wrong.
HR