Theseus holds power in Athens. He is a king in myth, but the poets of the democracy honor him as a leader whose power is built on the beauty of his character. For the poets of Athens, he is the model of a reverent leader. He will stand by Oedipus, enabling the old man to live his last day as a triumph.
The play is the last one Sophocles wrote, and it tells the end of Oedipus’ story. He has arrived near Athens as an old man, blind, crippled, on his last legs. He will gather power as the day goes by and walk cheerfully out of life, leaving great blessings on Athens and great curses on his ruthless sons. Be careful how you treat helpless people; as the poet shows, they may have extraordinary powers.
The play opens as Oedipus arrives at Colonus, near the city of Athens. Trembling with fatigue, he takes his seat on a sacred mound. This will be outrageous to the local people. They will be terrified of what the gods might be prompted to do by such a sacrilege. The Athenians who live at Colonus see Oedipus not merely as a disreputable homeless beggar, violating their sacred space, but as a man who carries with him a curse on whatever ground he occupies. He has killed his father and made children with his own mother. He did not know what he was doing then, any more than he does now, taking his seat on the sacred mound. But that makes no difference to the gods.
Theseus comes as quickly as he can, out of compassion. He has learned how vulnerable a human being can be, for he has traveled much alone, and he has been helpless. From his own sad experience, he knows there is open season on the helpless wherever there is no compassion. His sufferings have taught him reverence.
Reverence entails compassion, because reverence entails understanding the weaknesses you share with other human beings. When the reverent soul is aware of human suffering, it does not turn away. “That suffering could just as easily be mine,” says the reverent soul, and feels accordingly. Then the reverent soul follows those compassionate feelings into action. Theseus will protect Oedipus.
The people of Colonus are good Athenians, but they are not as good as Theseus. They have not had his experience, and they are terrified of what the gods will do to them if they tolerate the sacrilege that this old man has invaded their sacred space with his accursed history. Anger grows with fear. They are like us; they carry a tender garden of compassion inside them, but the garden is easily overrun. When we are frightened, or angry, or simply in a great rush to get things done, we trample on our own compassion like hungry students stampeding across a garden to get to a barbecue. The people of Colonus are not better than we, and they are seriously frightened. They stand around the old man in a threatening half-ring. They don’t dare step onto the sacred mound to yank him off, so they wait for their leader, Theseus, to arrive.
Whether a crowd turns nasty or not depends on leadership. If no one is appointed leader, the one with the loudest voice, or the first to be heard, may set the tone and lead the crowd one way or the other, offering the helpless person violence or shelter. The leader who brings compassion may be the lowest-ranking person on a team. The compassionate leader need not be an officer or commander, but a commander ought to be a compassionate leader.
At about six years of age, the poet-to-be William Stafford came home from school “and told his mother that two new students had been surrounded on the playground and taunted by the others because they were black. ‘And what did you do, Billy?’ asked his mother. ‘I went and stood by them,’ Billy said.” Was that enough to temper the crowd? Probably not. Where were the teachers and the older children who should have been there to speak a word of leadership?
Luckily for Athens, the Athenians have a leader who has the respect of all—Theseus—and he will speak for compassion. Only then will Oedipus tell him what he brings to Athens:
I have a gift to give you:
My own broken body—not much to look at,
But appearances can deceive,
And it has the power to bring you great good. (576–79)
Oedipus brings a blessing to the place where he will die. If he dies in Athens, his tomb will protect the city from its enemies. But that is not why Theseus felt compassion when he first saw the old man. No one could summon up a true feeling simply to make a profit by it. Theseus responds to the offer of the blessing:
Reverence forbids me to throw away this gift;
Therefore I am inclined to allow him to stay
And incorporate him within our city.
(Addressing the people of Colonus.)
If he wants to remain here, then you
Will be responsible for his well-being. (635–39)
He leaves and the men of Colonus treat Oedipus as an honored guest, entertaining him with a lovely ode to the beauty and grace of their land at Colonus. Theseus has set a tone for the way his people will treat the old man. That is what a leader does. If you replace Theseus in the story with a ruthless autocrat, puffed up by hubris, then these same people—who are now kind to Oedipus—will probably drive him off the mound with stones, and then out of their land with sticks. The old man has been driven off by blows before, from everywhere he has gone. Until now, in the vicinity of Athens, where he has found a people who are thriving under a leader who is compassionate—as I believe any true leader must be. Leaders have sources of compassion available to them that may not be open to their followers.
Leaders are responsible for the compassion of the groups that follow them.
That is the most important message of this book.
Compassion is not available to everyone in the same way. The gods of Greek myth were believed almost never to be compassionate. That was because they were immortal and beyond serious injury; they could not suffer the way human beings suffer, and so they could not imagine—as Theseus does in this play—that they would ever be in a position to suffer. By contrast, the Christian God is believed to have lived and suffered as a human being. He did so out of compassion, and, indeed, He suffered into compassion. That is one of the many factors that make Him different from the pagan gods. The Kwan Yin of Buddhism is compassionate because she (or he) is believed to have been a human being, and to have chosen to hold back from Nirvana out of compassion. Compassion rides on experience, real or imagined.
Young adults are like pagan gods. They feel invulnerable. They have not yet learned how easily they may fall through error or accident into doing or suffering dreadful things. Groups of young men are especially dangerous; in fraternities and other organizations they continue to kill and maim each other through hazing. Groups of any age or sex are erratic. Whether they show compassion or not depends a great deal on who sets the tone of the group. The loudest mouth, or the first to act, may turn a harmless collection of folks into a hurricane of violence. Think of a lynch mob.
Wiser heads are needed to call groups to order. The wise heads may be old ones (though not all old heads are wise). Older people have more experience of life. They are in a position to know how easy it is to do wrong, and they may know more deeply what it is to suffer. But wise heads may be young, and some young people must be wise if they are to be leaders in the full ethical sense. For them, education must make up for lack of experience. Every leader-to-be should receive some education for compassion—if compassion is really a good thing.
Is compassion a good thing? You may think this is obvious, but Plato repudiated compassion because he saw it as an insult to justice, and because he confused compassion with pity. Pity is often a bad thing, but it is not the same as compassion. Compassion is the ability to understand the feelings of another, with appropriate feelings, but not necessarily with the same feelings as the other. It is a close cousin of what I have elsewhere called cognitive empathy—a complex response involving both feelings and intellect. The ancient Greeks called it by a word with roots that mean “with-knowledge”—sungnomosune.
You may have compassion for someone who has done wrong, and you may still believe that the wrongdoer should be punished. You understand how the thing happened, and your understanding will help you decide what punishment the wrongdoer really deserves. If you understand the feelings that led a criminal to crime, you can come to a more just appreciation of how bad a person the criminal really is—and therefore to a better sense of what justice demands.
Consider Ajax. For nine years Ajax has been the heart of the Greek army at Troy. He is the biggest, the bravest, and the most loyal of all the soldiers. With his shield he is large enough to shelter a number of his comrades. He will fight his way to wherever he was needed and put himself between his friends and the Trojans. In this way he saves many lives, including the king’s, at great risk to himself. Agamemnon and Odysseus have both survived thus far because of Ajax. But they have been taking Ajax for granted all along, and he will come to learn that in a most insulting way. After the death of Achilles, his armor—made by a god—is to go to the best of the Greek soldiers. Ajax of course thinks that means him. By any standard measure he is the best. But instead the armor goes to the winner of a debate on the subject, and that is Odysseus, the trickster, the man who fights more with words and ideas than with his spear.
Bitterly shamed by this, Ajax tries to kill his king, Agamemnon, along with his former friend Odysseus, both of whom he now sees as enemies. According to the traditional rules, Ajax deserves to be stoned to death and left unburied for attempting the life of the king. But Odysseus has compassion; he understands how deeply Ajax was hurt by the commander’s actions, and so he knows that Ajax is not such a bad man as others think him. Odysseus takes a leadership role and saves Ajax and his family from the worst that could be done to him.
Pity is something else. You could feel pity for Ajax’s suffering without the least understanding of what he did or why. And your pity might incline you to let him off the hook entirely—to give him clemency. But that would be a mistake. He has done wrong, and justice requires us to recognize this with a fitting penalty. Philosophers like Plato have held that justice must ignore compassion, because they fear that compassion leads to softening the prescribed penalties—to softening the rules, which they think means ignoring the rules. Softening the rules (they think) would be a breach of justice. That is going too far. Odysseus’ compassion helps him see that the rule does not apply well to Ajax in this case. After that, Odysseus’ talent at public speaking helps him persuade the others to follow his lead—toward compassion.
Compassion has a role in restoring justice when it alerts the judges to notice how poorly a rule applies to a particular case at hand. What we want from justice is a sustained sense that our community is giving all its members what is due to them. Compassion helps an officer of the law see what is really due in a particular case—and that may not be exactly what the rules prescribe.
Compassion does not call for pity or clemency. It calls for understanding. Understanding is difficult; that is why experience and education help prepare us for compassion. I cannot expect you, possibly obese reader, to feel compassion for me when I tell you I have to work to keep from losing too much weight. You probably cannot imagine what that is like, and you probably do not have a friend with my problem. But I can have compassion for you because I have enough dear friends who have suffered while trying and failing to lose weight. Even vicarious experience can make the difference.
The ancient Greeks provided education for compassion. Sophocles’ surviving plays, with one notable exception (the Electra), all celebrate compassion. In Oedipus at Colonus, Theseus sets an example of compassion for the people of Colonus, and he enjoins them to be responsible for the welfare of the homeless wreck of a man who has come among them uninvited. The people of Colonus are old men, but behind their masks they are very young performers—young men just entering the age to be soldiers. Singing and dancing in such a chorus is part of their education as Athenians. Almost all Athenian males had this experience. Through music and dance, they are developing a sense of solidarity with each other and with Athens. At the same time, they are close witnesses to the deepest suffering that a stage can show. This makes up for their lack of experience. And above all, they have been trained as spokesmen for the shared wisdom of Athens.
In another play of Sophocles, Philoctetes, the Chorus takes the lead. Faced with a helpless invalid, who is a former soldier in the Greek army, the Chorus members are the first to feel and show compassion. They tell their commander, who is only eighteen:
Have a heart sir. He’s told of such suffering.
An ordeal I’d wish on no friend of mine.
And the young officer replies:
It would be shameful for me to seem less
Considerate than you in helping a stranger in need.
(Sophocles, Philoctetes, 507–8, 524–25)
In all Greek tragic plays the Chorus shows compassion for the sufferings of the main characters. In this they take the lead for the audience. Our games today have leaders in cheer, cheerleaders; ancient Greek theater had grief leaders who gave the audience their cues.
The tragic wisdom of the Chorus goes beyond compassion. We have seen earlier how they speak against tyranny and in favor of democratic leadership. Here is a famous example:
I pray the god will not dissolve
What is good for the city, our wrestling for power.
(Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 879–81)
The “wrestling for power” is the democratic process that brings now one leader, now another, into prominence. With tyranny, by contrast, there is just one man exulting in power, growing in power, growing therefore in hubris, and so heading for a great fall (see p. 86).
In Oedipus at Colonus, the Chorus will watch a shocking instance of the hubris that grows with tyranny. Creon will arrive with an armed force from Thebes. He will tread on sacred space, seize suppliants by violence, and try to abduct them. He is ruthless, utterly devoid of compassion, and contemptuous of sacred things. He will not succeed in this, and the Chorus knows that he will come to a bad end. Hubris has a high price. Athenians have already seen what will happen to him in the play Antigone—written earlier, but depicting the end of the saga of Oedipus and his children, when Creon loses his wife and sole remaining child, and comes to see that he is to blame for his own disaster.
Few people have the opportunity to be tyrants, so the Chorus must give voice to a wisdom that applies to all of us. Here is the core of tragic wisdom expressed by the Chorus:
The bright stars do not linger over mortals in the night;
Both poverty and wealth shall fade away.
They move in turn, joy and loss
Arriving at the same door.
(Sophocles, Women of Trachis, 131–35)
In those few lines are reasons for hope, dread, or compassion, depending in your position in the cycle of joy and loss.
The young men of Athens perform lines like these and stand close to enactments of the greatest suffering that a poet could imagine. This gives them the opportunity to learn reverence and compassion, riding on the experience of the poets and the collective wisdom of Athens. Witness and performance go a long way to make up for lack of experience. Nothing will force these young men to be reverent or compassionate against their will, but they deserve an opportunity to learn, and Athens has given it to them. Their protected young lives would never have given them such an invitation for learning.
So much for ancient Athens. What about us: what can we offer by way of education for compassion? Not what we are offering now, in either college or secondary school. Whatever we do offer will have to be powerful enough to counterbalance the increasingly ruthless tone of American civilization, which our students pick up from movies and video games and, worse, from parents and politicians. Education for compassion will probably not come from home or church, and it will certainly not be a by-product of the technical or vocational training that is so heavily supported by politicians.
Everyone is a leader-to-be, because anyone can speak up or make the gesture that could move others toward compassion. As in Athens, everyone should have the education of a leader. To make up for lack of experience—lack of suffering—leaders-to-be should have a broad education in the humanities, including both classic and recent texts. Ancient texts provide a useful distance that opens the most delicate issues (such as incest) to discussion. But whatever they read and discuss, students will have to see it as applicable to their own lives. Most of us who teach in the humanities will have to change our ways in order to meet this goal. Few of our students will have any use for academic disputes about manuscript readings in the Greek plays, but all of them have something to learn from Sophocles’ treatment of Oedipus.
We can’t make our youngsters play roles in Greek plays, but we can ask that they read the plays, discuss them, and apply them to their own lives. In my experience good teaching never leaves students passive, but engages them. One of the best ways to engage students in the humanities is through performance. When you perform a text, you make it your own, and you are more likely to keep its wealth in the treasure house of your mind.
Whether through reading or performance, the humanities can supply the vicarious experience that grounds compassion. For this reason, we must insist that leaders-to-be are exposed to the best of the humanities and in the best ways.
Second, demand the ability to communicate clearly and with feeling. What good is your compassion if you cannot pass it on to the people you are trying to lead? Speaking ability is essential, but it has been neglected in American education during most of the last century. Few teachers or professors are qualified to teach skill at public speaking, and all too many students think they already have it.
Third, imagination. Theseus could imagine a future in which his position was reversed. His experience helped him do that, but he added a vital ingredient—imagination. Education for compassion should foster imagination through creativity. We are losing ground in this area, as the arts are pushed to one side in favor of the short-term gains expected from technical and vocational training.
Fourth, practice. Leaders-to-be can be leaders now, if they find the right setting in or out of the classroom. In the reverent classroom, students are called on to be leaders, and in their roles as leaders to practice paying attention to each other.
Last, a word about ethics courses. I have little hope that courses in philosophy will make a difference, not as we teach them now. I am optimistic, however, about the use of fine-grained case studies that can give students vicarious experience and, at the same time, provide them with opportunities for practicing decision-making. Such courses are most credible when taught by veterans—people who have lived through situations like those to be studied, have made compassionate decisions, have taken risks in order to live ethical lives, and have succeeded in their chosen careers.
In short, education for compassion is whatever it takes to help people become more like Theseus in this play. But education often fails. Even Theseus will be ruthless, later in his life. In a fit of jealous anger he will call down a curse that will kill his only son. We are human, and nothing we do will make us perfectly good. That is no reason to give up the effort—no reason to forget about compassion. We owe it to each other to do what we can, and part of what we can do for compassion is education. We owe it to each other to give ourselves opportunities to change for the better, whether we take those opportunities or not. Some people do change for the better.
Changing people is very hard to do, and even when people have cultivated compassion in themselves, they cannot be relied upon to stay in character. Your student could become very much like Theseus and still be swept away in a ruthless mob, or reduced by fear and anger to treat human beings like cockroaches, as so easily happens in war. I am human, I succumb to stress, and all too easily I lose my grip on what I thought was my moral character. Part of my vulnerability as a human being is this: I cannot rely on my character to see me through. I too could be too busy to remember my compassion as I hurry down the road, leaving the wounded man to be cared for by the Samaritan.
Chris Hedges, whose background includes service in a ghetto, theological training, and war reporting, writes of his work in Roxbury:
It was a time I dreamed of being good. But this was idolatry of the self, the worship not of God but of my own virtue. I had to learn my own complicity in oppression, my own sinfulness, how evil lurked within me, how when I was afraid I could turn on the weak and powerless. (Hedges, Losing Moses [2005] p. 36)
Being afraid is worst, courage is best, but I have no good within me that is totally dependable. Luckily, I do not have to depend on my own character alone. We have each other, and we can organize—we can set up human systems to slow me down when I am in danger of going the wrong way. Those too may fail, but we must do what we can on behalf of compassion.
There are two ways to make people safer drivers. One is to change people through driver education. The other is to change the situations in which we put drivers, through engineering. We can change ourselves a little through education, but we can change our situation a great deal through engineering. Better-designed roads and cars have made us safer drivers. That does not mean we should give up on driver education. Education matters. But so do situations.
Similarly, teachers know two ways to reduce cheating on papers and exams. The least effective way is to lecture the students about the evils of cheating. The most effective way is to change the situation. Reduce incentives for cheating, engineer assignments in such a way that cheating becomes more difficult, and help the students learn so well that they feel no need to cheat.
When a commander insists on perfection in every training exercise, her subordinates are likely to lie to her, and the habit of lying taints the military culture. Good commanders do not insist on perfection. Rather than offering academic courses about why you should never lie, they choose to provide a safer moral environment for their subordinates. The subordinates already know they should not lie, but if you insist that they report a perfect operation every time, they will lie to you.
Everyone on a team is responsible for the moral environment in which they operate. But leaders should know that they bear a special responsibility for the moral health of their followers; they should do what they can to make their moral environments safer. Just safer; forget perfect safety. A moral environment is safer when leaders and followers are spurred on by values that they share, rather than by carrots and sticks, when those values bear moral scrutiny. In addition, a safe environment should meet at least these conditions:
1. All team members have the training and resources needed for their jobs.
2. No one is expected to do the impossible.
3. Members of the team communicate with each other.
4. Members of the team help each other catch mistakes.
5. Leaders communicate high standards to the team.
6. Leaders listen freely and without judgment to what the followers have to tell them; no one is afraid to speak up.
7. Leaders are well informed about what the team is doing.
8. Leaders follow up when standards are violated.
A fellow veteran of the war in Vietnam told me that he had an opportunity to kill a prisoner, and he was raging to kill the man in revenge for the death of his best friend. I asked him why he did not pull the trigger, and he said simply that he knew he would have been severely punished had he done so. He felt no compassion at the time, when his mind was rioting with anger and grief. But he knew that his commander enforced high standards, and so, even though he did not feel compassionate, he did the compassionate thing. For that he is grateful: one less burden on his conscience. Leadership saved the prisoner’s life and the veteran’s conscience.
Leaders take responsibility for the ethical qualities of the teams they lead. They do this by example, by specific commands, by training or education, by setting rules, and by following up. In any organization I have served, but especially in military ones, everyone knows which rules matter to the people in charge. “Command emphasis,” it was called. In one unit in which I served there was command emphasis on wearing appropriate headgear. Nothing wrong with that—see p. 187. But there was little emphasis on respecting the people of Vietnam, and that was a shame. American civilization can be ruthless.
We know now that the abuses at Abu Ghraib did not reflect the wishes of the chain of command. But we also know that the command team failed to prevent such abuses. No special training, no clear standards of behavior, no oversight, no follow-up. The Independent Panel to Review Detention Operations reported, “The aberrant behavior on the night shift in Cell Block 1 of Abu Ghraib would have been avoided with proper training, leadership, and oversight.” The consensus since then has been that these abuses reflected a monstrous failure of leadership at many levels.
That conclusion did not protect low-ranking individuals found guilty of abuse at Abu Ghraib. They alone were actually punished. No sentences were given the commanders, and some people believed that rank-and-file soldiers were not to blame. I agree that the commanders should have been punished, but I do not agree that the soldiers who committed the abuse should be let off on that account. Individuals are responsible for what they do, and individual malefactors should be punished—no matter how badly the command team fails at leadership.
Philip Zimbardo understood the moral hazards facing prison guards as a result of an experiment he conducted at Stanford. He divided the students in the experiment into prisoners and guards, not anticipating the cruelty that the guards would soon begin to show to their prisoners. He came to believe that the guards at Abu Ghraib were innocent, that it was not their fault they turned bad, and he testified to that effect. Neither the courts nor the military accepted his argument. In defending his view, Zimbardo used a striking image: the abusers at Abu Ghraib were as innocent as cucumbers dropped in a barrel of vinegar:
Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, “No, I want to retain my sweetness.” But it’s hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel. My sense is that we have the evil barrel of war, into which we’ve put this evil barrel of this prison—it turns out actually all of the military prisons have had similar kinds of abuses—and what you get is the corruption of otherwise good people.
The evidence is against Zimbardo’s claim. People are not cucumbers. A human being can retain some sweetness in a sour environment. After all, Joe Darby, another prison guard at Cell Block 1, did object to the abuse, and he did so strongly enough to take the risk of exposing it and incriminating his friends. In other parts of the prison, abuse was absent or much less common. Even in Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment at Stanford, some of the young guards behaved well. They were not cucumbers, and they deserve credit for that. The ones who went wrong deserve some measure of blame. But blaming individuals does not let the command team off the hook. The command team put the young people in the barrel without preparation—and then acted surprised when some were corrupted. What did they expect? If you throw dozens of people overboard from a vessel without lifejackets, you must expect some of them to drown. If you throw young, untrained soldiers into a morally corrupting environment, you must expect some of them to go bad. If you throw people overboard, you owe them some means of survival; and if you throw people into prison jobs, you owe them a moral lifejacket. So Zimbardo is right this far: when otherwise good young people are made guards in the prisons that war creates, a good number of them will become abusive. We can reasonably expect, on the basis of research, that this will happen.
I wish we could smash the barrels, abstain from war altogether, and stop detaining people we consider our enemies. But if we do go to war, and if we do detain people in the course of war, then whoever is in command should take responsibility for the moral health of the troops. I have no quarrel with individual responsibility: the guards who were abusive at Abu Ghraib deserved to be punished. But the commanders made criminals of the young people entrusted to them, and making someone a criminal is far worse, morally, than being one. At Abu Ghraib, the commanders were not leaders. They failed to take responsibility for their troops, and they failed to provide them a safer environment, to their shame and the shame of the nation.
Is this an isolated case? I don’t think so. When I discuss examples with my students I see that they too—not just the “bad apples” at Abu Ghraib—are infected by the growing ruthlessness of our civilization. We need to look more closely in the mirror.
When Theseus in the play hears about the situation at Colonus, he knows immediately how much depends on him. That is why he rushes to the scene, dropping important ritual business. There he finds the homeless man ringed by frightened, angry citizens. He knows the damage a mob tends to do in fear or anger, because he has felt it himself. So now he gives the orders for compassion, and the crowd does not become a mob. Evoking the beauty of the place, they make the old man at home there, for the last day of his life.
We find in the Veda that when Badhva was questioned by Bashkali he explained Brahman by simply not speaking: “He [Bashkali] asked: ‘Sir, teach me.’ He remained silent When he was asked a second and a third time, he replied: ‘I am telling you, but you do not understand. This self is silent’”
—Shankara,
on the Brahma Sutra 3.2.17