Steely Compassion

I sat on a city bench with a community leader I respect and appreciate. I was glad for the opportunity to sit with her and talk about the state of the world, and what people like us could do about it, besides show up or organize. When I suggested compassion, she tilted her head, squinted a little, and said, wouldn’t that let them off the hook? 

And I realized we meant different things. The compassion I was thinking of lets no one off the hook. Quite the contrary; it’s meant to drive change. It’s strategic. It’s steely.

But compassion is most often understood as kindness, equated or paired with sympathy, with empathy. When I ask what it is in groups where I speak, I hear at least once that it’s “suffering-with.”

The compassion I meant that day is not that. It doesn’t require sympathy or empathy, at least not if that means sharing emotions. It doesn’t involve forgiveness. It doesn’t veer toward pity. It certainly does not require agreement with worldviews or tolerate behaviors that cause other people to suffer.

I was struck by how far apart our conceptions of compassion were, so I went looking for definitions. I found many, including an article in which seven scholars sought to establish a definition of compassion that could be used to measure efforts to drive it. The authors reached into disciplines as wide-ranging as medicine, criminal justice, psychology, and organizational development, and layered that research with spiritual teachings and theology. 

They concluded that compassion is defined by five things: Recognizing suffering, understanding that all people suffer, feeling empathy for the person suffering, tolerating uncomfortable feelings that come up in the face of suffering, and motivation to do something to alleviate suffering.

The researchers included Buddhist teachings in their review, including the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, Tenzin Gyatso, known as the Dalai Lama. There are some subtleties, though, in his conceptions that I think the five-part definition leaves out.

For the Dalai Lama, compassion is an essential ingredient for a peaceful world, “a firm commitment founded on reason” that remains steadfast even if others behave in troubling ways. Such troubling behavior requires a “strong stand,” he says, as well as “expressing your views and taking strong countermeasures,” although always without ill intent.

Actually, he says without ill intent or anger. For the Dalai Lama, anger is a weakness. With deep and due respect, I disagree. It’s an honest emotion in response to limitation and threat, and it’s often seeded in fear – another honest emotion. In action, though, I agree that anger can get problematic, especially if it blows on the coals of others’ fears.

That’s where compassion gets strategic. That’s where it gets steely, requiring tolerance for feelings that come up in the face of others’ beliefs and emotions. Steely compassion, like other conceptions, also requires motivation to do something about another person’s suffering.

But steely compassion doesn’t require fixing suffering, and it’s not – or at least not only – for that person. It’s strategic; it’s about driving change.

Numerous studies in psychology and neurology have established that when people experience compassion from others, they feel more trust and connection, less anxiety, and less fear. 

Mistrust, disconnection, and fear often underlie exclusionary, unjust worldviews and behaviors that cause serious harm to others. Steely compassion is a reliably effective strategy for reducing those behaviors and supporting shifts in those worldviews.

Like other conceptions of compassion, steely compassion is motivated to do something about suffering, just not necessarily to alleviate it. Steely compassion requires only signaling clearly, I don’t want you to suffer, and I’m not interested in causing you harm.

Fear stands down in the face of that. Connection and mutual trust become more possible.

I want to be kind, sure, but honestly, that’s not what motivates my steely compassion. I want fear-based violence and injustice to stop. There’s only so much I can do about that in my day-to-day life on structural, large systems levels. I can and I do show up and organize, and be vocal in my objections to injustice and violence.

Steely compassion gives me a tool I can wield in the places I live and work every day, a strategy no one can stop me from using. There’s science behind it, and it works; it really does. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. At the small but powerful level of relationships, I can contribute to shifting those systems so more people can thrive in evermore peace. 

Lucinda Garthwaite
Founder & Executive Director, ILI

References

“What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures.” Strauus, C., Lever Taylor, B., Gu, J., Baer, R., Jones, F., Cavanagh, K. Clinical Psychology Review. Vol. 7, July 2016.  

“Compassion as the Source of Happiness.” and “Compassion and the Individual.” Tenzin Gyatso. Official website of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet. Undated.