When Compassion Dies

COMPASSION MUST BE THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR, especially among the instigators of war. And when compassion dies, the soul dies with it. For compassion is the essential core of the human soul. Thus, the loss of compassion is at the same time a loss of soul.

Dehumanizing the “Other” is the weapon that delivers the fatal blow. Militaries, and the states they serve, use this weapon to make war possible at all. Wholesale killing of the “enemy” depends upon making them less than human, either “demonic” or so distant as to become an abstraction (as in aerial or artillery bombardments and missile attacks).

Compassion is to feel the suffering of others, to suffer with them. The word comes to us from Latin (com “with” + passio “suffer”). Its Greek sibling is sympathy (sum “with” + pathos “feeling”). Because the biblical Hebrew word for compassion links the concept to the womb, it evokes the depth of a mother’s bond with her children.

Maybe that’s why, until very recently, war has been a patriarchal phenomenon. Only a father uncertain of his paternity could possibly distance himself enough from a child to see the child as a threat, as a dangerous “other.” This is what Freud pointed to in his understanding of the so-called “Oedipus” complex, and in his speculative fantasy about primeval humanity, which he offered up in his brutal myth of the primal horde (see his Totem and Taboo).

Compassion is nowhere to be found in such a view of the world. Indeed, this extremely one-sided worldview depends so much on the abstract or “spiritual” thought of the mind, that it is cut off from the soul — and from bodies birthed by mothers.

A complete loss of compassion and soul leads not just to mass killing, but even to “war crimes.” Military training suppresses the soldier’s individuality in order to build “unit cohesion.” Each soldier’s identity merges into a greater whole, becoming a part of a “mass” identity. A soldier’s powerful bond with fellow members of the greater whole separates the soldier from the “other,” who becomes the less-than-human enemy.

In war, compassion dies, warriors suffer a tragic loss of soul, and archetypal evil rushes in to fill the void. Pray for Ukraine. Pray for Russia. Pray for the triumph of compassion and peace.

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