Pity as Vice
Necessary but Somewhat Ungrounded Thoughts
Quick Note about the Language: Having been raised intellectually in the Western tradition of philosophy, I am more used to this issue than others might be, but I still want to acknowledge it. Arendt does not critically address the gender bias latent in the tradition. “Man” is, therefore, often the stand-in she uses when talking about an individual. Given the historical period she discusses—and the many gendered issues that appeared in these revolutions—I elected to keep the language in tact partly out of habit and partly because I do not think myself the right person to try to unpack those issues. It does not seem to be the sort of thing I can do justice to.
Introduction: Let me Remind You What this Blog is
Before I get into the heart of this piece, I think it would be best if I took a moment to remind you what this blog is meant to be. This blog is not meant to be an infallible source on the subjects I discuss on it, and I do not make any claim to expertise. Rather, I mean to bring attention to points that might otherwise be overlooked. This is why I have a few pieces posted and more in the works looking at various podcasts and the lessons underneath the surface. Perhaps I could be considered an expert on podcasting simply because the pond is so small and shallow that any moderately sized fish would look like a giant, but when it comes to the lenses I use to examine these things, I have never been properly trained to use them. There are implications to that. This is a weakness that I cannot accurately assess and that you–as a reader–need to be aware of.
It is worth stating this now because I am unintentionally presenting myself in proximity to someone who is an expert. Years ago, I had the privilege of being introduced to the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt by Dana Villa, currently the Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Villa is an internationally renowned scholar of Hannah Arendt and released a definitive guidebook to her work in 2021 through Routledge. And it is also worth noting that some years before, he was an editor on a more collaborative volume about Arendt as well. I won’t deny that his understanding of Arendt–or what he was able to impart during our brief overlap–has been foundational to my own, but regardless, all the errors committed in this piece are entirely mine. And I do not doubt that there will be some. I am deliberately extrapolating and reaching beyond the reference frames in which Arendt designed her argument. There are implications to that, but in this context, those unspoken implications are the point.
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On My History with Hannah Arendt
Photograph of Hannah Arendt in 1933
My interest in Arendt was not the result of Professor Villa’s teaching, though I do think he is an incredible professor whose strengths lie in encouraging his students to challenge their inherited notions and understandings of the world. Perhaps they will hold up after some scrutiny, but it is only through scrutiny that they will grow. I offer that assessment of his teaching with emphasis. It was life changing for me. It is the sort of gift that does not immediately make itself immediately known or strike a student as important while they work on the essays he assigns. It is only in hindsight that its effects can be felt, assuming the student is truly open to the lessons he offered. In any event, because Arendt was not the only theorist taught in his class, it was far from a guarantee that I would latch onto her work as intensely as I did despite his expertise and presentation. In fact, while it was her book On Revolution (1963) that won me over, that was not the first book of hers that we read in that course. The first book we read in his class was Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). And there are many things that could be said about it–both positive and negative–but on the whole, I was not engaged enough in that text to find the sort of motivations that makes one spend every cent they make from their theater job on every book that a writer produced, which was the degree of passion I had for Arendt’s work as I closed out my college years. It was On Revolution that won my heart so fully. Or, rather, it was a specific section of On Revolution that did so.
There is a passage of this book that–for the longest time–I wanted to wear as a tattoo despite how woefully impractical that would have been. The line reads, “Pity, taken as a spring of virtue has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself” (Arendt, OR, 79). And it was that line that captured me. Once I read it, I was not exactly a devotee, but I was listening.
I remember where I was when I first read that line. Despite how ordinary that moment was, it is burned in my mind. I was sharing a breakfast table with a very dear friend early one Thursday morning while we worked on some assignments. She was working on her Korean, and I was doing my readings for Professor Villa’s class. It was just in a few hours, and while I did not mean to procrastinate on his assigned readings as often as I did, some things were just not in my control. Working theater meant that my schedule was inconsistent and somewhat unpredictable (though that might have been more about my manager or that specific theater’s schedule than the nature of the profession). Consequently, the hours that I had every intention of devoting to my studies would randomly be demanded at said job, and I had to adapt. That wasn’t a huge deal. I had enough time to get all of my reading done, but I didn’t like cutting it that close. There were implications to that rush. In this context, the implication was that I was having a life-altering encounter while me and my best friend were still half-asleep and nibbling at very dry scones.
I stopped mid-bite and broke the silence of our table to read aloud, “Pity, taken as a spring of virtue has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself” (Arendt, OR, 79). My breath caught in my throat. I was stunned. I was also relieved. My friend felt the transformation in me as well.
That may seem dramatic, but this wasn’t the first time I had encountered this understanding of pity so much as this was the first time I had encountered someone bold enough to say what I already knew to be true. I knew pity. I knew it better than most twenty-year-olds did. It was what I was hit with when my father died. It was the force that complicated my grief. It was the poison everyone served me while patting themselves on the back. And it was that back patting and the general acceptance given to this behavior that then fueled my confusion and socially punished me for my completely valid emotions. I was not supported; I was pitied for my loss. That pity came with a great deal of suffering. It alleviated nothing. And everyone told me to be okay with it, but there was Hannah Arendt saying ‘fuck that shit.’
Granted, she was saying it in a different context. Her complaints about pity were nested in a larger conversation about the French Revolution and how bending the revolution’s political goals towards people’s biological urges might have been well-meant but were also what destroyed the fledging republic before it could get its feet off the ground. But regardless of the context, her statement was blunt and to the point. That meant a lot to me. It also opens up a paragraph, which draws the eye to it, which also meant a lot to me even if–from an editorial standpoint–it had to be that way. And so, it felt to me like a small act of rebellion or a protest in and of itself. I latched onto it. And out of appreciation for what she said, I latched onto her every word, buying them all with my meager theater paychecks.
This quote and the ensuing devotion to Arendt’s work became a staple of my identity in college and some time after. And to this day, I do think Arendt’s theories are somewhat fundamental to the way I view the world and to the ensuing political-based fictions that will come from my worldview. To that end, it is likely worth explaining where these idea came from and what they mean to me. But of course, let me reiterate, this is not meant to be a definitive or wholly accurate interpretation of Arendt’s work. It is a reading of that passage that is, likely, ‘unintended’ by the initial writer. For anyone who does want to learn about Hannah Arendt’s political theories including her thoughts on political revolutions, I recommend the one who taught me, his lessons now more accessible than ever through his recent book on the subject.
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On Revolutions… Of Thought and Otherwise
Arendt considered herself a political theorist not a philosopher by nature, and in describing political phenomena or laying out her theories, she used various historical events and actions to ground her insights. The most obvious example of this would be one of her more famous work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) where-to explain at the most basic level–she examined the roots of Stalinism and Nazism across three essays that were not just shaped by history but her own experience as a Jewish woman born in Germany who had to flee the Nazis, first to France and then to the United States.
On Revolution (1963) was published twelve years later. In it, she presents a comparison of the two most famous and defining revolutions of the 18th century: the American and French Revolutions. While these two revolutions are linked historically and even ideologically–to an extent–considerations or comparisons like this were and still are few and far between. It may seem like an apple and oranges sort of comparison. These two revolutions feel different, took place on different continents, and have wildly different mythos. More importantly, their outcomes are staunchly different as well. On one hand, the American Revolution did accomplish its goals, and the ensuing nation has endured. But across the centuries, its successes have largely been taken for granted while the French Revolution is routinely dissected and was frequently emulated despite its faults. Its faults being that not only was the monarchy later restored, overthrown again, etc etc. Most relevantly, the revolution plummeted France into the Reign of Terror in which at least 300,000 suspects were arrested, 17,000 were officially executed, and approximately 10,000 people died in prison without any sort of trial (Britannica), which is not to say or even imply that the trials during the Reign of Terror were anything that resembled fair and just. It is to say, however, that the official body count is likely higher or the concept is simply more complex than it appears at first glance. With that in mind, it does not seem unfair to say that despite all of the principles French Revolutionaries defined and presented to a global stage, the revolution itself was a failure. On the other hand, the American Revolution–for all that might have happened in the preceding centuries–was a success. And yet, there is a clear and noticeable preference for the former and a sequestering if not discounting of the lessons presented in the latter.
Once again, I must remind you that a more in depth understanding of Arendt’s argument can be found in Villa’s book. There is only so much I can go into in this context and keep this essay’s readability intact, and if I went beyond that boundary, I would only be regurgitating Villa’s argument anyway, so there is no point. For this context, I will simply state that Arendt believed that the turning point in the French Revolution–the point after which everything went wrong–was when the leaders of this new government shifted their focus away from establishing freedom and spheres of proper political action in favor of showing compassion to the masses. The American Founding Fathers never did this. In some ways, there was no temptation to do so. The sort of poverty known by French peasants was never experienced by American colonists. And so, there was no sort of pressure–social or internal–to address these plights. But regardless of the why, Arendt argues that staying the course secured the success for the American Revolution.
Interestingly enough, both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were niche historical interests of mine. And while that is interesting, it leads to a broader picture. At this point, it may be worth clarifying where I was when I first read this specific book. This essay cannot go on without you understanding the broader puzzle at the crux of this unintended reading of an important work of political theory.
To repeat myself, On Revolution was the second book of hers that I read, but the first one left little to no impact on me. And that was after–in the class lecture that coincided with that first book–I learned Arendt’s family history. Namely, that her father died when she was young. That piqued my interest. It was familiar. My father died when I was thirteen, and I had found that losing a paternal figure at such a young age, particularly one that took his responsibilities and duties to his children seriously, was both a defining and isolating experience. Undoubtedly, the person I have become was profoundly shaped by that loss. On the other hand, it was hard for me to explain the nature of this shift or effect. It felt as if a vocabulary for this change or loss did not exist. If it did, it was not one I had access to. It was not used around me or by anyone in my vicinity. In lieu of it, I gravitated towards others who had known that loss. If I could not explain it to others, then I needed to rely on having company around me that knew that specific hurt just as well as I did.
This detail did put Hannah Arendt on my radar, but considering that understanding and engaging with her political philosophy was an entirety of my personality my senior year of university, it certainly doesn’t explain enough. When you look back across history, thinkers/philosophers/writers/etc are seemingly more likely to have lost a parent young. Whether it’s because more people were dying young or because there is something to be said about going through that specific trauma and then making that specific career choice is not clear nor something I want to think about. But my point remains that I did not have to rely on Arendt for that specific type of consolation if her work did not speak to me, which that first book did not. A portion of On Revolution did not. But it was that specific quote “Pity, taken as a spring of virtue has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself” (Arendt, OR, 79) that changed my mind. I knew what she meant, just in a different sort of way. And we shared in that knowledge.
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On the French Revolution (Not so Briefly)
I recognize fully that an in-depth, working knowledge of the French Revolution is not a fair thing to assume that a reader of this essay has. Arendt and those who discuss On Revolution often make this assumption, but they are writing in a different context for a different audience. For a quick crash course or refresher (depending on your experience), I would recommend the OverSimplified YouTube channel, not just for its information but for its style and humor. OverSimplified covered the French Revolution in a duology of videos. The first part can be found here and the second part here.
To summarize things as briefly as I can, pre-revolutionary France was in financial ruin. Lofty spending by the French monarchy on both domestic luxuries and international war had left the country on the verge of bankruptcy. And what funds the crown had coming in came entirely from taxes levied on the common folk, otherwise known as the Third Estate. Wealth was concentrated in the other two estates, however. The Clergy being the First Estate, and the aristocracy being the Second Estate. These two estates, despite their means, were hardly taxed. Relatively speaking, they paid nothing. Perhaps the problem and the solution is obvious, but French kings have never been all that known for standing up against the first two estates, making that potential and obvious solution impossible. This financial strain was then worsened with bad weather that drastically reduced the amount of wheat that was able to be harvested. Bread was a staple of the French peasant’s diet, and its loss pushed the hungry masses into near or outright starvation.
The king at the time was King Louis XVI who–by many accounts–did not have the temperament or desire to be king. Consequently, not having an idea or the resolve to handle the issue himself, he called a meeting of the Estates General seemingly in hopes that they would sort it out themselves.
The Estates General can be thought of or understood–for the purposes of this brief explanation–as the closest thing to a legislative branch of the pre-revolution French government. That being said, meetings of the Estates General were incredibly rare, and this legislative body was ripe with inequalities and general poor design. Effectively, in this majority rule situation, there were three votes to be counted: one vote per estate. This shifted the frustration of a denied solution from the king to the Third Estate, and one can see how and why.. Quite obviously, the Third Estate would want to raise taxes on the first two or lower their own taxes, measures that were constantly blocked by the other two estates. And if the problem is not abundantly clear already, it would be worth noting that the Third Estate represented approximately 98% of France’s population, the portion of the population that had nothing to their name but a high tax bill.
The inability to act and all the frustrations therein are what birthed the French Revolution. Much like their counterparts in America, French Revolutionaries–who were largely concentrated in the Third Estate–wanted a real political realm or arena in which they could argue their beliefs and advocate for their own wellbeing without being undermined by obsolete traditions and the vested interest of an often malicious few.
In Arendt’s estimation, had the revolutionaries stayed on this course of action, the French Revolution would have actually created a new beginning for France. Being that no one ever truly wins the what-if game, it is hard if not impossible to know what would have transpired had revolutionaries avoided what Arendt thought was their fatal error. To Arendt, when the focus shifted from establishing and acting on the Rights of Man as laid out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) to “the rights of Sans-Culottes,” the revolution was effectively doomed (Arendt, OR, 51). The end goal was no longer freedom or a political sphere in which citizens could act in their own interest and sway the broader societal movement in their favor. Rather, the goal was abundance counter to the deprivation that so many in the Third Estate had always known. Freedom was surrendered to necessity, “to the urgency of the life process itself” (Arendt, OR, 50), which might have been understandable, but it was not actionable. Poverty, specifically in this era in French history, would have been better solved through an established administration devoted to ensuring access to commodities already being produced and technological advances aimed at producing more (Arendt, OR, 55 and Villa 246). If you think back to an earlier portion of this section, poverty was not an issue because there was no vote to eliminate poverty, at least not in the beginning. Rather, poverty was an issue because of the resource hoarding and coveting of the first two estates. Their refusal to take on the burden of supporting their own benefits put the strain on everyone else. An administrative body that enforced more accurate records and the implementation of more just policies would have solved that issue. And in other circumstances, technological innovations can better protect and increase wheat yields or the production of whatever resource stands as the thin barrier between peace and a disaster.
[Given the course of so many other revolutionary attempts, this shift also curtailed the aspirations of many other revolutions that were to follow. However, I must point out that discerning or detailing the influence of the French example and ideals on what comes after is more complicated than what I can do in this context and also not the point of this piece.]
Portrait of Maximilien Robespierre, circa 1790, unidentified artist
At this point, it is worth noting that these French Revolutionaries were, themselves, not amongst the destitute. For example, one of the most famous revolutionaries Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre could be considered, by modern standards, middle class. He was a lawyer who came from a family of lawyers. The plight of the lower classes, however, was always visible. This would have been something readily apparent to him and his compatriots, but this was not something they had ever experienced for themselves. With the downfall of the monarchy, this divide–the fact that this new government was more ‘for the people’ than it was actually ‘by the people’–was all the more obvious (Arendt, OR, 64). In some sense, most of the French populace cannot or did not feel the true weight of freedom, like someone in Robespierre’s situation could, but instead could only feel the weight of their own poverty.
Robespierre and those who believed themselves to be aligned with the Sans-Culotte saw the beauty of that metaphor but not its inaccuracies. If these struggles can be conceptualized as chains, then they must be conceptualized as different types of chains with different keys that can exist and be dismantled independent of each other. It is worth noting that though the situation was dire, breaking the privileges of the nobility opened up their wheat stores for distribution, which would have alleviated some though not all of the suffering of the Sans-Culotte. Therein was the solution. Perhaps it was not that specific idea, but it was in that idea’s variations. However, when the capacity for suffering or the ability to recognize said something became a political virtue, this distinction between types of chains also became political despite how incompatible this new virtue was with what Arendt would know as politics. (A belief that I find persuasive and is highly influential to my own.)
Arendt saw the political realm as a largely external one, or external to the self, which is a bit of an extrapolation on my part. Arendt holds that political spaces have to exist in what she conceptualizes in The Human Condition (1958) as The Public Realm or the realm of things held in common. This includes the world around us and things that can be observed jointly or otherwise experienced in conjunction with one’s fellow citizens. Rather than being a realm of beliefs or philosophical musings, it has to be a realm of displayable action and recourse against or among this shared world. Holding things in common, sharing the world, makes debate and deliberation possible. This debate and deliberation, particularly of those who are internally different, is a hallmark of what it means to have a political society (Arendt, HC, 7-8). To be even more clear, Arendt does not think that politics can exist in a wordless state or in a state of so-called transcendence precisely because the foundational, common world is either not present or actively dismissed and devalued (Arendt, HC, 55).
The capacity to recognize suffering, however, is largely an internal virtue, as is the willingness to tackle it. This is true regardless of whether one sees it as a Christian duty (which is an example of the aforementioned transcendence Arendt was so critical of) or just as a more religiously neutral moral imperative. Whether or nor it was because he was aware of this incompatibility or vaguely sensed it, Robespierre did try to adapt to this unspoken challenge. He tried to make the recognition of suffering a political virtue by adapting an age-old nationalist rhetoric surrounding a common enemy. Citizens of a nation can more easily come together when they see a potential invading force looming over the horizon. Historically, for the French, this would have been the English. As an English threat or potential invasion loomed, French citizens clung towards all that they thought of as French. But it is worth noting that, in the traditional French narrative as well as all other uses of this trope, this common enemy is out in the common world. [It is not an example that runs against Arendt’s conception but rather supports it.]
For Robespierre, selfishness was the enemy of good Frenchmen. And in this, you could say that he was drawing from the revolution’s previous villain. The First and Second Estates were greedy and selfish. That part could not be denied, but with the breaking of their thrones, this trait became less of an immediate force working against the good of the nation and a sort of boogeyman. It was the figure in the dark that could be used to frighten the docile into proper behavior. Robespierre proclaimed that selflessness and altruism were the answers to the selfishness that he rattled the French saber against. And to his credit, Robspierre firmly believed this and made it a matter of law that the heart, as difficult to know or conceptualize as it is, was the true source of political virtue (Villa 253).
That creates an almost insurmountable problem. The heart cannot be observed or seen, and so its workings cannot be known. And consequently, proving that one has these political virtues is an impossible request. It was unfortunate then that proof had become the prerequisite or requirement for citizenry in this new era of France. In the absence of it, one is potentially a traitor, vulnerable to death by guillotine, which is exactly what happened to so many in the Reign of Terror.
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On Pity
I still must discuss where pity belongs in all of this. Its role is not readily apparent in the layout above, and yet, it is–allegedly–a key part of this discussion as I have presented it. Part of this obscurity lies in the intermingling of three different terms: pity, compassion, and solidarity. You could say that Robespierre felt either pity or compassion for the Sans-Culotte. Judging from that sentence alone, those words seem to be interchangeable. And to say that Robespierre wanted to stand in solidarity with the Sans-culotte once again sounds like the same sentence with a slight verb shift. To Arendt, however, the experience of compassion and pity were completely different ones (Arendt, OR, 75). In fact, Arendt believed that “pity may be the perversion of compassion” (Arendt, OR, 78).
Compassion, in and of itself, is a very personal experience, connection, or passion, as Arendt calls it. When defining it, she grounds her explanation of the phenomenon in not only the French example but in other literary examples as well. For the purpose of this essay, I will be a bit more blunt in my summation. The short of it is that compassion is a bridge between someone in comfort or who has only known comfort and those who suffer or are suffering. It is the opening of “the heart of the sufferer to the sufferings of others, whereby it established and confirmed the ‘natural’ bond between men” (Arendt, OR 71). In this context, it is worth noting that this ‘between men’ is between specific individuals and not a plurality or–as Arendt understood it–a singularity of individuals lumped underneath the same term or umbrella. This interpersonal element is critical to understanding compassion. After all, we are not talking about suffering as a concept but as an affliction. To feel compassion for another is “to be stricken with the suffering of [that] someone else as though it were contagious” (Arendt, OR, 75). In compassion, the distance between the compassionate and the sufferer has to be bridged–figuratively, yes–enough for this risk of communicable suffering to be real.
It is worth noting here that Arendt thinks this bridging of a gap renders it incompatible with politics. Political matters require some worldly space, something outside of individuals that they can hold in common rather than existing as beings in a shared, common singularity. When one thinks about Robespierre and the Jacobins in this light, it is easier to see where Arendt thinks they went wrong. Wanting a neighbor to have food is noble. Feeling compassion for the starving peasant outside of your boarding house is good. It is a critical interpersonal connection shared between figurative brothers. This sort of “co-suffering” can be worked out in ways that are not or cannot be considered political. Those figurative brothers can help each other through a sharing of resources.
But compassion “cannot be touched off by the suffering of a whole class or a people” (Arendt, OR, 75). To Arendt, trying to have compassion with a mass of people defies the nature of the passion. One cannot create an intimate connection on that scale with so many different individuals. And if one tried, they would be confronted with a matter of scale. That scale can be defanged, as it were, through ‘depersonalization’ or a forgoing of the individual details that set individuals apart from each other. However, if one has to “depersonalize” the sufferers, then the distance between observer and sufferer is never bridged. The sufferer has been relocated to some conceptual place where they cannot be reached.
And this is why Arendt describes pity as the perversion of compassion. Pity is the result when the intimacy of alleged co-suffering is lost. Pity keeps its distance, and this distance defines its perspective. From where the one who pities stands, he “does not look upon both fortune and misfortune, the strong and the weak, with an equal eye” (Arendt, OR, 79). These distinctions/demarcations/categories are important to pity. Without them, without the presence of misfortune, pity cannot exist (Arendt, OR, 79). But do we need pity to exist, one might ask as a follow up question. The anatomy of a sentiment might be foreboding, but if the sentiment is due for extinction, then it should not be too much of a concern. Therein lies the bigger problem. Because it is a sentiment–a mental feeling or emotion–one might enjoy it for its own sake and not because it produces anything or contributes something to the outside world. That character is the source of the concern we should have. Pity can only exist in divides defined by misfortune, hurt, and suffering and offers no incentive to fix those gaps. In fact, the gratification it offers the pitier can only exist when others are suffering. The gratification is motivation to not actually improve the situation of those who suffer because where would you be if they were no longer suffering? Hence why Arendt says, “Pity, taken as the spring of virtue, has proved to possess a greater capacity of cruelty than cruelty itself” (Arendt, OR, 79). Pity cannot exist outside of cruelty. In its absence, cruelty has ceased to exist entirely while pity continues to crave it.
From there, Arendt goes on to explain what solidarity is, which is the route the Jacobins tried to take in regards to the Sans-Culotte, but Robespierre’s pity for the Sans-Culotte was never far from the forefront of the revolution. And, of course, it did nothing. By design, pity is not meant to solve anything. So not only was the revolution lost, but nothing was gained for the trouble.
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On Pity As I Knew It
As I frequently say, my father died when I was a child. I was a newly minted thirteen year old which some do not define as a child, but I know is a child. In hindsight, I would be a better judge of where I was in my development back then than a stranger is now, but even back then, I knew I was much too young to go through something like that. I knew that feelings of grief were not something I had ever been taught, and even if I had been taught any sort of cursory lesson on the subject, I would still have been woefully unprepared to take on something so much larger and beyond me. I needed help. But I did not get help. What I got was pity.
And I suppose I did make for a pitiful sight. I was a child who had lost a parent, specifically the parent that would have provided the most protection and guidance. My mother was an immigrant. She didn’t know the way things go in the United States. She did not know how to navigate the school system or insurance. She needed help for so much of what went into daily life, and I was always the one to provide it. Inserting oneself into this gap is a somewhat common or shared experience amongst the children of immigrants like myself. It is unfortunate that we are better equipped to handle these challenges than our parents are, but it is what it is. There are advantages that come from being raised in a world, specifically benefits in familiarity and socialization. That is not to say that any sort of parentification is okay. I am a firm believer that it is not. There are other strategies or approaches that are far better for all involved. This deficit is not the sort of thing that cannot be overcome by kindness, something that is unfortunately rare.
My mother and I did not have it. And once my father was gone, we did not have the support that got us so far. Which is all a long way to say that I was suffering. I was in circumstances that a child should not find herself in. I was grieving. I was taking on challenges far beyond my emotional or mental capacity. And this was the sort of thing that defined my reality. I needed help, but what I got was pity.
This pity took shape in a few different ways. The crowd favorite was empty platitudes. The “I’m sorry for your loss” wasn’t the hug I needed. The “He’s in a better place” diminished my own feelings because that place was not with me. And the “At least he’s no longer in pain” shamed me for wanting him to still be around. And in the silence of those who did not speak, was a shape that I sarcastically call my ‘favorite’: the Easter Lilies we were sent that my mother and I could not–for the life of us–keep alive. There was an irony in that, I’m sure. How can you greet the grieving with more death and grief, even if it comes on a time delay? I’m sure that was not their intention. Many people don’t know how hard Easter Lilies are to take care of, and it wasn’t a carefully thought out decision. My dad died around the Easter season; those flowers were on the top of every florist’s website. There were other things as well: gift cards, rides to places or other things that were actually helpful for a moment, but what I needed was to talk about my dad. No one gave me that. People changed the subject as quickly as I brought it up. Memories that I wanted to share were brushed away. And maybe that was for their own sake, maybe that was just their discomfort with death and dying that sent them running from subject matter they found difficult, but it still hurt me.
For all we got, there was never a genuine and sustained attempt to tend to my suffering, but I was still supposed to be grateful for all the things I did get, even and especially those things that were markedly not helpful. These were ‘blessings,’ I was told. These were an outpouring of ‘love and support,’ people would say. They were helping, they would claim. None of it was true. I knew I was worse off with each attempt at piss-poor consolation than I had been just a few minutes before. Although this word is thrown around a lot, I think it was fair to say that I was being gaslit. It seemed as if the entire world were trying to convince me that all the not-helpful things I was getting were valuable things that I should have appreciated, and I was the monster for not being more grateful. It seemed as if the whole world were saying I was the problem for not being happy about the poor choice of flowers or the shame their empty platitudes would drop onto me. Maybe the people who offered me those things felt good about it, but I didn’t.
Death is an uncomfortable subject for so many of us. And it is something we are reluctant to change about ourselves. We are hesitant to confront it. And so, we have found a way to dance with it. The death of a parent whose children are relatively young is an injustice, one that we cannot do anything about in so many circumstances. This powerlessness is an uncomfortable subject for us as well. We are just as hesitant to confront this feelings of powerlessness as we are to confront death itself. But why confront it when you can find ways to live with it? Create rituals that don’t do anything but give you some sense of satisfaction or the perception that you have helped your fellow human in a less confrontational way. Sacrifice the occasional child to the wolves if you have to. They are less than you. They are the unfortunate ones. They are such a distant creature that it does not matter.
Let them be miserable. Their misery gives you the chance to shine, does it not?
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Conclusion
I’ve found that the hardest part of these essays is the conclusion section. As I was taught in school, this is the point in which you do not just rehash your previous points, but you also provide your audience with some sort of quest or purpose. Now that they have been imbued with the knowledge you have provided them, they are inspired and need a task to act upon. This is the section where you give them that task.
It’s the sort of thing that can be hard to implement even when the logic is sound, but honestly, that logic does not seem to fit here. What should I be saying? Pity is bad. It is not just bad for the now fatherless-child that you may encounter or may come to land in your orbit. It goes beyond that. It goes beyond the Sans-culotte or beyond that specific era of French history, and while I had hoped to give that critique of pity some sense of scope with this piece, adding my own example still keeps the field of consideration remarkably limited.
Pity goes beyond these examples. It extends far beyond what any singular work could discuss. In actuality, pity is at the root of so many of our interactions, the ways we conceive other people, or the way we discuss global affairs. How unfortunate, we say, that’s terrible, we may add, or if we do not feel like talking, we give token amounts of money to charities we don’t properly vet or research. We take small actions towards some depersonalized or sterilized image and call it a day. But the next day brings no difference. The depersonalized image we worked to mitigate or fight against remains what it was, and we may be okay with that. We might be okay with the lack of progress because it means that the rush we got from our half-hearted attempts at rectifying these situations gets to be had again. We get to feel good again, just like we did before, and in reality, that’s all that matters to us.
At the end of the day, pity makes you feel good but gives you a reason to not do good. And on a grand scale, that sort of inauthenticity leads to a lot of pain and suffering that you will likely not feel as the pitier unless we’re in a Reign of Terror situation. In a game of incentives, there is no reason to change or do anything productive. Unless one is staring up at the guillotine’s blade, pity will always be alluring and comforting, so you will want to engage with it. There’s very little anyone else can do or say that will make for a compelling counter argument against something that feels that good. Myself included.
So should I be saying, “pity sucks, do better?” It seems like a waste of my energy to do that. How about this: pity sucks, read Villa’s book, and think about things more often. That just seems to work better. There’s more opportunity or promise in that. Maybe you won’t change, but that’s up to you.
Works Cited
Arendt, H. (2006). On revolution. Penguin. Purchase Link.
Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition. University of Chicago Press. Purchase Link.
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2022, November 9). Reign of Terror. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Reign-of-Terror
Villa, D. R. (2021). Arendt. Routledge. Purchase Link.