Psychologies Magazine, January 2001 —
The growing success of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in the West has revived an old moral concept worn down by centuries: compassion. Already criticized by the Stoics and Spinoza as a weakness of sensitivity, compassion has been likened, since the 19th century, to a condescending form of bourgeois charity that Nietzsche rightly hated: pity. Thanks to Buddhists, therefore, we are rediscovering compassion today as a kind of sympathy or universal communion with those who suffer.
This rediscovery of the word is concomitant with a global evolution of our sensibilities. After Auschwitz, the gulag, Hiroshima, and two atrociously murderous world wars, we are more attentive than ever to respect for life and fundamental human rights. As if man had had to go to the very depths of human destruction to discover the sacred character of the human person and feel this sentiment of universal brotherhood. Umberto Eco told me, just before the turn of the millennium, that this sensitivity to human rights, this sympathy for those who suffer, wherever they may be, was certainly the most significant positive development of the 20th century. We all feel sympathy for the victims of genocides, civil wars, acts of barbarism, natural disasters, and injustices of all kinds. The reactions around the world after the attacks of September 11 are a clear sign of this.
André Comte-Sponville, however, clearly emphasized in his “Petit traité des grandes vertus” (Seuil, 2001), that this sympathy turns into compassion as soon as we feel the demands and duties that the suffering of others imposes on us. In other words, true compassion is also action. This is what happened after the Toulouse disaster, where we witnessed spontaneous outbursts of generosity, such as those craftsmen who came to help the disaster-stricken residents rebuild their homes. Unlike passive and contemptuous pity, compassion is active and respectful. It consists of putting oneself in the other person's place, empathizing with them to the point of understanding their suffering and helping them, as far as possible, to overcome it by finding the right gesture or word.
This message, which we are rediscovering today in secular humanism or through Tibetan Buddhism, is in fact at the very heart of all the great religious traditions. "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do it to me," Jesus said to the crowds who followed him (Matthew 25). Alongside ambiguous or warlike words that fuel divisions and fanaticism of all kinds and which are still rife in the news, it is a true gem that shows that religions can also be seeds of peace.
January 2001