Trust me, I'm compassionate and kind.

So, if you're not loyal and respectful, I'll fire you.

Apr 04, 2023

Image: ‘Boaz meeting Ruth in his fields’ by Rembrandt

Decades ago, when I was a pubescent lad, we lacked the easy access that today’s children have to pornography. Which is why parts of the Bible became especially interesting to me at that time. The Bible was far more readily accessible back then, at home, where I was in a religiously-minded family, and at school. And one of the biblical stories that fascinated me was the tale of Ruth and Boaz. If you’re not familiar with this little gem of a bodice-ripper, it goes something like this …

Ruth is a daughter-in-law of Elimelech and Naomi. She is married to one of the couple’s two sons, and they all live in Moab. All three of the chaps die, leaving Naomi, Ruth and the other daughter-in-law, Orpah, without help and protection - not a healthy state of affairs in that society at that time.

Naomi decides to head back to her own family home, Judah, and tells the two girls that they are free to go back to their own families. Orpah departs the scene but Ruth is made of sterner stuff and famously says: “[W]hither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

In Judah, Ruth meets Boaz, a farmer, and obtains his permission to scavenge on his land for grain left over by the harvesters. Naomi gets excited about this because Boaz is one of her kin. Some time later, Naomi tells Ruth to go to the threshing-floor and, when Boaz lies down after a hard day separating the wheat from the chaff, to ‘uncover his feet’ and lie down with him.

To make a short tale even shorter, Boaz and Ruth are married and produce a son, Obed. Why does this quirky tale get included in the Bible? Well, Obed begat Jesse and Jesse begat King David of Israel, and the family tree extends onwards to include Jesus.

What really piqued my interest in all of this was the fact that I had discovered that ‘the threshing-floor’ and the instruction to ‘uncover his feet’ are actually euphemisms and refer to … ahem … you know what. I know, I know, it’s pathetic but, to a hormonal lad, it felt deliciously naughty. And here’s the kicker - when this tale was presented and discussed in Sunday School, the key message, I was told, was that Ruth’s behavior towards Naomi was a wonderful example of compassion.

Fast forward six decades and, in a meeting with a senior executive at a large consulting firm, he suggested that Compassion and Kindness were the Number One requirements for management. “Really?” I queried, “What about Honesty and Integrity?” His response was emphatic: “No. Compassion and Kindness come top. Get that right and everything else follows.”

That was five years ago and I’ve thought about it a great deal. I am not suggesting that anyone should lack compassion or be unkind but I’m still not convinced that those two attributes stand clear atop the list of virtues. However, as time has passed, it seems to me, there’s more and more talk of this kind about particular behaviors and outcomes. Compassion and Kindness, we’re told, build Trust, Loyalty and Respect.

I find it strange: I don’t recall these things being discussed in workplaces anywhere near as much in the past. Why do they feature so prominently now?

Why now?

It links back, I suggest, to the fact that, in the 1990s and 2000s, the West hurtled into a complete dismantling and reassembly of Business on a global scale. Digital tech enabled Business to operate on a distributed basis: manufacturing on one side of the earth, other functions and customers on the other.

It was deindustrialization of the West on a massive scale. That much we all recognize. What is not so clearly acknowledged is that this process forced the tectonic plates of Western societies apart. Before the earthquake, Politics, Society and Business (P.S.B) in Western nation-states operated synergistically: we lived in an integrated P.S.B landscape.

The P.S.B combo originally came together because the expansion of commerce in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided with the rise of the nation-state as the dominant constitutional order across the western world. At that time, the United States of America, Germany, Italy and more joined the list of nation-states and found, in the business corporation, the perfect partner for success. The legitimizing basis of the nation-state was “The State will better the welfare of the nation”1 and the business corporation was its indispensable ally:

Its indispensable ally to produce wealth for the well-being of the nation and its people.
Its indispensable ally for the provision of jobs to bring prosperity to citizens.
Its indispensable ally to produce tax revenues from those employed, directly and via sales taxes, some of which were available to finance welfare payments and retirement benefits.

For a long time, this modus operandi was a rip-roaring, money-generating, politically-stabilizing, society-enhancing success. Then, in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, it was sheared apart. But this was a final convulsion (or, perhaps, not even the final one but we have yet to see what else may follow). Before that the tectonic plates of the P.S.B landscape and its value-bearing seams had for more that a century been shifting in other areas: for example, the decline of belief in the Western religion, Christianity, especially its Protestant strand. Protestantism and the Protestant work ethic2 had played a central role in the development and cohesion of Western communities. All of which brings us back to thoughts about Compassion and Kindness and their supposed outcomes, Trust, Loyalty and Respect.

The melancholy, long withdrawing roar

At the start of the modern era the primary source of moral teaching in the West was the Christian church. It delivered its message through pulpits, political platforms, schools and a wide range of resources for the poor. Then, from the late 17th century to the early 19th century, came The Enlightenment or Age of Reason. The central idea was that the world could be explained though scientific, political and philosophical discourse. The influence of the church was progressively displaced in favour of 'reason' and 'rational discourse'. Here’s Matthew Arnold’s powerful mid-19th century take on the outcome3:

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

“The cohesive social force which religion had once provided was broken up”4 The decline led to a vacuum but, as Aristotle long-ago pointed out, nature abhors such an outcome. The question was, what would fill the void? Answer: a new secular religion - postmodernism5 with added wokeness.

All religions have their priesthood, so who are they for wokeness-enhanced postmodernism? Initially there were the philosophers and educationalists who started it all: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty and their like. Their teachings were taken up by an ever broader academic cohort, “the long march through the institutions”, until there was a critical mass that could enable the new religion to make a bid to take over the whole of society.

This presented a major challenge however - how to take over Business? Business was and is central to western societies but how to grab control? Clearly, a bold move was required but, hey, suddenly Business actually expedited it. It was Business’s enthusiastic outsourcing spree (enthusiastic because the Business elites espied quick financial returns) that enabled the splitting away of Business from Politics and Society right across the West.

A new dispensation - call it New-Business - had an easy passage to fully install itself. Now, New-Business has a secular priesthood of consultants and Human Resources specialists who promote lifelong training and conformity to the new morality.

Hello and welcome to Sunday School

New-Business presents us with a vast amount to ponder and discuss but, here, I want to focus just on the one issue of language and, specifically, the use of words like Compassion, Kindness, Trust, Loyalty, Respect.

Compassion and Kindness, we’re told, lead to Trust, Loyalty and Respect. We are further informed, they are not just ‘nice to have’ but ‘must have’. Employees, in particular, it seems, need to be highly committed to their roles - which is to say, lots of Trust and Loyalty. Just performing your job conscientiously and well is, apparently, not sufficient.

No, apparently, these days, workers need to be cognizant of a higher purpose to it all. ‘Save our home planet’, for example. But this is a political and societal quest with quasi-religious overtones and I’m really uncomfortable when it gets conflated with business.

When I was 17 years old I rejected religion and am an atheist to this day, but much of the language used by New-Business echoes back to my early days in Sunday School. The main difference is that the teaching I received all those years ago seemed to be better-thought-out and more coherent.

Consider Compassion. My Oxford English Dictionary gives these definitions: “Participation in another’s suffering; fellow-feeling, sympathy. Pity inclining one to show mercy or give aid.” So there we have it: Ruth sees Naomi’s distress, recognizes that Naomi will struggle to get to Judea on her own, and chooses to accompany her. However, the teaching I received about this topic included a crucial point: Take care! Compassion when appropriate is a great virtue but, inappropriately applied, it will do harm! The point is, Compassion and Kindness need always to be considered in context with mutual respect.

It is perhaps easiest to see this distinction when thinking of children. The job of a parent is to enable a child to grow and be able to stand on his or her own two feet. This is not always achieved by taking the easiest pathway, or constantly preventing the child from pushing its boundaries. “Being cruel to be kind” is an old expression that captures this sense. A child that achieves something new, outside its comfort zone, will be worthy of respect and will respect the parent all the more.

So, it is not the case that Compassion and Kindness lead to Respect. Rather, Respect is required in order to determine the appropriateness of any application of Compassion or Kindness.

Thank you for reading Aargh! (Age-activated rage, grumpiness and humour) by David Pinder.. This post is public so feel free to share it.

From respect to contempt

The American historian Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) described Compassion as:

the slogan of social democracy, a slogan that has always been used to justify welfare programs, the expansion of the state’s custodial and tutelary functions, and the bureaucratic rescue of women, children, and other victims of mistreatment.6

Aha! There’s the magic word. Victims. If Lasch is right, and I think he is, the more categories of victim there are, the more the proponents of compassion will relish it. And in the therapeutically-driven world of postmodernism the list of victims seems to just grow and grow and grow. Again, to my mind, Lasch sums up the issue perfectly:

A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect. … Today it is widely believed, at least by members of the caring class, that standards are inherently oppressive, that far from being impersonal they discriminate against women, blacks, and minorities in general. Standards, we are told, reflect the cultural hegemony of dead white European males. Compassion compels us to recognize the injustice of imposing them on everybody else.
When the ideology of compassion leads to this kind of absurdity, it is time to call it into question. Compassion has become the human face of contempt.7

Postscript

Here’s a serendipitous incident! I was brought up by impecunious, religiously-minded parents. Mum in particular was committed to her Wesleyan Methodist roots. Wesleyan Methodism “emphasized the doctrine of free will – that we must be free to choose to do the right thing.”8

In my childhood there were only a few books in the house, one of which was titled Easter at Epworth9. I still have it. If you are at all familiar with Wesleyan Methodism you may know that Epworth, in the English county of Lincolnshire, was the home of the Wesley family. John and Charles Wesley, the brothers who founded Methodism, were born and brought up there.

Talking on the phone with my daughter, during the time I was writing this piece, we briefly discussed Easter and I mentioned the book. Shortly after, I took it down from the bookshelf and thumbed through it. This reference to Susanna Wesley (1669-1742), mother of John, Charles and five more children who survived, plus a further six who died in infancy, struck me as relevant to the topic at hand:

She was a remarkable woman; beautiful to look at, yet there was something of the warrior about her. She stood for love and strength. Her children were dressed in neat but much-patched clothes; their food was sparse and plain; and though the fields around were good to play in, the old war with those who hated the Wesleys of Epworth still went on. Louts in the dark nights maimed the two or three cows they had; the thatch leaked, and the rain came though. Sickness often knocked at the door. The father struggled on with his parish and his poem on Job’s sufferings; but Susanna, the mother, taught the children Greek, Latin and French. She spent a separate night with each one of them reading the Bible.

Respect! Even from an old atheist like me.

Aargh! by David Pinder

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