In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty, when challenged about his idiosyncratic use of words, replies: “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Last week many of us were surprised to hear Suella Braverman describing governmental measures to send people who arrive in small boats in the UK to Rwanda as “compassionate,” when most experts were describing them as precisely the opposite of that. She seems to have been playing Humpty Dumpty here, giving her own meaning to the word “compassionate”. She also claimed to “refute” the idea that her plans weren’t humane (I think she meant “repudiate”). To refute something you need to disprove it, not simply utter the phrase: “I refute that” like a spell from Harry Potter – “refutamus!” – though to be fair to Braverman, many other politicians regularly misuse “refute”.
What words mean matters, though, and there are limits to what you can do with them. As Alice pointed out to Humpty: “The question is… whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Perhaps, though, Braverman really believes that her plans are compassionate, and that she’s not simply giving a new meaning to a familiar word. Perhaps she believes she is using it in the way other people do. If so, it’s worth spelling out what compassion is and showing how far adrift she really is. It’s an important concept, but for many people it’s a bit like time was for Augustine. “If no one asks me what time is,” he said, “I know what it is. But when I want to explain it to someone who is asking, I don’t know what it is.”
Here goes. Compassion involves empathy but is distinct from it. Empathy is a kind of emotional understanding of another’s point of view that involves decentring and to some extent sharing the other person’s feelings as well as appreciating their predicament intellectually. There is evidence that for an empathetic person, mirror neurons trigger brain activity that evokes the same sort of subjective feelings that other people are experiencing, though not necessarily to the same degree, when we are in their presence. An empathetic person is sad when in the presence of a sad person because they make the imaginative leap of thinking and feeling what it would be like to be in that person’s position. To have empathy with another’s suffering can be painful, but this comes in degrees.
Compassion goes further. As the psychologist Paul Bloom has pointed out, empathy alone doesn’t guarantee morally good behaviour. In an extreme case a mildly empathetic torturer might be more effective because they would have a rich sense of what it would be like to be in their victim’s position.
Compassion, in contrast, gives weight to another’s feelings, and involves a desire to make the situation better. It typically leads to altruistic acts, sometimes even to heroism. A compassionate person not only feels something of another’s pain, but seeks to alleviate it, even at some cost to themselves. Think of the Good Samaritan helping the injured man by the roadside.
A more extreme case of compassion was the Polish Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe. In 1941 he was a prisoner in Auschwitz, there because he had helped hide Jews from Nazis. Some prisoners had attempted a breakout, and as punishment the guards selected 10 prisoners at random for execution as a deterrent. One of these, Franciszek Gajowniczek, called out: “My wife, my children!” when selected. Kolbe, moved by his plight, offered himself in his place and was taken with the others to a punishment bunker. He was starved for many days and eventually murdered with poison. Gajowniczek survived.
Contrast that with support for a policy that punishes people who have fled war, hunger, and fear, risking everything to cross the Channel to freedom, a policy that will send them to Rwanda, a country with a dubious human rights record, even though there was no viable legal route for them to get to the UK. How is that compassionate? To suggest this policy stems from a deep appreciation of the position in which such people find themselves and an imaginative engagement with their plight is an insult to our intelligence.
This policy won’t stop the boats and will cause far more suffering than it prevents. It will make the journey more perilous for those who attempt it. To claim that this is compassionate is absurd and worthy of Humpty Dumpty. We are truly in a looking-glass world.
