A lot of this critique is my territory for journalistic writing. I’m sure I’ve made this same kind of argument. I’m sure we all have. This is pretty much the cloud of critical psychiatry that has been raining down its criticisms for some time. The problem is there is a pretty good drainage system in the cities on which it falls. As many oceans fall from the sky, the offices of psychiatrists and policy advisers never flood and the noxious ideas are never drowned. Here we get the critique of medicalization and the privatisation of mental illness or distress. We get the usual talk. All of us in or near to anti-psychiatry or critical psychiatry or radical mental health have heard this stuff. It’s also fairly simple minded. I’m kinda with the questioner who talks about poison intolerance disorder.
Peter Sedgwick made the point most clearly in his response to Szasz: to say “I am depressed” is a potent weapon because I can now say “capitalism has made me sick”. In fact this is what public health and health education is involved in doing: as a student nurse I did about 5 modules on “the social determinants of health and sickness”. It would actually have been nice to have had some more biology or neurology.
So on to compassion. The most obvious point to make is that Razer never defines compassion. It is far from obvious what compassion is, especially when we’re moving from nursing theory to social theory to politics. This is also why we have to be careful in our definitions. She talks about compassion in instrumental terms whilst criticising the instrumental: she talks about it as a resource that can be depleted in full agreement with psychologies that model themselves on capital, as if their constructs were really limited resources. The closest we get to compassion isn’t just “caring more” and I’m not sure that compassion is as she defines it through the Tony Abbot example. While we’re at it, we also could do with a better, or any, definition of care. Because the “I care” minus a practice of care is empty verbiage.
Who actually talks about compassion fatigue? I’ve only heard other nurses talk about it and then they tend to just call it burn-out or not caring any more. If we’re talking about compassion fatigue then let’s actually talk about it. Here we’re at the place where Bifo is coming from in his writing on the death of empathy. His work is hyperbolic and far too silly. I think this point out why compassion is important though. If I am unable to feel compassion for the other there isn’t really anything to motivate me to care about him. The “numbers” won’t motivate me. The “formula that contains them” won’t motivate me. In fact nothing will. Maybe rational self-interest? Ah that old dog. It’s been flogged to death already by psychoanalysis, behaviourism, advertising, behavioural economics…oh, what did I leave out? P’raps we’re talking about egoism.
And here is where she gets interesting: the showing of compassion. The idea that there are appeals to “show you care” or “appear compassionate”. I would say this is too slippery because of the failure of definition. But the idea that there is a whole psuedopolitics of emotional display that comes down to the signalling of emotion. This is in fact shared by capitalist firms, advertising, radical political communities and so on share: the call and response of victimhood and the display of emotion. This is the “being moved” that Razer talks about. And yes it is noxious and idiotic. But I don’t think this is what compassion comes down to. Indeed the Stoics insisted it was our moral duty to cultivate a cosmic sense of compassion without ever demonstrating it. And Christianity says we ought to be motivated to act from compassion but that we should never wear the sign of it. That is there is no necessary link between compassion and emotional demonstrativeness.
This is all part of a technology of affective manipulation. She even touches on its more brutally material side when she jokes about Zoloft. I’d have thought a revolutionary, just like any other politico (aside from libertarians I guess) would be interested in taking this and using it. This is how I would “accelerate”.
The last point on compassion being based on suffering and being a blind passion: well, okay, this is why you there is a problem here. While she is talking about the globally distributed networks of resource extraction and production the question that pops into my head, and which I put forward here a couple weeks ago over and over again (remember the no lives matter thing?), is why should I care? She goes on an emotional rant about the worst (whilst saying be careful about emotional flares for finding the worst) I can only assume she gives a shit because she cares. She may even experience compassion.
I’m with the sentiment theories that are raised in the discussion. Or at least I’m with their updated versions. And look at that: in the Q&A she even agrees. I’m with Hume and Schopenhauer and Haidt. The objection that “compassion is not thinking it’s feeling” is to ignore the fact that feeling comes prior to thought this is simple physiology, and that while the two are separate they are not separable, and all psychotherapy is predicated on this. The passions are guided by reason, as Hume said.
So she summarizes that there is nothing wrong with compassion in itself but only in its use. And then moves to say that it isn’t compassion but the passions themselves; feelings in general are bad; and then feelings is dropped from humanism; and the humanism is conflated with human rights discourse. This is sloppy. It is sloppy and it mistakes its criticisms of demonstrativeness and egoism for a criticism of compassion itself.
And if she says “that’s so bourgeois” one more time I’ll throw myself out of the window. Okay. Sure. Critique compassion and keep harping on about some phantasy of revolution. Oh and as one last comment, her opening jokes about binge eating disorder are pretty badly judged. There are plenty of examples of pathologized normalities but this isn’t one of them. It doesn’t just mean eating beyond being full: it means eating beyond being full up to and beyond the point where eating becomes physically and psychologically distressing. It’s a diagnosis that features compulsion and therefore a sense that one MUST eat, not just that one likes eating too much pizza.
I dunno. Maybe I’m not some cool hip revolutionary guy. I might be “that’s so bourgeois”. Meantime I’m going to keep taking my compassion to work. First do no harm; second, help others as much as you can. If you ain’t got these two aspects you ain’t got compassion, you got some kind of guilt or egoism.
synthetic zerØ 
A lot of this critique is my territory for journalistic writing. I’m sure I’ve made this same kind of argument. I’m sure we all have. This is pretty much the cloud of critical psychiatry that has been raining down its criticisms for some time. The problem is there is a pretty good drainage system in the cities on which it falls. As many oceans fall from the sky, the offices of psychiatrists and policy advisers never flood and the noxious ideas are never drowned. Here we get the critique of medicalization and the privatisation of mental illness or distress. We get the usual talk. All of us in or near to anti-psychiatry or critical psychiatry or radical mental health have heard this stuff. It’s also fairly simple minded. I’m kinda with the questioner who talks about poison intolerance disorder.
Peter Sedgwick made the point most clearly in his response to Szasz: to say “I am depressed” is a potent weapon because I can now say “capitalism has made me sick”. In fact this is what public health and health education is involved in doing: as a student nurse I did about 5 modules on “the social determinants of health and sickness”. It would actually have been nice to have had some more biology or neurology.
So on to compassion. The most obvious point to make is that Razer never defines compassion. It is far from obvious what compassion is, especially when we’re moving from nursing theory to social theory to politics. This is also why we have to be careful in our definitions. She talks about compassion in instrumental terms whilst criticising the instrumental: she talks about it as a resource that can be depleted in full agreement with psychologies that model themselves on capital, as if their constructs were really limited resources. The closest we get to compassion isn’t just “caring more” and I’m not sure that compassion is as she defines it through the Tony Abbot example. While we’re at it, we also could do with a better, or any, definition of care. Because the “I care” minus a practice of care is empty verbiage.
Who actually talks about compassion fatigue? I’ve only heard other nurses talk about it and then they tend to just call it burn-out or not caring any more. If we’re talking about compassion fatigue then let’s actually talk about it. Here we’re at the place where Bifo is coming from in his writing on the death of empathy. His work is hyperbolic and far too silly. I think this point out why compassion is important though. If I am unable to feel compassion for the other there isn’t really anything to motivate me to care about him. The “numbers” won’t motivate me. The “formula that contains them” won’t motivate me. In fact nothing will. Maybe rational self-interest? Ah that old dog. It’s been flogged to death already by psychoanalysis, behaviourism, advertising, behavioural economics…oh, what did I leave out? P’raps we’re talking about egoism.
And here is where she gets interesting: the showing of compassion. The idea that there are appeals to “show you care” or “appear compassionate”. I would say this is too slippery because of the failure of definition. But the idea that there is a whole psuedopolitics of emotional display that comes down to the signalling of emotion. This is in fact shared by capitalist firms, advertising, radical political communities and so on share: the call and response of victimhood and the display of emotion. This is the “being moved” that Razer talks about. And yes it is noxious and idiotic. But I don’t think this is what compassion comes down to. Indeed the Stoics insisted it was our moral duty to cultivate a cosmic sense of compassion without ever demonstrating it. And Christianity says we ought to be motivated to act from compassion but that we should never wear the sign of it. That is there is no necessary link between compassion and emotional demonstrativeness.
This is all part of a technology of affective manipulation. She even touches on its more brutally material side when she jokes about Zoloft. I’d have thought a revolutionary, just like any other politico (aside from libertarians I guess) would be interested in taking this and using it. This is how I would “accelerate”.
The last point on compassion being based on suffering and being a blind passion: well, okay, this is why you there is a problem here. While she is talking about the globally distributed networks of resource extraction and production the question that pops into my head, and which I put forward here a couple weeks ago over and over again (remember the no lives matter thing?), is why should I care? She goes on an emotional rant about the worst (whilst saying be careful about emotional flares for finding the worst) I can only assume she gives a shit because she cares. She may even experience compassion.
I’m with the sentiment theories that are raised in the discussion. Or at least I’m with their updated versions. And look at that: in the Q&A she even agrees. I’m with Hume and Schopenhauer and Haidt. The objection that “compassion is not thinking it’s feeling” is to ignore the fact that feeling comes prior to thought this is simple physiology, and that while the two are separate they are not separable, and all psychotherapy is predicated on this. The passions are guided by reason, as Hume said.
So she summarizes that there is nothing wrong with compassion in itself but only in its use. And then moves to say that it isn’t compassion but the passions themselves; feelings in general are bad; and then feelings is dropped from humanism; and the humanism is conflated with human rights discourse. This is sloppy. It is sloppy and it mistakes its criticisms of demonstrativeness and egoism for a criticism of compassion itself.
And if she says “that’s so bourgeois” one more time I’ll throw myself out of the window. Okay. Sure. Critique compassion and keep harping on about some phantasy of revolution. Oh and as one last comment, her opening jokes about binge eating disorder are pretty badly judged. There are plenty of examples of pathologized normalities but this isn’t one of them. It doesn’t just mean eating beyond being full: it means eating beyond being full up to and beyond the point where eating becomes physically and psychologically distressing. It’s a diagnosis that features compulsion and therefore a sense that one MUST eat, not just that one likes eating too much pizza.
I dunno. Maybe I’m not some cool hip revolutionary guy. I might be “that’s so bourgeois”. Meantime I’m going to keep taking my compassion to work. First do no harm; second, help others as much as you can. If you ain’t got these two aspects you ain’t got compassion, you got some kind of guilt or egoism.
Prolly an article in there.
prolly