Vagueness and Compassion

It's a mistake to see vagueness and compassion as equivalent. They're not. As our society shows quite well, vagueness breeds bigotry as surely as a carcass flies.

The problem with relativism in practice is that when people stop absolutizing absolute things, they instead just absolutize themselves. In the absence of universal standards & authorities personal likes and dislikes become absolute. And by the standards of the absolutized individual personality, no one is deserving of mercy and compassion. You did *that*? I can't imagine doing that. You don't know *that*? I can't image not knowing that. The people my feelings tell me to love I will love, and the people my feelings tell me to hate I will hate: Amen, so be it. Those I like are justified, those I dislike are cast into the outer darkness, where is wailing and gnashing of teeth--how could it be otherwise?

No one has ever had to be taught to not understand another person, no one has ever had to be taught to be indifferent to another person, no one has ever had to be taught to dislike another person--it's loving and compassion that has to be laboriously drilled into people by authority and reason and dramatic leaps of faith. Take away that authority and that reason and that faith, and you infallibly get hatred.

I'm not sure there has ever been a group of people as collectively pitiless and devoid of compassion as modern Americans--and it is for this, first and foremost, that we will be judged. And we, most of us, most of the time, are pitiless and merciless not because we have any reason to be, but because we don't have any reason not to be. We have only ourselves--a God not of mercy, but wrath.