Sadly, there are psychopaths among us, and sadly they are often the most successful among us. Ignoring the welfare of others, and putting one’s own above all others happens to be a path to dominance. We are in some ways crippled by our conscience as it attenuates our desires for self gratification when they run up against the interests of those around us.
It is the nature of our cognition to be legion. Different structures and functions of our minds are often in conflict with one another, but our sense of self and identity abide the illusion that we are one, not the many selves that actually make up our minds. It is in these squabbles between our sub-minds where most of morality and philosophy are played out.
One of the most obvious and mundane demonstrations of this distributed control of our supposedly free and unitary will is motion sickness. We have two separate navigation systems keeping us upright, one is inertial, using the sloshing fluid in our inner ear, and the other a sort of dead reckoning, using cues mostly from our eyes about what is up and what is down and which way we are moving. Normally, these systems agree, and tense and relax our muscles in unison, but inside of a moving boat, car, airplane or spaceship, they each send separate and conflicting signals, the push and pull of which can make one extremely nauseated.
I happen to be particularly susceptible to motion sickness, despite being an avid sailor, and know that the key to not getting sick is just to make a point of looking around and frequently checking out the horizon and the sky, so as to sync up the conflicting referential models. I have tried to explain this to dozens and dozens of guests on my boats. But they tend to think I am telling them it is “all in their head”. Resenting my denial of their obvious distress, they most often make it worse by insisting on going below to lay down and close their eyes, that is until they come back on deck to barf over the rail.
It’s the same when we try to explain these challenges to the idea of a self with omnipotent freewill. It somehow challenges folks’ sense of identity, and they refuse and deny. But the healthier of us do really have an approximation of a cartoon devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other whispering in our ears, or the five little homunculi from Pixar’s Inside Out, though, of course, it is vastly more complex than either of those.
The point is, thank goodness for compassion. Its voice steers us toward a communitarian path, making it possible for us to work together for the common good, a rising tide that will lift one’s own boat. It may torment us with guilt, and thwart our deepest wishes; we may envy the psychopath’s charm and success, but of course, if the rest of us also lacked the ability to empathize and develop compassion, we would never have gotten to where we are, and it would indeed be the dog-eat-dog world so many cynics believe it already is.
Thankfully it is not. Thankfully we are not possessed of god-given and strictly self-interested souls who must be bound by rules and fear of eternal damnation to act in each other’s interests. Thankfully the vast majority of us are able to empathize we our fellow creatures and find compassion for their fate as for our own. Thankfully these are ingrained, if not always dominating, features of our minds.
One navigational system is follows the intertia of desire, saying screw them, just look out for number one. Another is calculating: seeing oneself in another, and judging that there but for fortune go I, raising a compassion for the pain we know we could too easily share, and deciding to help alleviate it.
Compassion sits here second among the list of principles becuase it is fundamental to any formation of community. Communities to which we all owe not only our survival, but also our joy.
Happy Compassion, and …
HOLLY DAYS 