Vulnerability and Compassion

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The pragmatist philosopher-activist Jane Addams in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), examined the great gap that she believed was then opening up between “old” and “new” ways of thinking about poverty.

Addams gave witness to the moral compassion within what she called “the neighborhood mind.” She attributed this compassion, in part, to the recognition among the poor of their common material precariousness.

In contrast to the affluent, whose privilege masks this precariousness, the poor were in constant, daily contact with tenuous economic life, and as a result, according to Addams, they tended to be exceptionally gracious and hospitable toward one another—going out of the way to help each other, often to the detriment of their own interests. Note that her argument is not that the poor are intrinsically morally superior…but that the experience of shared vulnerability is fundamental to the expression of compassion. Forming solidarities across differences requires recognition and experience of shared vulnerabilities.

The point is not that vulnerability as such is good…but that some degree of vulnerability is intrinsic to human experience and that recognition of this fact is foundational to the sympathies of choice and purpose around which solidarities are formed. Not all vulnerabilities are the same. And vulnerability is not evenly distributed in our world. Some is degrading. Some can be avoided. Some is unjust. Some is unavoidable.

Thinking through these things is theopolitical work because the way we imagine vulnerability and solidarity and their relations is influenced by religious symbols and rituals that shape our political reasons and desires. If this is so, and if we are living in a world in need of more imaginative, border-crossing solidarities, then the tasks of a progressive political theology are twofold. We must critique what keeps us from seeing these things and resist the religious ways of being that format a divisive, alienating politics. And, constructively, we must advance religious ideals that are sufficiently critical to discriminate the forms and types of vulnerability and sufficiently imaginative to bring to life the forms and types of solidarity that the injustices within our imperiled world demand.