I would say that compassion is not a luxury; it's a necessity for human society to operate.
Societies thrive when humans cut each other a little slack. They die when people are constantly looking for ways to take advantage of others.
Societies thrive when humans cut each other a little slack. They die when people are constantly looking for ways to take advantage of others.
Read about the dehumanizing effects of concentration camps on individuals hiding food from their family or praying their father dies so they can get his food
Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature
Concentration camps are an example of humans taking advantage of one another. Arguably, it's the ultimate example.
True.
> Its arguable that our ability to build luxurious enough societies has allowed out compassion to flourish far beyond what is witnessed elsewhere in the state of nature.
Concentration camps and famines are not the 'state of nature'. A closer analogue would be tribal societies in the Amazon basin, Eastern Africa and the like. Constant hunger and scarcity are not the norm for well adapted human cultures, nor have the been for most of recorded history.
Of course a concentration camp isn’t the state of nature
I’m saying human compassion far exceeds anything witnessed in the animal/plant kingdom. Some animals show affection for their offspring, but it usually doesn’t extend beyond that. There is no dog or lizard or tree version of mother Teressa
They did not emerged as force of nature out of ground. They were intentionally and conciously build. And guards were well fed.
And in here, when you use inmates lack of compassion as example of powerty causimg lack of it, you absolutely should compare to compassion of builders and guards.
These aren't the problems of a society rising out of a state of nature; as TFA states, "The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation”". I think certain aspects of Chinese culture as we know it, writ-large, make more sense coming from people who weren't just recently struggling as a society, but who are well aware of how that condition compares to their historical one.