Weeping won’t help the weak

This year witnessed the beginning of an ethical revolution. Voters in Australia and the US overwhelmingly endorsed the proposition that doing good is radically different from feeling good. This U-turn away from sentimentality is also taking hold in Britain.

At the Labour Party’s annual conference in Brighton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair proclaimed: “When I hear people say, ‘I want the old Tony Blair back, the one who cares’, I tell you something. I’ve come to realise that caring in politics isn’t really about ‘caring’. It’s about doing what you think is right and sticking to it.”

The head of Australia’s National Indigenous Council knows just how Blair feels. Children’s Court magistrate Sue Gordon says that looking to address the issues that face Aborigines is far more important than, “the stolen generation wanting to be said sorry to”. Gordon speaks with authority. She was taken from her parents as a four-year-old.

Labor’s most senior Aboriginal figure, Warren Mundine, also wants to move beyond the “sorry” debate. He is adamant that too much energy has been dissipated trying to secure a form of acceptable words. As he says: “An apology is not going to change a person’s life in Wilcannia.”

This is a world apart from the sentiment of former Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission president Ronald Wilson who, in 1995, conceived of a national Sorry Day during which all who wanted could express “their sorrow and ask forgiveness”.

This ethical shift taking place in Australia and elsewhere recognises that while emoting sentimentality might make some people feel satisfied with themselves, it can often do great harm. This is because true compassion involves engaging in appropriate action that alleviates a problem. It’s not a show-biz phenomenon.

Twenty years ago, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid introduced the McDonald’s-isation of humanitarianism. It was fast feeling via television; you feel bad about what you see, you feel good by phoning in your money. And all the while you can tap your feet. But what was the result?

In 1984-85, $1 billion worth of aid arrived in Ethiopia. Mengistu Haile Mariam rubbed his hands, used substantial amounts of the cash to build up his war machine and helped himself to the aid supplies to feed his armies. Ethiopia’s war, fuelled by phone-in donations, continued for another six years.

Feelings are flighty entities. They are easy to ignite about war, famine, poverty and trees. And those ignited feelings can turn nasty. The vast majority of Australian Greens live in affluent urban suburbs. They felt good when Bob Brown referred to log-laden trucks as “the axles of evil”. Jobs would be lost to save trees, but not in Greens’ electorates. John Howard, at a press conference in Tasmania just before his re-election, addressed that sentimentality head-on: “If you live in other parts of Australia you don’t carry any of the burden, you only enjoy the aspirations.”

Howard, unlike US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, knows that political change comes from slow, boring toil not from quick feelgood gestures. This is the source of so much Howard hating and Bush bashing.

Observing the Republican national convention, novelist Kate Jennings was depressed. “The Bushies,” she concluded, “are using standard fascist fare.” One of her jacket buttons said it all: “Republicans are people too: mean, selfish, greedy people.”

Yet the convention’s backdrop slogan read People of Compassion. For critics such as Jennings, however, the parties of the political Right have no compassion. Compassion is assumed to be the exclusive preserve of Bush loathers and Howard haters. And they have the badges to prove it.

But do public loathing and the wearing of crotchety badges show true compassion? British author Patrick West in his book Conspicuous Compassion argues that the flaw of vainglorious self-deception has corrupted politics.

It has been unquestioned, he says, that to show feelings about public events and public figures demonstrates superiority of soul.

But ostentatious caring, he concludes, is mere egotistical indulgence fuelling political impotence.

Noel Pearson would agree. For years he has attacked the “reality-evading progressive Left” because of its sentimental approach to Aboriginal affairs.

To which Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone offers this reality check: “Conspicuous compassion may make some people feel better, but it doesn’t provide more health care, it doesn’t provide education, in fact it doesn’t do anything practical.”

Vainglory is not a modern vice. English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes recognised its pervasiveness. And in Matthew’s Gospel we find: “Beware of practising your piety before men in order to be seen by them … when you give alms sound no trumpet before you.”

Bush, Blair and Howard all appreciate this. They’ve read the book.

In the therapy-dominated 1990s, the question was: How do you feel? In the age of terror, the question forced on us is: What do we do to fix the problem?

Paul Comrie-Thomson wrote the introduction to the Australian edition of Patrick West’s Conspicuous Compassion, which the Centre for Independent Studies publishes today.