When giving is selfish:

Christmas is a time when churches and charities urge us to think of those less fortunate than ourselves. It is a time for showing compassion for people we don’t know, as well as for those we do.

Genuine compassion is a core Christian virtue. It is celebrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan who quietly offered help to an enemy stranger in need. But there is a crucial difference between this sort of practical compassion and the mawkish sentimentality which is becoming more common in our culture today.

I am British. Like many other Brits, it was the death of Princess Diana in 1997 that made me aware of an emerging culture of ostentatious caring. The flowers, teddy bears and crying in public all seemed to signify that a nation once famed for its emotional reserve was increasingly desperate to display its feelings on its collective sleeve.

We have since witnessed similar outpourings of compassion after the death of Linda McCartney, the two 10-year-old girls murdered in Soham, England, or those unfortunates beheaded by Iraqi terrorists. Today we sport countless empathy ribbons, weep in public over the deaths of murdered children and demonstrate against war and global poverty, carrying banners proclaiming our sensitivity and humane sympathies.

Some have applauded these developments as a sign that we are becoming a more caring society. But the new culture of ostentatious caring is about feeling good, not doing good. It illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish.

Consider the growth of looped empathy ribbons since the early 1990s. These ribbons serve mainly to communicate to strangers one’s political and social leanings. In Britain between 1995 and 1999, ribbons sprouted everywhere, but donations to good causes dropped by 31 per cent (donations are up in Australia, but here they are tax-deductible).

Conspicuous compassion is manifested in the anti-war slogan “Not in my name”, suggesting protesters are less concerned with stopping conflict than with declaring their personal disapproval of it. “Drop the debt” is similarly an emotional statement about how protesters feel about global poverty, rather than a realistic strategy for combating it. A quarter of all the postwar money lent to Third World countries went on military spending and 20 per cent was hived off by kleptocratic leaders, but these are uncomfortable facts which anti-G8 protesters prefer to ignore.

The urge to display one’s feelings in public is not a British phenomenon. In his introduction to the Australian edition of my book, Conspicuous Compassion, Paul Comrie-Thomson discusses several Australian examples including ostentatious concern about the plight of Aborigines.

As some Aboriginal leaders have argued, the “sorry” campaign has done little or nothing to address the core problems of substance abuse and welfare dependency that are crippling many rural Aboriginal communities, but it has offered splendid opportunities to display self-righteous sentiments with badges, T-shirts, posters, marches and graffiti. Real compassion would mean confronting the real issues, but those who have tried to cut through the emotional fog have often been accused of being “uncaring”.

Sometimes, conspicuous compassion does real damage. The retired anthropologist Roger Sandall shows how well-meaning efforts to promote Aboriginal “identity” and “cultural awareness” in schools have increased indigenous illiteracy in English. This renders young Aboriginal people almost unemployable and condemns them to a life of poverty, ensuring another generation of victims for the rest of us to feel sorry about.

Why do we so desperately want to show we care? It is a symptom of what the psychologist Oliver James has dubbed our “low serotonin” society. Despite being healthier, richer and better-off than in living memory, we in the West are more depressed than ever. Institutions such as the church, marriage and the family have withered in the postwar era. Raised in fragmented family units, more of us live by ourselves. Ostentatious caring permits the lonely nation to forge new social bonds. As James concludes: “A common impulse behind wanting to give love unconditionally to non-intimates is the desire to receive it.”

Such displays are sheer opportunism. By the fifth anniversary of Diana’s death in August 2002, there were no crowds, tears or teddies at Kensington Palace, for Diana had served her purpose. The recreational grievers had moved on, busy with “never forgetting” other dead unfortunates.

To today’s collective “carers”, the fate of the homeless, starving Africans or dead celebrities are of secondary importance. What really matters is the need to be seen to care. Yet sometimes it can be cruel to care. Sometimes, the only person you care about is you.

Patrick West is the author of Conspicuous Compassion. The Australian edition is published today by The Centre for Independent Studies.