The Pitfalls of Compassion

__"Moist Eyes—From Rousseau to Clinton" by Clifford Orwin, in The Public Interest (Summer 1997), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.__

Compassion is one of the cardinal virtues in American political life. Candidates who appear to have it will find many vices forgiven. Those who do not soon begin thinking about careers in the private sector.

Americans’ compassion, however, is not the same as that of Jesus or Plato, argues Orwin, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. It owes its character to Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who, in Émile (1762) and other works, "set out to devise a worldly, egalitarian, post-Christian, and post-Enlightenment morality" grounded in compassion.

Rousseau’s notion of compassion was different from the Christian idea of charity, says Orwin. "Charity is a theological virtue...: to love one another as God has loved, we must overcome our natural human self-love. Compassion, as Rousseau

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