Crisis and Compassion

          In a class on the rhetoric of crisis, I think it will be important to begin to decipher ways in which we find crisis compelling and ways in which we find ourselves called to participate in acts of representation and remediation of crisis. One motivator that would seem to be particularly strong is compassion, especially when it comes to humanitarian crises.

          In a 2007 article [PDF], Matthew Newcomb summarizes Hannah Arendt’s views on compassion. He writes, “Compassion is something that overcomes a person, so that one cannot choose to act with initiative and reason. Compassion is a determining force that does not make a person better or more human than others, and it makes appropriate action (which for her is often speech) unavailable to a person truly feeling compassion” (108). Newcomb finds this explanation of compassion useful for thinking about how students and teachers might find new motives for talking about the “pain, trauma, and suffering of others” (108). In particular, he hopes to find motivations for helping others that move “beyond personal feelings of sympathy or pain” (108). We need to seek these new motivations, he argues, because “too often instructors have a sense that the language of papers is just reproduced based on close affiliations the students have with particular groups or ideologies.” As a result, “Compassion can limit thought and real…in the classroom” (119).

          On Arendt’s view, compassion is an essentially self-interested force and, consequently, does not offer much political purchase. More, as Newcomb points out, compassion often pushes us to reproduce formulaic language in the pursuit of sympathy as a form of identification.

          On the matter of identification, and thinking about use-value of texts, Stephen Parks argues that composition pedagogy should "demonstrate to its students how the binary concepts of in/out and canonical/noncanonical are the result of negotiated literacy acts and practices" (83). He believes that "English studies can push...toward a metaphoric view of language…where different language communities bring themselves together for greater explanatory (and political) power—thus replacing the literal text with a catachretical text” (83). While Parks focuses on local publics and community interventions, I think his turn to English as a space where texts a rendered as catechretical spaces of representation is both an interesting maneuver and apropos for thinking compassion and composition in relationship to sexual violence in the Syrian conflict. For an assignment, it might be useful to have students read three short news articles on rape in Syria, such as the following:

• Fear of rape 'driving Syria refugee crisis'
• Rape has become ‘significant’ part of Syrian war, says humanitarian group
• Fear of rape 'driving Syria refugee crisis'

I would invite a short, 500-word response to one of the articles in which the students reflect on the crisis and the way their article represents the situation. 

          During the next class meeting, we would have a look at the Women Under Siege project. Organized in part by Gloria Steinem, the crowd-sourced mapping project calls “on women and men from Syria and those working with Syrian refugees to provide us with reports of sexualized violence as the crisis unfolds…to help us discover whether rape and sexual assault are widespread.” The project offers inroads to solidarity rather than compassion, per se, inasmuch as “such evidence can be used to aid the international community in grasping the urgency of what is happening in Syria, and can provide the base for potential future prosecutions.” At the broadest level, the description says, “Our goal is to make these atrocities visible, and to gather evidence so that one day justice may be served.” So the focus stands squarely on participation and the value of small contributions in the form of reports. If these reports can provide valuable, political interventions on a national or world scale, what kinds of local interventions might students provide? What kinds of local projects might we imagine on this kind of model? Are there local happenings that might be styled as crises worthy of addressing in a similar manner?

          Practically speaking, we would talk about compassion and what it might mean to have compassion for rape survivors in Syria. Is compassion an appropriate response? What is compassion, anyway? The self-reporting and acquaintance-reporting model on which Women Under Siege operates should open up a number of issues with regard to political and/or moral responsibility and the significance of efforts like Women Under Siege to raise awareness. I would then assign a second, longer response in which the students reflect on crisis and compassion and compare the Women Under Siege project with representations of the Syrian crisis in the press.