We should not concern ourselves primarily with the usefulness of our compassion.

We help people because we are affirming our common humanity in Christ, or brotherhood in the human race. We are connecting ourselves to them in a sacred way. We humanize them, personalize them. All love is particular in this sense. No one “loves people”. We love particular person in acts of kenotic kindness.

We pour ourselves into one another. We imitate Christ. We participate in His life by doing what He does.

Now if you aren’t particularly religious, there are still philosophical and poetic overtones to this line of thinking that can resonate with the classically conservative.

We belong to each other, not in some fluffy new agey nonsense, but we are intrinsically linked in life to parents, communities, ancestors and progeny. We don’t belong to ourselves.

And to those who have said that there is little you can do for these people in other places, I simply don’t agree. Of course you can give money,and that’s the easiest. And it is no good saying that the money you give won’t actually help that much, because you can always find good organizations (ex. Catholic Relief Services) that deliver most of the money to those who need it. Malaria kills millions of people each year. For $100 you can supply enough medicine for 4 patients in Uganda for six months. That saves lives. Do you all honestly believe that I should spend that money? And there are more radical ways you can help. You can go to Uganda or some place like that yourself and devote your life to serving the poorest of the poor there in anyway you can. Yes, as the article points out, this requires extraordinary heroism. But it is not impossible. Look at Mother Theresa. True, to do it you have to become a saint, but that is the whole goal of Christian life to begin with anyway.

Perhaps I am stating it to strongly. Obviously I realize people have different vocations. I think more than anything this post is my feeling guilty because I believe I should be doing more. But I honestly cannot believe that Christ would have us turn our backs on suffering that we can alleviate simply because those that are suffering the most don’t live right next to us.

Twitter is the beginning of the end.

We should all submit a most humble apology to the Chimpanzee for our assertion that several million years of evolution beyond them has resulted in such a rank level of amateur proto-godlike infidel.

That’s patronizing. The Indians are just as human as we are and can develop their local capacity to provide those things just we did as long Imperialist don’t interfere and entrap them into usurious debt.

The only way for Indians to ensure their right to clean and water is to allow them the to creatively develop that capacity voluntarily.

Freedom is necessary and voluntary.

I have a passion for Dostoevsky. He is a great revealer of truths, though sometimes he too is writing propaganda of a sort. We all do on some level. It can’t be helped. A stoic might try to persuade you to become a stoic. And even stoicism is an -ism and systematized or abstracted still looses its essential character.

On another point, my wife, upon seeing the bumper-sticker “coexist” (with the use of various religious symbols to mimic the letter shapes), became offended on behalf of those pious people who might see the sticker. She said, “That’s extremely disrespectful to those people who consider those symbols sacred.”

It is, in fact, a sort of childish ideological violence. Rather like throwing a brick through Old Man Jones’ window because he tells you to get off his lawn.

David:

I’ve certainly encountered the sort of fixation you refer to — “everything today would be utopian if only ‘X’.”

‘X’ being anything from “the Protestant Reformation hadn’t occured”, “the Enlightenment hadn’t occurred”, “Communism hadn’t arisen”, “the 60′s hadn’t occurred”, etc. etc.

I assure you that sort of pathological nostalgia has nothing to do with Dr. Fleming’s book.

If you’re familiar with the essays of Wendell Berry, I’d say that this is a point where Berry’s thought intersects with Dr. Fleming’s.

We’ve all known people (or, if we’re honest, on occasion been the people) who get so engrossed in glorious, romantic Big Causes that we neglect our responsibilities to our family, neighbors, and immediate community. Rather than try to save the world or save America, perhaps we’d all be better off if we concentrated more on saving just our own little corner of it, that part which we know and touch directly.

For example, think of people who have touchy-feely bumper sticker slogans plastered all over their cars and who never miss a candlelight vigil to save Tibet, yet who are indifferent (if not downright nasty) toward the people they actually engage on a face-to-face basis in everyday life.

A character in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov sums up the real meaning of the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor” by pointing out how childishly easy it is to love Mankind in a fluffy, sentimental sort of way, but that it is incredibly challenging to love individual men. The latter, however, is the only way that real good can be accomplished. Unless I’m a superhero conferred with a combination of nigh-omnipotence along with nigh-omniscience, there’s precious little I can do for, say, Somalian war-orphans.

I can, however, help out those who exist within my own little sphere, for two reasons: I have more influence in my own sphere, and I have more intimate understanding of those people’s needs.