In this blog post, I want to explore how we can practice genuine compassion and solidarity when confronted with others’ suffering in modern society.
Modern people primarily experience others’ suffering through media like news or movies. We encounter disasters and tragedies happening around the world daily on our screens, often perceiving them as distant stories disconnected from reality. Media plays a dual role: conveying suffering while simultaneously diminishing its immediacy. This indirect experience makes it difficult to fully comprehend the pain or feel deep compassion compared to directly confronting another’s suffering. Modern society also strictly emphasizes not encroaching on private spheres. Respecting personal privacy and maintaining distance has become an important virtue. This culture of respect, though born of positive intentions, carries the risk of degenerating into excessive indifference to others’ suffering. Perhaps as a result, modern society seems to be becoming a comfortable yet desolate sanatorium for patients suffering from apathy, unable to feel even simple compassion.
Definitions of compassion vary widely across eras, cultures, and regions, but according to many scholars, compassion arises when two conditions are met. First, the suffering must be an accidental tragedy, not the result of the person’s own fault. Second, one must believe that such a tragedy could befall them at any time. Viewed through these conditions, the feeling of compassion is highly likely to become dulled in modern society. We often perceive another’s suffering as an inevitable consequence of their own poor choices or actions. This mindset places us in a position detached from that suffering, reducing the need to feel compassion. We tend to believe we could have prevented such misfortune and strive to keep it far from our own lives. This can rationalize indifference to others’ pain and widen social distance.
Yet compassion remains vital in modern society, and its value can even grow. First, while modern society appears safer than the past, dangers lurk everywhere. Natural disasters, epidemics, economic instability—these threats can strike anyone at any time. This reality suggests we should recognize the need for social solidarity with greater compassion, rather than becoming desensitized to others’ suffering. Second, happiness and unhappiness now depend more heavily on people’s relationships than in the past. While intimacy between individuals has diminished, socioeconomic relationships have become far more complex and intertwined. Consequently, we are deeply entangled in each other’s lives, and the likelihood that another’s suffering will become our own problem has increased. Third, advances in transportation and communication mean modern people can now become aware of the misfortunes of people they never knew before. We now live in an era where disasters occurring on the other side of the globe can instantly impact our daily lives. Even if it’s difficult to feel compassion through indirect experience, the increasing frequency of confronting suffering makes compassion all the more necessary. In this context, compassion is more urgently required than ever before, and its value is correspondingly high.
True compassion usually leads to solidarity. Solidarity means acting together to eliminate the causes of suffering. Those who keep their distance while merely chanting emotional compassion implicitly build walls dividing the two groups, ensuring they themselves and the suffering people do not mix. This wall is both a firewall to block their own misfortune and a fortress wall blocking the entry of suffering others. Just as a ‘castle without an entrance’ has no exit, they do not venture into the dangerous territory outside the castle. Such sympathy, content to toss a portion of one’s possessions over the walls from the safety of the castle, is also a valuable form of compassion. However, true compassion is about tearing down walls and forming solidarity. This solidarity begins by recognizing another’s suffering as one’s own problem and actively stepping forward to solve it. Furthermore, solidarity shares social responsibility and fosters a culture where community members care for one another. Through solidarity, we transcend indifference to others’ suffering and gain the strength to build a better society together.
