The precarious and fragile conditions

All at once, with converging news from different friends who describe some ordeal, I enter a mild terror (yes, there is no such thing, is there?) about the fragile conditions upon which depend, as I suppose, my sanity and self-possession, my self worth: possibilities from which I avert my gaze because I do not want to have to think about how I might cope with them. Thus my sense of well being, dependent upon certain things not happening to me or mine, and so on ...

... and yet this is more than a personal thing, it's a reflection of larger and grosser realities that lie outside the confines of our common world, and by 'our' I mean, of course, something like the European or Western middle class, whose comfort depends, depends, depends upon not knowing the causal conditions of that world, whose reality lies outside it, moral realities of exploitation mainly, in which we collude because we do not protest, and so forth, nothing new here, nothing new ... but the passage from mild disquiet to ruling though not engulfing passion ...

A couple of scallies, guttural of speech, hoarsely calling each to other, their world laid out in the confines of that speech, who nevertheless, within these terms, make judgments about what is plausible and implausible, and aggressively and with indignation maintain their state like any decent man.

We keep returning to the status quo ante, to the condition of the horde or the tribe, with its war lords and the pull on even the most civilised imagination, of primitive violence... that there is pleasure, engulfing joy and delight, in a released savagery, in kicking someone's head in, as the disinhibited youths we read about in the press ... so what is the role of compassion, what is its natural source?

It seems to me that the doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of God's 'self-emptying', or of Christ's making himself powerless, is precisely a way of fixing or projecting a moral insight about power, particularly about the power over others. When we have someone in our power, so that we can do with them just what we want to do ... power that is in one way or another self-aggrandising or gratifying, is what we have to renounce if compassion, or any other moral virtue that allows others to be, is to emerge or flourish.