Humanitarian Compassion

I found Meister’s argument for humanitarian compassion particularly insightful and compelling: ”it makes us feel good about feeling bad, creating the delusion that compassion is its own reward” (73).  The idea of a purely psychic level of compassion complicates the condition of suffering by making it something that can be co-opted and, in a sense, robs this experience from the person suffering.  The fact that one then feels good about feeling compassion – some kind of perverse sense of selflessness in identifying with the victim that is actually entirely selfish – seems to lead to numerous social problems that fail to disrupt the conditions that create the suffering.

In this context, humanitarian melodrama and the idea of the truth commissions are also of interest:

“In revealing the truth about pain, melodramatic performance thus enacts a partial victory over evil: suffering is redeemed, and the victim is vindicated in the end.  To describe the work of a truth commission as falling under a genre of fiction (melodrama) seems insensitive to the real human pain that is reported.  My point is not that the truth about what happened was (or might as well have been) a falsehood, but rather, that the narrative through which that truth is told assumes an audience that regards itself as sensitive to human suffering in just the way melodramatic fiction does” (63).

I wonder what the consequences are of doing away with fiction/nonfiction when considering humanitarian melodrama.  Readers of melodramatic fiction—these people who read because they “want to feel bad about the conditions described but who would be made highly uncomfortable if the victim were portrayed as blaming them” (63)—are mostly women.  However, men seem to be the main audience for the truth commissions because they make up the majority of powerful legal and political positions that are the audience. Gender has not been approached in this chapter, but I wonder what this means for the role of gender in questions of justice and revolutionary aims, especially since women tend to be victims of oppressive patriarchal social systems worldwide.   Is there any value to thinking about humanitarian melodrama’s nonfiction male audience or fictional female audience?  Does this change the type of sensitivity or humanitarian compassion that is conceived when looking at it in terms of gender? 

It looks like Sol and I have a similar interest here, so hopefully we can pursue this more in class.