July/August 2005

The faces of compassion: An interview with Marc Ian Barasch

After last year’s tsunami disaster, hundreds of thousands of people across the world rallied to support victims of the tragedy. Our compassion, our basic kindness, was evidently more than a product of culture or race; it seemed to be wired into our makeup as humans. If so, why is it seemingly difficult to sustain displays of human goodness in everyday life? Will that worldwide outpouring of compassion simply ease into the background until the next spectacular tragedy?

Boulder resident Marc Ian Barasch examines these and other questions about compassion in his latest book, Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness (Rodale, 2005). Barasch, a Yale graduate and award-winning writer, editor and television producer, is also the author of Healing Dreams (Riverhead, Penguin Putnam, 2000) and Remarkable Recovery (Riverhead/Putnam, 1995). In his latest work, Barasch set out to answer the question, “What exactly is compassion?” His field work took him from the streets of Denver, where he spent a week living homeless, to a maximum-security prison in Georgia, to a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first major gathering of cutting-edge Western brain science and ancient Eastern mind science.

In Field Notes, Barasch asks the question “What if the driving force of human progress is not survival of the fittest, but rather survival of the kindest?” Here, Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema talks to Barasch about the nature of basic human kindness, the biological evolution of goodness, and how compassion can transform our individual lives and the world at large.RD: In your book, you look at compassion through a very broad lens; can you give us a general definition?

MB: Generally, compassion implies some kind of active engagement with other people who are in need, and some active giving. Obviously, there are different levels of compassion and different types of compassion. In college, most of us have a sort of romantic compassion; we believe the world is a place that will immediately respond to innocence and heartfulness—which it should; if it did, it would be a wonderful world. And we think of compassion as having the qualities of softness and gentleness. But when you look at the practical idealists, from Christ to Gandhi to Mother Theresa, they’re pretty tough people. Mother Theresa once described herself as being “seventy percent Attila the Hun.” True compassion takes some toughness and strength. There’s a job to be done, not just an ideology or a wish or a hope.

In our culture, compassion is imprecisely defined. The word itself literally means “to suffer with.” It means to actually be able to experience someone else’s suffering, which is very similar to the Buddha’s first noble truth. People always say Buddhism is a slightly depressing religion, because it starts with suffering. But the Buddhists are very wise; they know that the thing that keeps us apart from others is often a fear of suffering, a fear of catching the contagion of somebody else’s sadness, a fear of having to suffer ourselves in order to perhaps do good or help.

Everyone finds it easy to share joy; that’s often our collegiate ideal. “We’re going to go out in the world and spread joy,” we think, “and the world will rejoice and sing ŒHosanna’ along with us and we’ll all skip off into the sunset with butterflies and choirs.” But that’s not the way it works; it’s really a matter of taking in the poignancy of the world. If you’re not afraid of that, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty, then you can really be engaged with other people in a deep way, and that’s the reward.

I think this is the only way to live, the only approach that makes life good, individually and in terms of the planet. If we want to continue as a civilization, even as a species, into the infinite future, our vector of social—perhaps even biological—evolution must be towards survival of the kindest. It’s towards having some feeling for our fellow beings. You could say compassion is the acknowledgement that we’re connected to everything, everywhere, all the time. That’s an inescapable truth. Once you begin to glimpse that, it changes not only the way you see the world, but also the way you behave.

Let’s take environmentalism as an example. Environmentalism is really about deep emotional healing with the world as it exists and the people and creatures in it. If we want a sustainable world, a sustainable civilization, we need compassion. It’s not necessarily going to happen just by creating mechanisms for trading carbon credits and creating derivative futures markets and ending pollution. It’s going to come from a moral/spiritual/cognitive place beyond just our own well-being, even beyond the well-being of those immediately around us.

All the great teachers have always said to love the stranger. The translation in the Old Testament of “stranger” is not your next door neighbor who you don’t know; “stranger” meant someone from the other tribe, from the place where the boundaries cut off. It’s common, in both the natural world and the human world, to have cut-off points and boundary conditions. We’ll be very nice to people in our church or synagogue or meditation group, but we’re not quite so generous towards the “others,” those outside our immediate circle.

RD: Are you seeing more examples of compassion in our modern world—say, for example, in business?

MB: Yes. As a matter of fact, the concept of compassion, of recognition of others, is beginning to show up even in corporate trainings. The idea of corporate training as maximum efficiency is giving way in little pockets to the idea that a corporation is a gestalt, and that promoting the good of the whole benefits everyone.

This approach is turning Adam Smith on his head. His idea was that you live a selfish life, governed by your own drives to succeed or achieve, and that an invisible hand in the marketplace will somehow sort things out. If everybody just pursues their own narrow self-interests for all they’re worth, the “magic” of the marketplace will create a just and kind society. That doesn’t seem to be the case. That approach is training a whole culture to think of only numero uno.

Even in many spiritual movements, the focus is on the self: “How do I self-actualize?” It’s fine—and important—to think about our own human potential, but what about cherishing the potential of other people, other beings? That’s the terra incognita, the area of discovery we tend to let fall by the wayside. Ultimately, we can broaden it out to the whole planet, and even what’s beyond our planet.

RD: Sort of like the research that’s being done now by SETI scientists?

MB: Yes. The approach of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists was, “How can we receive a message from the stars?” They would scan the heavens, hoping someday someone would send them a little e-mail. They finally started thinking, “Wait a minute—what are we going to say back?” Eventually, they thought, “We’ll say we’re civilized, we’re technologically advanced, we’re smart.” But, they thought, maybe that’s the cosmic equivalent of being a cocktail-party bore. So they thought, “Maybe what they want to know is, are we kind? Maybe that’s what the universe is really interested in.” So they started trying to craft a message to convey that we, as a species, understand compassion and empathy and altruism; they realized that might be the signal characteristic of a civilization.

In the end, that might be the signal characteristic of a long-term successful corporation as well. I once had a meeting with Peter Schwartz, the futures planner at Royal Dutch Shell in London, a mammoth multi-national oil corporation. I was pleasantly surprised by our meeting. Peter’s a very progressive guy with a lot of spiritual training. He told me some of these companies actually think in terms of 500-year plans, and they recognize that unless they’re stewards of the planet, they’re not going to have a market. They realize it’s in their interest to be more compassionate towards the world in general; otherwise, you have unstable economies with people who are only self-interested and don’t build strong communities. Compassion comes with a long-term view, when we see the extent of our connectedness. Any futures planner would have to do that to be really successful in the long run.

RD: I recently read some research on happiness. One of the researchers determined, after thousands of surveys, that the main indicator of happiness is leading a meaningful life. I assume this includes some level of compassion; does a lack of compassion create unhappiness?

MB: We can look to one of the archetypal stories in our culture, The Christmas Carol. Here’s Scrooge, the miser, who has everything he could want or need materially, but who’s alone and miserable. Those people really exist; we’ve all met them. In answer to your question, yes—it seems the more self-centered you are, the more miserable you become. From the standpoint of Eastern philosophies, when you’re centered on the self, you’re clinging to an illusion of separateness from everything. The more you solidify and fixate, the less your life flows and the less joy you have.

William Blake said, “He who binds himself to a joy, does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sun rise.” The minute you try to catch the butterfly and pin it to a corkboard, you just have a dead insect. On some level, we all know this, even though our culture says that we should get the good stuff for ourselves. We’ve been trained to believe in the pursuit of happiness, rather than the recognition that happiness might be right under our noses, in our relationships to the people around us. The pursuit of happiness has been transposed into an endless quest that’s never fulfilled.

But when we try making someone else happy, it generally feels great. It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of people who do charitable work describe a “helper’s high,” a phenomenon that psycho-physiologists are suddenly very interested in. It seems to be some kind of secretion that happens when the human organism gives. Is it endorphins? Is it oxytocin? Whatever it is, the human organism exalts in it. I have a whole passage in my book about this newly named emotion, called “elevation,” that occurs when one performs a selfless, noble deed. In interviews across many cultures, people describe it in the same way—you get a lump in the throat; tears spring to your eyes; you feel elevated; you feel a kind of exhilaration.

RD: So the desire to help, to be of service, may be wired into our DNA?

MB: It appears so. It appears that we are wired to exalt in each other’s happiness. Helping others might be a far better endogenous tonic than the feelings we get simply satisfying ourselves in isolation, or sometimes to the detriment of others. That sense of triumph over somebody else is a short-lived enjoyment, and it seems quite addictive; you’re constantly having to shore up the self that feels that. If that’s your paradigm of happiness, you’re never free. There’s no end to the pursuit. I’ve met people with $100 million who were jealous of people with $200 million.

Of course, the idea of happiness itself is slippery; it slides over many different experiences that we might classify as “happy,” some of which are temporary, some of which are self-involved forms of happiness, some of which are other-centered. I’d guess that these different kinds of happiness activate different parts of the brain. Some kinds of happiness create social cohesion, and some of them create division which, in the end, makes everybody more unhappy.

It’s hard to have happiness, even distantly, at the expense of others. I think we’re aware, on some subliminal level, that our prosperity is bought at the expense of people around the world who are living on a dollar a day. It’s a painful thing to think about that. That knowledge is like the skunk in our garden, the ragged guest at the edge of the party. We know if we’re not giving back, our happiness is tainted.

RD: When I was growing up, we could view the world in a smaller orbit, consisting primarily of our family and friends, because we weren’t as connected. Now, it’s hard for anybody who surfs the internet to think that their constituents are just North Americans.

MB: Yes, and that raises another interesting point. On one hand, people who can appreciate their own lives and take care of their families are the building blocks of society. It has been argued that if the whole planet had functional family systems raising healthy, self-actualized children, the world would be a better place. I wouldn’t argue with that, but it’s an incomplete picture. If our normal values were enough to produce the kind of world we could all live in with sustainable abundance, we would be living in that world by now. But there’s an inherent limit to only taking care of one’s own.

All of the great teachers have said to look beyond that. Jesus said, “Unless a man hates his family, he cannot follow me.” That’s a shocking statement—what does it mean? I don’t know if that’s exactly what he said, but I would take it to mean that the person who takes his family as the be-all and end-all of happiness can’t really follow these teachings; he can’t become fully realized.

There seems to be a dynamic of spiritual growth that is very much like the pebble dropped in the pond that creates ever-widening ripples. Those widening ripples of feeling, of consciousness itself, seem to broaden out past your immediate kin and community, to encompass all living beings. All the great humanitarians seem to be remarkably content, though many of them have nothing material and might not even have families.

I don’t want to imply that I have the answer; this is just a fascinating dialectic. There are studies going on now that are examining these issues. One at UCLA, for example, is looking at the relationship between love of family, friendship, and love of humanity. Suppose we’re each given one cup of the milk of human kindness, which we can allocate as we will; does allocating it more in one place mean that we’re depriving another place? In other words, is there a fixed quantity of kindnesss, compassion or love? I don’t think so. I think if you really open your heart, you’ll tap into an impossibly deep well of compassion and love.

I became enamored with the teachings of Kierkegaard when I was writing this book, because he talks about something called “the infinite debt of love.” When I first heard that, I thought he meant it in the conventional sense—if you are loved, you sort of owe the other person on some level. You want to be in a reciprocal arrangement, you want to give love back. Kierkegaard said that was absolute nonsense. In fact, he said, it’s the one who gives love who’s in debt; he’s the one who taps this infinite well of love and allows it to pass through him, and who can then contact divinity through the other person’s need for that love.

I think that’s a wonderful way to look at it—to have gratitude towards those who draw love from you, who allow you to access that well. You don’t expect anything in return; you’ve already received the greatest gift. But so many relationships devolve into a quid pro quo arrangement: Am I getting my needs met? Many great teachers say, instead, to see that the other person’s needs are met, and then watch what happens. It’s an experiment. What do we find when we look closely and remove some of the ego lenses through which we usually view the world?

RD: This reminds me of the movie “Scared Sacred.” Have you seen it?

MB: No, I haven’t.

RD: In the film, a man named Velcro Ripper travels to places he calls “ground zeros” around the world, like Bhopal and Bosnia and Hiroshima, and interviews people who have lost something, usually some huge thing. He looks for how they draw on the sacred to get through their ordeals, and finds that most of them turn to compassion.

MB: That’s interesting—I was at a conference in Bali with Desmond Tutu and other people who you’d call social healers. Many of them were from ground zeros of various sorts. They came out of these cauldrons of hatred, and suffered so badly that you would expect them to be bloody-minded towards their enemies, to crave revenge and justice. What we do with our wounds is a central question on our planet. These people found a way to heal their wounds through forgiveness of their supposed enemies; that turned out to be the salvation for them psychologically and spiritually.

Again, this is what the great teachers have always told us, to seek forgiveness. I wonder if post-traumatic stress is so difficult to cure because forgiveness is not part of the therapeutic modality. We have in us, right down to the primate level of our being, the ability to forgive. It’s an ancient capacity, and it’s very healing. Many of the great social healers are people who have realized this; after having been persecuted, they have made a choice to not continue the cycle, to somehow absorb and transmute their own suffering into loving kindness. It sounds idealistic, but I think it’s the only practical solution to war.

I am going to do everything I can to talk about this, to promote the idea; many of these great teachers aren’t well known, and this message isn’t well publicized. But the idea of universal forgiveness has the potential to change the world. We’re evolving, and with that evolution comes the incorporation of the great doctrines of all the great religions into the everyday lives of so-called ordinary people. We really know all we need to know; the great psycho-spiritual discoveries for the most part have been made, many of them thousands of years ago. It’s just taken this long for them to begin to osmose into people’s actual lives and into the politics of countries.

We’re seeing this now in the historically unprecedented number of recent peaceful revolutions, like eastern Europe in the late ‘80s and the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. These revolutions were entirely peaceful, with a loving kind of mentality. They made it so inviting to dissolve the police state that the police took off their uniforms and the soldiers simply dissolved back into ordinary people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate crimes committed during the apartheid era in South Africa, is a marvelous example of this trend toward peaceful revolution. Similar bodies have been started in a few other countries. In those countries, the state, for the first time, is resolving civil war through these commissions, which are based on the ideal of forgiveness.

I had some long conversations with a Catholic priest in Columbia named Father Anarbaez, who is creating schools for forgiveness under state auspices to help integrate the right-wing death squads and the left-wing guerillas back into society. Those schools of forgiveness have now spread to Bogota, where there’s a very progressive mayor. They’re trying to create a culture of compassion and forgiveness in this very dense and difficult urban environment.

RD: And you wouldn’t expect it, with the polarized environment of haves and have-nots, of victims and perpetrators.

MB: That’s right. I think it’s the first time this social experiment is beginning to catch hold. And I think more of humanity is ready for this next step in our social evolution; I think we’re ready as a whole to learn how to live together on this beautiful planet, to have compassion and to forgive.

RD: What about your own experiences? Is there an instance in which you found it impossible to forgive somebody?

MB: Yes, there is. I realized that I had one enemy that I knew of, a person I felt had wronged me deeply. It was a business relationship, but it devastated my family, it effectively bankrupted me, it was one causative factor in a serious illness, it was incredibly destructive to my life. It took me many years to recover, and the whole experience pivoted on the perfidy of this one man. I held him as my personal demon for 18 years. Grudges don’t just sit there; you have to feed them—you know the saying about “nursing a grudge.” A resentment or grudge is on life support; it’s brain dead, but we keep it in the ICU of our psyche and keep it alive.

I knew I was devoting attention and energy that could have gone elsewhere to keeping this grudge alive, but I couldn’t shake it. I would sometimes dream of hitting this guy or harming him. I realized I didn’t want this anymore. I had to look at it and decide what to do.

There’s a saying that craving revenge is like drinking poison and hoping the other guy will die. The first realization you have is, “This is hurting me; this is blighting my life.” So the first level of forgiveness is to help yourself. After a while, I realized this was about more than me; it was about our relatedness. This event occured in my professional life; as a result, I had created areas that were off limits because they tangentially touched this person or this experience. My life was suddenly truncated; I had limited myself, I had painted myself into a corner with this grudge. Even though it may make us feel righteous and powerful and good, a grudge is diminishing.

Eventually, I decided to meet this guy, as an experiment as much as anything else. I hadn’t spoken to him for 18 years, but I wrote him a letter. I said, “I would like to do an experiment in forgiveness for myself, perhaps for you. It may be for the greater good.” He wrote me back and acted as if he’d forgotten the whole thing. It was humiliating, to realize I thought of somebody as my personal demon, and I was just a blip on his life radar. But we decided to have a meeting with a friend of mine, who is a mediator. She didn’t do anything but sit there and meditate and hold the space. It allowed a space for compassionate listening.

Sometimes, that compassionate listening, where you want somebody else to bear witness to your suffering, is all we can do for each other. I got to say, “Here’s what I felt, here’s what I experienced.” To his credit, this man listened. Then he told me his view. Before our meeting, I had done some prep work. Someone gave me a simple exercise, to imagine what this man might have been feeling, and why he would have behaved the way he did.

The assumption is that malice is an external manifestation of a fear or even thwarted love. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is nothing but love. There’s either the resistance to it, the thwarting of it, the craving for it or, if you’re very lucky, the living within its embrace. But everything circles back to love in some way or another. In this exercise, I tried to look at his personality for the first time, and I was amazed. I really was able to see how he might have felt, and then I began to see sort of my own culpability. I think it could be fairly said that, in conventional terms, I would be the feather and he would be the lead weight on the scales. But that doesn’t matter, because the feather can be heavy, too. My behavior hadn’t been exemplary but, in the righteous mindset of the grudge holder, I forgot to see that part. This reversal of position was the key to compassion and empathy.

RD: Would you have gotten the same relief without the prep work or the compassionate listening?

MB: I don’t know. I think the prep work helped; it prepared me, because when he told me his viewpoint, it was very much what I had intuited by imagining myself in his shoes. At a certain level, empathy has to have the faculty of imagination. If we can be more imaginative with each other, we can be more compassionate. You have to interpolate your own feelings into your imagination of how the other person feels. Eventually, you’ll realize higher levels of empathy—radical empathy, where you’re able to really get the other person’s feelings wholesale rather than retail, rather than through your own ego vending-machine.

Imagining how he might have felt prepared me; it was like tilling the ground, so the seeds of forgiveness were more easily planted. What astonished me was when he finally said, after a lot of back-and-forth and hemming-and-hawing, “You know, I was wrong and I’m sorry.” It was like a Tibetan sand painting, where they do these elaborate castles with deities and demons and retinues of personages, and at the end of the ritual, they sweep it all away into a pile of gray dust. That was the sensation I had. It was as if this elaborate construct that had taken 18 years to maintain, was swept away in an instant. And it never came back.

Sometimes I think about the fact that there was no restitution. It’s like someone saying, “I stole your bicycle, and I’m sorry,” but not giving you the bicycle back. It’s a bit incomplete. I think restitution is important, but in this case, it wasn’t going to happen. For me, it was letting go on a spiritual level of a psychological construct that I had been clinging to, the way somebody who’s being electrocuted, through muscle spasm, clings to the electrical cable.

RD: It’s as if we compulsively grab on to whatever’s torturing us.

MB: Yes, as if that’s going to free us somehow. I also prepared myself by thinking of great acts of forgiveness. For a Christian, it’s thinking of Christ saying, “Forgive them; they know not what they do,” which is, to me, a great universal statement—that ignorance, not malice, is the problem. I also thought of Tibetans forgiving their Chinese torturers, Jews forgiving SS men. The capacity for forgiveness is remarkable.

RD: I read a story about a concentration camp survivor who reported that when the allies liberated the camp, some of the guards were still there. There was a period of time when the inmates became the guards of the guards—they switched roles—and the former inmates did not torture or kill the Nazis who had recently tortured them. I thought that was remarkable—that people could go through that kind of torture, and not seek revenge.

MB: This is an interesting issue, of revenge, empathy and pity. Pity is also very deeply imbedded in our neurological make-up, and you can find examples of pity in primate behavior. We also see this in forgiveness rituals in traditional cultures, in which somebody who wants forgiveness crawls to the person whose forgiveness they seek. We are good creatures at heart; when we see anybody helpless, it automatically excites our sense of sympathy.

So what creates pitilessness? This is an important social study. How are individuals trained to overcome their innate goodness? Some philosophies would say that it’s only ripping the mask off our innate cruelty, that the veneer of civilization is thin, and beneath that lie the bloody teeth and claws. It’s quite the opposite. The question is, what is the force powerful enough to suppress people’s natural compassion and affinity for each other?

It’s the basic goodness versus basic badness argument, and it’s tied in to our biological evolution. There are those who who would maintain that we are fundamentally selfish and aggressive creatures. Research shows that chimpanzees have many laudable characteristics; they’re able to make friends and forgive and reconcile. But they also rape, they pillage, they murder, they inflict organized violence. You see a lot of our worst characteristics in chimps, and chimps were taken as the model by evolutionary biologists to point to what we innately must be, given that these are our cohorts from the same original progenitor.

However, another creature from the presumed progenitor of the great apes is the bonobo, an entirely different creature that has just as much in common with us genetically as a chimp does. Whereas chimpanzees have a male-dominated, competitive society, bonobos have matriarchal societies marked by cooperation and sharing. Bonobos have a peaceful nature, and they often resolve conflict with sex. They don’t rape and pillage. They are affiliative, and they seem to have a highly developed sense of empathy for each other.

The chimps and bonobos are just beginning to be studied to provide one among many scientific pillars to the idea that our nature might be, in fact, kinder rather than crueler. Darwin himself talked about it, but that discussion did not become valorized within science. Popular interpretations of Darwin’s work have ignored all the instances in which Darwin talked about cooperation and symbiosis in nature and maternal instincts and kindness among animals. That discussion didn’t make it into the popular conception of what Darwinism is, what we know as survival of the fittest.

RD: That really has been a driving force in our society, the dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest concept. That’s what the research into happiness that I read about was pointing to as well—if you only considered evolutionary theory, we have a powerful inclination toward being content only if others are doing well.

MB: That’s an incredibly important point. Darwin made that point as well. He said that any animal or human population that had a higher percentage of altruists, up to a point, would be more successful. The dark side is that you can have a very successful group of SS men or Crusaders or Jihadists who are extremely altruistic within their group; that contributes to the success of their group, to the detriment of the wider group. The challenge now is for us to see the group as all of humanity, to see all of our fellow creatures. That’s our evolutionary thrust.

Many corporations are latching onto that idea—that if you foster kindness and generosity within the corporation, the corporation does much better. In the long-run, it’s also more stable. There are obviously corporations that still believe you create a snake pit and you see which snakes survive, and that those will be the fittest snakes. But generally, in those cases, the snake eats its own tail and disappears inside itself. None of the orders based on hatred have ever survived. There’s never been a thousand-year Reich. There’s never been a social order that could survive with that kind of mentality, because hatred is parasitical. It only exists in relation to love. If we are in an evolutionary process of creating a sustainable global civilization, compassion is the only sustaining force. It’s not just a nice moral construct; it’s an evolutionary imperative.

A fund has been established to support the Compassion Project and the work of Marc Barasch. Tax-deductible donations may be sent to All Seasons Chalice Church, PO Box 2180, Boulder, CO 80306.