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I borrow my title from a poem by Zbigniew Herbert whose protagonist Mr. Cogito, upon picking up his daily newspaper, confronts a pair of page 1 stories.1 The first reports the latest casualties - 120 to be precise - in an ongoing if distant war. The second, complete with a picture of the alleged perpetrator, details a gruesome multiple homicide, presumably much closer by. What transpires will seem familiar enough as 'the eye of Mr. Cogito slips indifferently' over the report of dead soldiers 'to plunge with delight into the description of everyday horror'. Mr. Cogito's response, though commonplace, is disturbing. This is not just because, as Herbert intimates, Mr. Cogito perhaps succumbs to prurience. The difficulty also, but only partially, is one of proximity - the murders occurred locally, the casualties are more distant. This, as Herbert explains, renders them invisible.
for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain
too great a distance
covers them like a jungle
But even that is not the sole, indeed, not even the most important source of difficulty here. The problem is that the dead troops are an aggregate and so, on Herbert's account, more elusive. As he concludes:
they don't speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction
a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion
It is tempting to read Herbert as posing what commonly is seen as a basic dilemma of contemporary politics - whether and, if so, how it might be possible to prompt people to respond compassionately not just to the victims of arresting local tragedies but also to the plight of large populations that not only are more distant, but that are suffering the effects of sweeping breakdown, carnage and devastation.
We should resist this temptation. For Herbert is susceptible to a considerably more useful reading. He is, I think, rightly warning against the impulse to ground politics in compassion altogether. Indeed, since compassion consists in a pressure to acknowledge and respond to particular suffering, a pressure so ineluctable as to seem mathematical, the very idea of a compassionate politics verges on incoherence. For politics typically demands precisely that we attend...