Today, as a scholar of Greek literature who studies narrative and memory , I see how this collective trauma shaped U. Collective trauma is a term that describes the shared experience of and reactions to a traumatic event by a group of people. That group may be as small as a few people or as large as a whole society.
It also demonstrates that collective tragedies can shape the world views of individuals who were not present at the event. The traumatized group may go through shared stages of grief , from disbelief to anger. The further the group gets from the traumatizing event itself, the closer it moves to social memory , a concept historians use to describe how groups of people come to share a consistent story about past events.
This narrative can be manipulated to reflect or enforce values in the present. My studies of ancient Greek history suggest to me that this is what happened in the U. There are myths and histories of the ancient world that describe how, in the wake of the destruction of cities, societies created cultural memories that helped them find reasons for rushing into war.
These episodes have parallels to the U. Of course compassion required making the Trojans somehow familiar, so that Greeks could see their own vulnerability in them, and feel terror and pity, as for their own relations. Not those other ones, over there in Melos. Compassion and terror now inform the fabric of our lives. And in those lives we see evidence of the good work of compassion, as Americans make real to themselves the sufferings of so many people whom they never would otherwise have thought about: New York firefighters, that gay rugby player who helped bring down the fourth plane, bereaved families of so many national and ethnic origins.
More rarely our compassion even crosses national boundaries: the tragedy led an unprecedented number of Americans to sympathize with the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban. Yet at the same time, we also see evidence of how narrow and self-serving our sense of compassion can sometimes be.
Some of us may notice with new appreciation the lives of Arab Americans among us — but others regard the Muslims in our midst with increasing wariness and mistrust. Indeed, the events of September 11 make vivid a philosophical problem that has been debated from the time of Euripides through much of the history of the Western philosophical tradition.
This is the question of what to do about compassion, given its obvious importance in shaping the civic imagination, but given, too, its obvious propensity for self-serving narrowness. Is compassion, with all its limits, our best hope as we try to educate citizens to think well about human relations both inside the nation and across national boundaries?
So some thinkers have suggested. Or is compassion a threat to good political thinking and the foundations of a truly just world community? The enemies of compassion hold that we cannot build a stable and lasting concern for humanity on the basis of such a slippery and uneven motive; impartial motives based on ideas of dignity and respect should take its place. This debate continues in contemporary political and legal thought. In a recent exchange about animal rights, J. Coetzee invented a character who argues that the capacity for sympathetic imagination is our best hope for moral goodness in this area.
Peter Singer replies, with much plausibility, that the sympathetic imagination is all too anthropocentric and we had better not rely on it to win rights for creatures whose lives are very different from our own. I shall not trace the history of the debate in this essay.
Instead, I shall focus on its central philosophical ideas and try to sort them out, offering a limited defense of compassion and the tragic imagination, and then making some suggestions about how its pernicious tendencies can best be countered — with particular reference throughout to our current political situation.
Let me set the stage for the analysis to follow by turning to Smith, who, as you will have noticed, turns up in my taxonomy on both sides of the debate. Smith offers one of the best accounts we have of compassion, and of the ethical achievements of which this moral sentiment is capable. Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity.
He would, I imagine,first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.
The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the more profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.
But more often than not, those sentiments stop short at the national boundary. We think the events of September 11 are bad because they involved us and our nation.
Not just human lives, but American lives. The world came to a stop — in a way that it rarely has for Americans when disaster has befallen human beings in other places.
The plight of innocent civilians in Iraq never made it onto our national radar screen. Floods, earthquakes, cyclones, the daily deaths of thousands from preventable malnutrition and disease — none of these makes the American world come to a standstill, none elicits a tremendous outpouring of grief and compassion.
At most we get what Smith so trenchantly described: a momentary flicker of feeling, quickly dissipated by more pressing concerns close to home. Similarly, compassion for our fellow Americans can all too easily slip over into a desire to make America come out on top and to subordinate other nations.
One vivid example of this slip took place at a baseball game I went to at Comiskey Park, the first game played in Chicago after September 11 — and a game against the Yankees, so there was heightened awareness of the situation of New York and its people. Things began well, with a moving ceremony commemorating the firefighters who had lost their lives and honoring local firefighters who had gone to New York afterwards to help out.
There was even a lot of cheering when the Yankees took the field, a highly unusual transcendence of local attachments.
In that context, the chant had expressed a wish for America to humiliate its Cold War enemy; as time passed, it became a general way of expressing the desire to crush an opponent, whoever it might be. With such examples before us, how can we trust compassion and the imagination of the other that it contains?
I shall proceed as follows. First, I shall offer an analysis of the emotion of compassion, focusing on the thoughts and imaginings on which it is based. This will give us a clearer perspective on how and where it is likely to go wrong. This proposal, at first attractive, contains, on closer inspection, some deep difficulties. Third, I will return to compassion, asking how, if we feel we need it as a public motive, we might educate it so as to overcome, as far as we can, the problem that Smith identified.
More than a warm feeling in the gut, compassion involves a set of thoughts, often quite complex. There is a good deal of agreement about this among philosophers as otherwise diverse as Aristotle and Rousseau, and also among contemporary psychologists and sociologists who have done empirical work on the emotion. It requires the thought that the other person is in a bad way, and a pretty seriously bad way. It contains within itself an appraisal of the seriousness of various predicaments.
Let us call this the judgment of seriousness. Notice that this assessment is made from the point of view of the person who has the emotion. And yet it does not necessarily take at face value the estimate of the predicament this person will be able to form. As Smith emphasized, we frequently have great compassion for people whose predicament is that they have lost their powers of thought; even if they seem like happy children, we regard this as a terrible catastrophe.
Complex though the feat is, young children easily learn it, feeling sympathy with the suffering of animals and other children, but soon learning, as well, to withhold sympathy if they judge that the person is just a crybaby, or spoiled — and, of course, to have sympathy for the predicament of an animal who is dead or unconscious, even if it is not actually suffering. Next comes the judgment of nondesert. There may be a measure of blame, but then in our compassion we typically register the thought that the suffering exceeds the measure of the fault.
The Trojan women are an unusually clear case, because, more than most tragic figures, they endure the consequences of events in which they had no active part at all. But we can see that nondesert is a salient part of our compassion even when we do also blame the person: typically we feel compassion at the punishment of criminal offenders, to the extent that we think circumstances beyond their control are at least in good measure responsible for their becoming the bad people they are.
People who have the idea that the poor brought their poverty upon themselves by laziness fail, for that reason, to have compassion for them. Next there is a thought much stressed in the tradition that I shall call the judgment of similar possibilities : Aristotle, Rousseau, and others suggest that we have compassion only insofar as we believe that the suffering person shares vulnerabilities and possibilities with us.
I think we can clearly see that this judgment is not strictly necessary for the emotion, as the other two seem to be. We have compassion for nonhuman animals, without basing it on any imagined similarity — although, of course, we need somehow to make sense of their predicament as serious and bad. Finally, there is one thing more, not mentioned in the tradition, which I believe must be added in order to make the account complete.
This is what, in writing on the emotions, I have called the eudaimonistic judgment , namely, a judgment that places the suffering person or persons among the important parts of the life of the person who feels the emotion. Thus we feel fear about damages that we see as significant for our own well-being and our other goals; we feel grief at the loss of someone who is already invested with a certain importance in our scheme of things.
Eudaimonism is not egoism. But I do mean that the things that occasion a strong emotion in us are things that correspond to what we have invested with importance in our account to ourselves of what is worth pursuing in life. Compassion can evidently go wrong in several different ways. Even more frequently, it can get the judgment of seriousness wrong, ascribing too much importance to the wrong things or too little to things that have great weight.
Finally, and obviously, compassion can get the eudaimonistic judgment wrong, putting too few people into the circle of concern. My account, I think, is able to explain the unevenness of compassion better than other more standard accounts.
Compassion begins from where we are, from the circle of our cares and concerns. It will be felt only toward those things and persons we see as important, and of course most of us most of the time ascribe importance in a very uneven and inconstant way.
Empathetic imagining can sometimes extend the circle of concern. Still, there is a recalcitrance in our emotions, given their link to our daily scheme of goals and ends. Smith is right: thinking that the poor victims of the disaster in China are important is easy to do for a short time, but hard to sustain in the fabric of our daily life; there are so many things closer to home to distract us, and these things are likely to be so much more thoroughly woven into our scheme of goals.
Let us return to September 11 armed with this analysis. The astonishing events made many Americans recognize with a new vividness the nation itself as part of their circle of concern.
So our antecedent concern emerged with a new clarity in the emotions we experienced. At the same time, we actually extended concern, in many cases, to people in America who had not previously been part of our circle of concern at all: the New York firefighters, the victims of the disasters. We extended concern to them both because we heard their stories and also, especially, because we were encouraged to see them as a part of the America we already loved and for which we now intensely feared.
This accounts for the sports-fan mentality so neatly depicted in my baseball story. Compassion for a member of the opposing team? In light of these difficulties, it is easy to see why much of the philosophical tradition has wanted to do away with compassion as a basis for public choice and to turn, instead, to detached moral principles whose evenhandedness can be relied on. The main candidate for a central moral notion has been the idea of human worth and dignity, a principle that has been put to work from the Stoics and Cicero on through Kant and beyond.
We are to recognize that all humans have dignity, and that this dignity is both inalienable and equal, not affected by differences of class, caste, wealth, honor, status, or even sex. The recognition of human dignity is supposed to impose obligations on all moral agents, whether the humans in question are conationals or foreigners. Out of this basic idea Cicero developed much of the basis for modern international law in the areas of war, punishment, and hospitality.
This Stoic tradition was quite clear that respect for human dignity could move us to appropriate action, both personal and social, without our having to rely at all on the messier and more inconstant motive of compassion. Indeed, for separate reasons, which I shall get to shortly, Stoics thought compassion was never appropriate, so they could not rely on it.
What I now want to ask is whether this countertradition was correct. Respect for human dignity looks like the right thing to focus on, something that can plausibly be seen as of boundless worth, constraining all actions in pursuit of well-being, and also as equal, creating a kingdom of ends in which humans are ranked horizontally, so to speak, rather than vertically.
Security expert Martin Roenigk said officials in Athens could be expected to establish a tight perimeter — on the ground, in the sea, and in the air, aimed at thwarting any potential assault. When Greek security forces tested their readiness at a three-day European Union summit at the exclusive resort of Porto Carras in northern Greece last week, authorities deployed anti-aircraft missiles, military helicopters, patrol boats, and thousands of guards.
However, one thing that hasn't had much of a try is bioterrorism, said Roenigk, whose company Compudyne has helped secure a number of American embassies. On the other hand, the unforeseen circumstance might not be the manner of attack, but the identity of the attackers. Domestic terrorists should not be underestimated, said Barkey, who teaches international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
Another threat might come from anti-globalization protesters, Wamsley said. But Fergus, who also worked on the Olympics in Sydney, said anti-globalists arrived to protest there, but they lacked a focal point and quickly lost their momentum. Despite the challenges, Greece appears to be "focused on meeting the expectations of the world community," Lee said. Olympic officials tout that Greece has:. Created the Olympic Security Division, which brings together intelligence and helps coordinate security forces — much like the Department of Homeland Security.
Staged extensive training exercises. In November, security forces simulated the hijacking of a cruise ship and airplane with help from experts from Scotland Yard. But the action that has proven to be most assuring to the international community almost happened by chance.
Last summer, Greece made their first-ever arrest of an operative of the November 17 terror group, who had injured himself making a bomb.
November 17 was once called one of the most elusive terror organizations in the world, having allegedly committed 23 killings and more than bombings since But since that first arrest, the Greeks have nearly "eradicated" the group, said Fergus.
The State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report also gave Greece a rare highlight for its victories against November
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