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Key points
- Pity has mainly a negative connotation.
- Pity is part of the continuum of feeling another's pain.
- To feel pity is part of what makes us human.
A Kenyan friend once said an experience he once had was “awful.” This was puzzling since the event was a joyous one. I asked what had happened to make it awful. It took some doing to understand that nothing went wrong. Rather, he was using the word it in its older, original meaning—inspiring wonder.
In contemporary English, we’ve separated wonder and awe into opposites, with "wonderful" retaining its positive connotation, while "awful" is associated with dread. This is an example of semantic shift, where words can drift into different usages over time, occasionally winding up just opposite of what they meant originally.
Words can also be widened to encompass far more than originally intended. Jessica Bennett, a New York Times contributing editor, wrote about the word "trauma," pointing out how its meaning has changed recently1. She quotes Natalie Wynn, a commentator on YouTube, “All pain is ‘harm.’ All ‘harm’ is trauma. All ‘trauma’ comes from someone who is an ‘abuser.’ It’s as if people can’t articulate disagreement or hardships without using this language.”
The difficulty is that broadening the definition of trauma makes all pain equivalent, which threatens to equate small harms with the most terrible or irremediable. Being scolded by a parent isn’t the same as being beaten by one’s parent; being pushed by a bully isn’t the same as being relentlessly ridiculed. Harm is on a continuum that ranges from minor to—"trauma." Understanding the levels of harm is a way of respecting people who have been harmed, as it sorts out the trivial from the significant and helps figure out appropriate personal and therapeutic responses. The person who has been hurt by being stared at crossly deserves a sympathetic response but the person who has been tormented with vicious threats deserves something greater than kind words and a hug.
This brings me to another word, one that unlike "trauma" has widened in its usage but has drastically shrunk and nearly fallen out of favor—"pity," a word that once had deep resonance. Consider Michelangelo’s sculpture, that of Mary holding the body of Jesus on her lap, is called the Pietà. It is the expression of tremendous compassion, mourning, and great sorrow. Is there a better word, one more adequate for this feeling? Yet the word has been in decline for the last 200 years as it has taken on the negative association with being condescending; to pity someone carries the implication of superiority.
Is pity, then, morally wrong, like contempt? Or is pity an aspect of one of our altruistic emotions, aligned with compassion? Is pity a contemptuous emotion because of feelings of superiority? Or is being without pity (pitiless) a moral failure? There are few psychological studies of this emotion, nor is there much philosophical analysis. Robert Kimball, a professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville, in A Plea for Pity, argues that pity serves a useful moral role.
Kimball points out that sometimes compassion is an emotionally inappropriate response to a situation because this emotion implies that the action will be taken to help alleviate the distress. Pity is distinguished by its acknowledgment that nothing can be done and that interventions are all but hopeless. Kimball writes, “Feelings of pity toward others who have suffered the worst misfortunes can be morally praiseworthy, expressing full recognition of the limits of human life and power, while reaching out to others with intense sorrow. It can be one of our most profound and most humane emotions.”
The moral and psychological role of pity is captured in the documentary movie, The Sorrow and the Pity, which examines the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany. In the film, Marcel Verdier, a French pharmacist says, “The two emotions I experienced the most [during the Nazi occupation] were sorrow and pity.” Nazis and their supporters felt neither sorrow nor pity for the victims of the Holocaust. Those who opposed Nazi collaboration felt impotent and while their ability to act was severely limited, their emotional life was intact: they felt both sorrow and pity. With the liberation of France, those who felt pity could turn the emotion into compassion, as it was now possible to act in the way it hadn’t been before. Hope had been restored, and with it, the moral demand for action that compassion implies.
Those who collaborated and those who did not but didn’t feel pity for the Holocaust victims acted shamefully. Which brings me to another moral emotion that has fallen out of favor—shame. I will save my comments about shame for another blog.
