Compassion is the antidote to the politics of cruelty | Letters

Readers respond to an article by John Harris in which he argues that around the world virtues such as kindness and compassion are gathering dust

John Harris’s powerful article exposes the growing assault on empathy in politics (From the US midterms to the hard right in Britain, empathy has become a dirty word in politics, 3 November). But why has empathy become such a threatening quality? Perhaps because extinguishing it completes the work of aggressive neoliberalism by severing the last thread of the social contract: our sense of responsibility for one another. If we can persuade ourselves that people are to blame for their own suffering, and that helping them merely enables dependency, we can abandon them without guilt.

We founded Compassion in Politics in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s first election because we feared precisely this erosion of compassion from public life. Yet evolutionary science tells a different story about human nature. Our capacity for compassion is innate. It is one of the qualities that enabled our species to survive through cooperation and mutual care. Crucially, it is not fixed. The cultures and institutions we create can nurture it or suppress it.

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