I'll never forget the first time I had a real conversation with an unhoused woman during my early days of volunteering at a shelter. When I asked her how she found herself sleeping there, her story was one I didn’t expect. She told me she's been living with her mother in an apartment. Then, when her mother became ill with a cancer diagnosis, she'd been forced to quit her job in order to care for her. With no money for the rent from either mom or daughter, they were evicted with nowhere else to go.
At that moment I came face to face with my own pre-judgement. I’d considered several reasons why a young woman might find herself in a shelter for the unhoused, but this hadn’t been one of them. It seems her own compassion had landed her there. But where was my own?
Bias Gets in Our Way
Though most of us balk at the idea of being called judgmental, I think we’d all be hard-pressed to find anyone who truly lives without at least mental indictments of others (if not verbal). And over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the link between my level of judgment and my level of compassion — or lack thereof.
What’s become clear to me is how big the speck in my eye actually is (Matthew 7:3–4).
While I don’t think judgment is the sole explanation for our lack of compassion as a society, it’s a particularly insidious one; easily painting others in broad black and white strokes while allowing ourselves to sit in seats of color and nuance. We assign all manner of “good reasons” to our own failings.
Psychology calls our instinct to assign character flaws to others, but circumstantial issues to ourselves, Fundamental Attribution Error. The cognitive bias goes something like this: other people do things that are a result of their personality or character, while my behavior (especially those viewed as negative) is dictated by circumstances beyond my control. For example, if someone cuts me off while driving they might be an absolute idiot or a stronger expletive given my mood. But when I speed or fail to use a signal it’s because my neighbor parked their car in front of my driveway and I couldn’t leave the house quick enough, so now I’m late and it’s all their fault.
We instinctively defend our mistakes with “valid” reasons; while categorizing the mistakes or misfortunes of others as character flaws. The danger in this perspective is that our mistakes are a fleeting things – able to be brushed aside. While the flaws of others are more of a “condition.” The latter feels permanent, so perhaps mercy or compassion is a waste of time.
There’s a hopelessness embedded in the belief that some people are beyond help.
I’m sure you can think of lots of arguments that rely heavily on the belief that others have made bad choices based on some major flaw. Maybe it’s a moral one.
Here are a few examples:
The unhoused population is on drugs or dealing with mental health issues, therefore, funding for more shelters or affordable housing is a waste of money. Things will never get better.
People who’ve taken out loans for their education and have yet to pay the loan back after years of being out of college must be spending their money unwisely. Therefore they shouldn’t be given loan forgiveness.
Women who choose to abort their babies are heartless and immoral, therefore we should picket outside of the clinics where these procedures happen. We don’t need to try and understand why they’d make that decision.
These are heavy-handed examples, and there are softer instances to be found in our personal lives to be sure, but when we talk about compassion as it applies to the world at large, our tendency to reduce people to flaws and judge them is particularly treacherous.
Get Curious
That evening in the shelter taught me a lesson not only about prejudice but about my lack of curiosity. It was only because I had an actual conversion with that woman at the shelter, that I learned her story, the real truth of her circumstances.
One of my biggest takeaways from that evening was that I needed to be far more curious. To start asking questions instead of allowing preconceived ideas to stop me from entering fully into people’s lives.
Who is someone in your life that you’ve judged without knowing the full story? How might curiosity help lead you toward compassion?
What Do You Need?
J.S. Park is a chaplain. In this February Instagram post he describes a scenario involving a volatile patient in the hospital he was working in. He also describes how asking, “What do you need?” and offering compassion instead of judgement, changed everything.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s installment of, Curious Compassion.
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