Either ‘Newspeak’ or ‘don’t speak’ . . .

The Catholic activist Carlo Carretto, who spent ten years of his life living as a hermit in the North African desert, wrote of the implicit problem for the secular do-gooder (though, of course, he wouldn’t and didn’t express it in those terms) of the moment of potential disillusionment when coming face to face with the ‘egoism, arrogance, and capacity for betrayal’ that is central to man.

The labour activist Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, and who spent his adult life organising the immigrant grape pickers of California, said something similar.  ‘I learned quickly that there is no appreciation . . . whatever you do, you do it because you want to see it done . . . I know good organisers who were destroyed, washed out, because they expected people to appreciate what they’d done.  Anyone who comes in with the idea that farmworkers are free of sin and that the growers are all bastards is an idealist of the first water’.

When he speaks of idealism here, he is speaking of people seeing what they want to see, rather than the reality, and genuflecting before it.

Even Jesus, if you read the Gospels carefully, had no illusions about human nature.  In John, for example, ‘But Jesus himself did not entrust himself to them, because he knew them all, and he knew that he had no need for anyone to tell him about man, for he himself knew what was in man.’

The main thing that encompasses the three individuals mentioned is their ability to realistically apprehend what man is and yet at the same time express a compassion for him that transcends, or even includes, the negative characteristics.  Carretto describes this as ‘Love’, though, of course, this description suffers from being already burdened with so many alternative meanings.

More akin to ‘love’, in the romantic sense, is Chavez’s description of the disappointed organisers who couldn’t quite cut it and became burnt out.  What he is clearly saying is that beneath their activism lay an obscure personal motivation, an unconscious itch that they sought to scratch through their labour involvement.  Like your average romantic, they were engaged in chasing an illusion, which, if they were unlucky enough to catch up with, was as likely to prove as much a disappointment as a fulfilment.

Yet there is a version of compassion abroad today that is very much along the lines of a fashion statement, something to be paraded whenever possible to show how caring one is.  It is an ersatz compassion, a selective compassion, an emotional attachment to some touchy-feely cause, generally accompanied by a visceral hatred of anyone or anything that disagrees with it.  It is not a true compassion, in any sense of the word, but rather a trojan horse for an ideology whose ultimate aims are anything but compassionate.

Yet the fact is that it has managed to capture the ears of the world, primarily because it controls, or has infested, like plaques in the interstices of an Alzheimer patient’s brain, the means of information.

And in a related sense, too, what are we to make of the current furore over homelessness, the state standing condemned for its apparent failure to future plan?

How come nobody ever mentions the word ‘immigration’?

How is one to square the notion of democracy with a society where those who should be asking the questions seem too afraid to ask even the obvious ones?