You can still visit the expo at MAS | Museum aan de Stroom until 31 August 2025.
12 steps to a compassionate life
Part 1 consisted of a public evening lecture at MAS Museum and a seminar at the University of Antwerp in collaboration with the Karen Armstrong Chair (University for Humanistics Utrecht) and Nieuw Wij.
The starting point was Karen Armstrong’s book on compassion – Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life – and the global movement of compassionate cities she inspired.
How can compassion be an engine for social renewal and how does it inspire actors in neighbourhood and community building?
On 20 February, we hosted a first lecture at the MAS Museum with Rosita Steenbeek and Manuela Kalsky.
With author Rosita Steenbeek, who wrote an essay (Heb uw vijanden lief) about her experiences caring for refugees during a stay in Lampedusa, compassion received its first concrete implementation as charity. She also brought testimony to the importance of this value in her personal development as a descendant of a pastor’s family.
This study day for social sector professionals took place at the University of Antwerp on 21 February.
The study day, led by Manuela Kalsky, the chair holder, brought together Flemish and Dutch organisations that connect people in the super-diverse urban context, enabling them to live together and thereby promote the quality of living together.
Good practices from entrepreneurial association BOHO 2140, youth association City Pirates, and homeless organisation ‘t Vlot from Antwerp, and dialogue organisation Mo en Moos (Jewish-Islamic) and Stichting Heilzame Verwerking Slavernijverleden from Amsterdam were the subjects of several round tables.
The second lecture on 20 March with political philosophers Allegra Reinalda and Dirk De Schutter (KU Leuven) dealt with political implications, starting from the ideas of Hannah Arendt.
As a refugee, she was sensitive to the vulnerable and fought totalitarianism all her life. She recognised the value and beauty of compassion in terms of the individual personal relationship, but rejected it as a compass for politics. The closeness that compassion requires is disastrous for political action characterised by sober contemplation and incessant disagreement.
Allegra illustrated at length that compassion in politics degenerates into a values argument for paternalistic intervention and curtailment of individual freedom in her analysis of the Terror in the French Revolution.
Compassion as pity can be crippling and risk perpetuating injustices and we also find this in the writings of Aristotle and Nietzsche. For Aristotle, catharsis is liberation from fear and compassion, and for Nietzsche, friendship does not consist of compassion but of co-joy (rejoicing in another’s happiness), and it is much more difficult to show love to the remote than to one’s neighbour.
We think we know what the other needs or wants, and do not listen to what they desire. The political community is not one body with one voice. Saving humanity is not revolution but compassion on a grand scale. So, how to take political action? Arendt preferred the value of solidarity which is more inclined to political action.
The third lecture on 29 April with neurophysiologist Christiaan Keysers (Netherlands Brain Institute, KNAW / University of Amsterdam) and psychiatrist Stephan Claes (KU Leuven) explored if the human brain and psyche are equipped for empathy and compassion.
Laboratory studies in laboratory animals and emotive testing in humans provide tangible evidence of brain activity in mirror neurons when experiencing empathy. We are all equipped to feel empathy (including psychopaths), but it is a matter of will. We can self-regulate the degree to which we feel empathy as we feel more responsible and more closely related.
One kind of empathy we should activate more often, is empathy with ourselves as a counterbalance to physical and psychological exhaustion that so many people struggle with today. How do we get so psychologically dysregulated and physically exhausted that we break down?
Claes devoted a book to the theme: The Stressed Society. We deregulate our nervous and immune systems under choice stress and performance pressure, and we don’t listen to our bodies giving signals (going into defence mode). In a Cartesian society based on the adage ‘I think, therefore I am’, the somatic is pushed into the background and the body becomes an instrument. Compassion refers to a sensitivity to the fate of others but also to our own.
The final lecture on 22 May addressed the role of compassion as a compass in daily life and faith practice with contributions from Anne Birgitta Pessi (University of Helsinki) and Emmanuel Van Lierde (Curando).
Pessi has been researching the well-being of groups in society and employees in all kinds of organizations for many years. She asked what holds communities together and motivates them: solidarity based on shared interests, joint responsibility and active cooperation.
It is institutionalized politically, socially and religiously in the welfare state, social movements and the church. It is reinforced by ‘compassionate leadership’, which creates a culture of trust and a safe psychological environment conducive to communal action. Compassion is not a trait but a skill that can be used as a tool for social cohesion and against indifference.
Van Lierde presented a new publication on a research project by Curando and KU Leuven’s Faculty of Theology. The first part is about what the Bible teaches us about radical charity (Love to the Extreme), and the second part about the church’s service to the world (Engagement on behalf of God). What distinguishes the Christian faith in this respect?
Caritas or charity is not a typically Christian value, it is universal. The exemplary role of Christ, in whom God becomes man, is an incentive and support for sustained effort, not only to alleviate needs but to go further in combating structures of injustice.
If we stick to passive charity, we risk perpetuating these structures. Therefore, we must continue to be outraged (following the holy anger of the Old Testament God) and stand on the barricades. Caritas and diakonia also have a political dimension.
The lecture series aimed to invite the general public to reflect on the multidimensional meaning of the concept of compassion through words as the exhibition at the MAS does through images. Visitors are welcomed there by a wall full of words from all cultures and religions, illustrating the different charges and various layers of meaning of the concept. Compassion, empathy, pity, charity, solidarity … What’s in a word?
You can still visit the expo at MAS | Museum aan de Stroom until 31 August 2025.
Organisers
UCSIA collaborated with the MAS | Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp for this lecture series.
