Compassion is the core of our humanity In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes -- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty -- can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul. Where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Thus the survival of the species may well depend on the ability to foster a boundless capacity for compassion.

Roots in the family Compassion seems to have its roots in the family. We think of those we love as easily bruised, and our love is shot through with imaginings of the hurts lying in wait for them. A loving wife cannot help imagining the wounds which a day's participation in the rat race may inflict on her husband, and he in turn senses the fears, born of unavoidable physical decline, which prey on his wife's mind. Their impulse is to protect, console and reassure each other.

Parents foster compassion. Parents overflow with compassion as they see their children go out into a strange, cold world.

The whole village. It is conceivable that the present weakening of the family may allow compassion to leak into wider circles. So, too, the creation of family ties between strangers -- esprit de corps -- should aid the spread of compassion. But the question is whether we can make people compassionate by education.

A totalitarian intelligentsia. It amazes me that well-educated people are not more compassionate than the uneducated. The reverse seems to be true. When Gandhi was asked what worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated." The enormities of the twentieth century were committed by people who were better educated than the average and who felt competent to instruct and guide the ignorant. [Lenin, Stalin, Hitler.]

Twentieth century "Civilization" It was not far-fetched of Churchill so speak of the members of the Soviet politburo as "the bloody-minded professors of the Kremlin." There was a high percentage of schoolteachers among the Nazi Gauleiters. Among the twenty members of the group in charge of the extermination of the Jews there were a university professor, eight lawyers, a dental surgeon, an architect, an art expert and an ex-pastor.

[by Eric Hoffer, In Our Time]