Monday, 30 May 2011 00:00
Karen Armstrong is known and admired for her best-selling books, which include a history of the Bible and a biography of the Prophet Mohammed.
She has studied the sacred texts of the world as well as philosophy,
anthropology and history and recently wrote a response to atheists, The
Case For God. Her latest project is the Charter for Compassion -
charterforcompassion.org For Armstrong, compassion is a deep empathy
with others, not a feeling of pity or concern.
She visited Brussels to speak at a debate on the role of religion in
modern society, organized by the Centre for European Studies and spoke
to New Europe in an exclusive interview.
Your view of compassion is based on empathy
It is at the heart of every spiritual, moral and ethical idea,
religious or not. It’s based on the golden rule; treat others as you
would want to be treated. Basically, that’s the heart of morality, but
now it is an urgent necessity, because if we don’t treat all peoples as
we would wish to be treated, we’re not going to have a viable world.
How would a compassionate European Union treat migrants?
Very often these immigrants have come to fuel
our economy and haven’t come of their own free will. Both sides have
some work to do. The immigrants have to remember what it was like when
the Europeans colonized their countries and changed them forever.
Remember the pain that caused, the pain that is still reverberating
today and is the cause of many of our international problems worldwide.
Europeans have to remember that these people, who they have invited here
to do cheap work are to be treated with dignity.
We’re going to have to learn to put yourself in the place of another and
ask, “Do I like to hear my sacred traditions being trashed, be those of
a religious, political or moral nature.” There are certain values that
we have, such as free speech, which is seen as sacred and inviolable.
What we are seeing is clashes of the sacred. Two people with different
ideas and these have to be negotiated with greater maturity.
The Muslims have to stop being enraged, and falling into the trap, that,
very often extreme people on the other side are trying to lure them
into. If Europe fails this test, it is going to go right back to the
1930’s and 40’s.
There is a debate on has multiculturalism failed?
It will fail unless we can negotiate these differences in a
mature manner. If we say we’re committed to liberal values and
democracy, that means everybody’s voice has to be heard.
There is, unfortunately, also a secular radicalism, which doesn’t
represent the majority. During the Denmark cartoons controversy, there
was a poll of Muslim youth and 97% said that, while they were horrified
by the cartoons, they were also horrified by those Muslims who were
attacking and burning down embassies. At the same time they did a survey
among Danes, who said that yes, they believed in free speech but also
were upset that those cartoons had given offence. That middle voice
doesn’t get heard. It’s not exciting, but it shows the situation has
become distorted.
What happens then is that both sides show themselves in the worst light.
The West comes over as arrogant, racist, insulting and islamphobic and
the Muslims come over as atavistic, violent. That is not the whole of
the reality; the middle ground has been erased. At the end of the crisis
we both fulfill the others expectations of ourselves and the prejudices
go a little deeper.
We’re more aware of ‘the other’ now, how are we adapting to that?
Not well, but we have got to adapt. Whether we like it or not,
the other is there. If a market goes down in one part of the world,
there’s a domino effect. We are interconnected. We’re no longer living
in a ‘Belgium for the Belgians’ or ‘Britain for the British’. That’s
gone because we’ve created this global market. It’s not some terrible
plague that’s come along.
But our perceptions haven’t caught up with reality and unless we do
that, we will be irrational. It’s irrational to think these people will
go away.
This change is going to need politics.
I don’t hold much hope for politics. The people who have come
to help me with the charter have, universally, been businessmen. Leading
business, because they know you need peace and the big push for the charter is from business.
So far, politicians haven’t come up to help with the charter, it’s companies like Microsoft, Google, Starbucks. They say it makes business sense to treat your employees respectfully.
What is the aim of the Charter and the compassionate cities project?
We’re building an international network of cities dedicated to
the pursuit of compassion, but it has to be practical, and when it is
endorsed my Mayors and so on. Before they can qualify they need to
produce a practical program, based on the needs of their locality, their
problems and so on. Seattle has signed up and Chicago, Philadelphia and
New Delhi are joining.
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From the Urantia Book:
140:8.11 The Jewish rabbis had long debated the question: Who is my neighbor? Jesus came presenting the idea of active and spontaneous kindness, a love of one's fellow men so genuine that it expanded the neighborhood to include the whole world, thereby making all men one's neighbors. But with all this, Jesus was interested only in the individual, not the mass. Jesus was not a sociologist, but he did labor to break down all forms of selfish isolation. He taught pure sympathy, compassion. Michael of Nebadon is a mercy-dominated Son; compassion is his very nature.
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