Our kinder politics

Julian Baggini asks whether “compassion in politics” is a pipe-dream.

With that in mind, I suggested looking at three ways of thinking prominent in non-western philosophies that might alert us to aspects of our own that have been squeezed too much into the background and could benefit from being given more attention.

One was the Confucian ideal of harmony, the cardinal social and ethical virtue in classical Chinese philosophy. Harmony is not about everyone being the same or being slavishly obedient. Social harmony actually requires difference, just as musical harmony requires different instruments and notes.

Put like that, everyone is in favour of harmony. But our foregrounding of individual and group rights tends to make our politics disharmonious, as it becomes a winner-takes-all competition for power. This wasn’t always so extreme. It used to be taken for granted that whoever won an election governed for all and that politics was the business of balancing competing demands and interests. Thinking about the value of harmony might help us recover some of that and counter the spirit of polarisation and division that is currently running amok.

A second idea concerns how the self is conceived. In the contemporary west, the self is first and foremost an atomic, autonomous, self-contained entity. It is only secondarily related to others. In many parts of the world, including East Asia, the relational nature of the self…

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