Bring knowledge, compassion to issue

I want to visit a couple of worlds apart: knowledge and compassion, ignorance and torture.

We’re going down a bad path, and I hope this is an issue that folks of all religions, or none, can agree upon. We might take different routes, but arrive at the same destination, with just the drive separating us.

An example: A longtime friend of mine loves art and is also a painter and gardener. She’s generous, kind-hearted and perhaps the most religious person I know. During a visit a couple of months ago, I asked if she’d happened across this column, forgetting that she doesn’t much read the paper.

So I told her about it, and she laughed large, in the surprise that follows hearing something totally out of left field. That something was me, writing a faith and values – i.e., religion page – column.

She said, “Don, you’re the least religious person I know – not that that’s a bad thing.”

Funny, those are my thoughts exactly, in opposite land. Driving different roads to the same place.

She’s Christian, an evangelical fundamentalist and, again, one of the best people I know – if a little naïve. She probably veers toward one Buddhist extreme, a “good-hearted fool,” while I sometimes careen close to the other, “knowledge without emotion.”

In the Theraveda Buddhist tradition, the hardest path to enlightenment is the “books” or “head” route – not my friend’s forte, but sometimes a pretty good description of me.

The proper approach is called the “middle path,” developing both knowledge and compassion – each essential, at least as far as I’m concerned.

Now, being knowledgeable doesn’t automatically make one “better,” but I’ll argue that an educated mind is preferable to an ignorant one. And that the more one learns, the more likely that compassion follows, as we broaden our spectrum of inclusion.

But, to each their own – different roads, same destination.

I’ll admit that I might be naïve in assuming agreement about the essentiality of knowledge; there is a great deal of willful ignorance in this country.

I know otherwise well-educated people who make it a point to know nothing of politics. That is, they prefer to avoid altogether the single most impactful outside force in their lives, as government determines precisely how we live and die. (Katrina, anyone?)

Different road, different place.

Or, as syndicated columnist Molly Ivins recently reported, this nugget: “I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told (Sen. John) McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote.”

“Traditional values”? Different road, different destination, for sure.

Compassion without knowledge is possible, but it might be too exclusive. The compassion of the ignorant can be too narrow, too often inclined “so in favor of torture.”

Erasmus wrote of this almost 500 years ago in “The Complaint of Peace,” saying, as the voice of the Goddess of Peace: “What can I do but weep over them? And I weep over them the more bitterly, because they weep not for themselves. No part of their misfortune is more deplorable than their insensibility to it. It is one great step to convalescence to know the extent and inveteracy of a disease.”

Knowledge and compassion are cures for the disease, and I’ll argue that one of the chief roots of evil in this world is a lack of both.

This is nowhere more evident than in the current climate of torture, where – pure lunacy, this – it is apparently appropriate to even debate, as legal policy, whether or not we are going to be a nation that engages in torture.

If you have the least bit of non-“24”-like information you know: It. Does. Not. Work.

If you have the least bit of compassion, you know that, if only to avoid having our own troops tortured, we do not do it to others. Which is to say, we stop, right now.

How can it even be possible that we have a chief executive who, in response to the question of appropriate treatment of detainees and enemy combatants, just said: “And that Common Article 3 (of the Geneva Conventions) says that, you know, ‘There will be no outrages upon human dignity.’ It’s like – it’s very vague. What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation.”

Human dignity, “open to interpretation”? “Very vague”? Insensibility to torture, our misfortune? (Recall that as a child, his friends say, he blew up frogs.)

On what kind of road, to what warped destination, is he driving us?