Guest Post At Mindful Construct: “3 Things The Personal Development Critics Got Wrong”
I've published a guest post at Melissa Karnaze's blog Mindful Construct called "3 Things The Personal Development Critics Got Wrong." It mainly deals with critics' arguments against personal development's ethic of taking responsibility for your circumstances, including the claims that this ethic encourages selfishness and self-blame.
I think this article will be a useful summary for people who have recently discovered my work at this blog. I think you'll also appreciate Melissa's articles, which take an approach to personal development that's rooted in cognitive science and psychology. Enjoy!
Do Thoughts Create Things?, Part 1: Yes, Unless You’re A Robot
It will probably be obvious, to anyone who follows debates about personal development, that a central question in these debates is whether our inner experience can affect reality. In other words, can changes in our thoughts and feelings cause changes in the world around us?
It's tempting to respond the way some critics do, and treat the answer as plain -- and, perhaps, the question itself as dumb. Clearly, the answer is no -- thinking about a BMW won't cause one to appear in my driveway, my bad moods don't cause inclement weather, and so on. Only a fluff-headed, New-Agey navel-gazer could think otherwise.
But that response, as we'll see, caricatures and oversimplifies the question. In fact, this question raises profound, and hotly debated, philosophical and scientific issues. To illustrate, let's look at a few (and by no means all) of the ways we might answer this question.
Reductive Materialism
From one perspective, it's impossible for our thoughts and feelings to affect reality. What we perceive as "thoughts" and "feelings" are merely our subjective experiences, or "epiphenomena," of biochemical processes in our brains. Our experience of those processes plainly cannot cause or influence those processes.
Here's a crude analogy -- the chemical reactions in my brain are like a movie, and "I" am like a person watching that movie. Clearly, my experience of the film can't alter the film itself. The fact that I like some character in the film, for instance, won't cause the movie's plot to change so that the character lives rather than dying.
One result of this view is that human beings don't have free will. This is because the very concept of "I" -- an individual who chooses, wants, makes plans, and so on -- is itself just a subjective experience of chemical reactions in the brain. "I," being merely an illusion created by neurological activity, can't influence anything that happens in the physical world.
If you buy this view, you're free to claim that our thoughts and feelings don't affect reality at all. But if you don't accept it, I think, you have to believe -- on some level -- that they do.
Emotions As Reasons
You may recall that, in an earlier post, I observed that we do most, or all, of the things we do in life because we want to experience certain feelings. For example, as I pointed out, most people don't make money just to own little colored pieces of paper -- they do it to create feelings of security, power, joy, or something else.
If this is so, there is clearly a sense in which our inner experience -- our thoughts, feelings and sensations -- affects our reality.
Take the example of making money. The feelings we desire (security, power, etc.) influence the actions we take in the world (starting a business, getting a job, and so on) -- and when we act, of course, we alter the physical world in some way. This is just another way to put the point that we make money because we want those feelings.
Thus, on some level, I think most people would agree that our inner experience does affect reality. The real question is the way in which, and perhaps the extent to which, it does so. We'll get into that question more deeply in the next post.
What Is Personal Development?, Part 3: Progressive and Lasting Change
Last time, we talked about the first part of my working definition of personal development -- namely, that, to amount to personal growth, an idea or technique must be consciously intended to work with our "inner experience," meaning our thoughts, emotions and sensations.
I'll now talk about the second criterion an approach must meet, under my definition, to be personal development: it must be intended to produce progressive and lasting change. (Yes, I added the "progressive" part upon further reflection after my last post. 
)
By "progressive" change, I mean that, each time the user does the activity, they make progress -- however gradual -- toward their ultimate goal, whether that goal is happiness, a better job, a Buddhist-style attitude of non-attachment to their experience, or something else.
By "lasting" change, I mean the benefits of the activity must persist even when the user isn't doing the activity. In other words, the user must take those benefits with them into the "real world."
Why Therapy Isn't Like Candy
If I see a psychotherapist, for instance, I will probably do so expecting progressive and lasting benefits to my mental and emotional health. I'll desire progressive change in the sense that, each week that I visit my therapist, I want to feel more at peace with myself than I did during the last.
What's more, I'll probably want those benefits to last in between therapy sessions. I won't want the self-acceptance I feel to suddenly disappear the moment I walk out of the therapist's office. In all likelihood, I'll also want that peace to persist even when I'm no longer in therapy -- I won't want it to fade away after the therapeutic relationship ends. Thus, generally speaking, psychotherapy is a personal growth activity under my definition.
By contrast, suppose I eat a piece of candy because I want to create a particular inner experience -- in this case, a taste sensation. I probably won't do this expecting lasting changes in my experience. In all likelihood, I'll get a brief moment of pleasure, and after a little while the feeling will pass.
A few minutes later, I'll be "back to square one," emotionally speaking -- as far as my inner experience is concerned, it'll be as if I never ate the candy at all. Thus, eating candy will not produce progressive change in my experience either. (Duff raised the similar example of taking drugs in response to an earlier post in this series.)
It's About Expectations, Not Results
Finally, note that I said the activity must be intended to produce progressive and lasting change. The activity need not actually create that type of change to amount to self-development under my definition.
For example, if a person goes to an energy healer expecting to grow more relaxed and focused over time, but in fact each session only creates a fleeting "high" like the candy I mentioned earlier, the energy healing would nonetheless be "personal growth" as I use the term.
I offer this caveat to avoid defining personal growth to include only techniques and perspectives that "work," because that would exclude the possibility of meaningful debate about the merits of specific approaches.
As a result, even if you believe that no form of personal development is effective and it's all a fraud, you can still accept my definition. Like I said in response to previous comments, my definition is purely descriptive -- it's simply meant to capture the conventional view of what self-development is, and not to judge whether certain techniques are helpful or moral.
What Is Personal Development?, Part 2: Growth Vs. Advice
In my last post, I offered a working definition of personal development that goes like this: "Personal development" perspectives and techniques are (1) consciously intended to work with our "inner experience," meaning our thoughts, emotions and sensations, and (2) meant to produce a lasting result.
As Duff pointed out in response to my last post, I've yet to discuss how one particular area of self-development fits into this framework. I'm talking about approaches that try to harness our thoughts, emotions and sensations to create a specific result in the outside world.
Popular examples include visualizing something you want in order to bring it into your life -- whether it's business success, an intimate relationship, or something else; and energy healing intended to improve the client's health.
Such a technique is a form of personal growth, under my definition, if it seeks to achieve the outer result by transforming the user's inner experience, or the way the user relates to that experience.
To illustrate, as I said earlier, a book that teaches us ways to become more loving toward ourselves, on the theory that this will help us attract a partner, would amount to personal growth because it seeks to create an outer result by working with our thoughts and emotions.
While it uses the transformation of our inner experience as a tool to change our outer circumstances, this book nonetheless qualifies as personal growth because it involves consciously focusing on our inner experience.
Tire-Changing Isn't Self-Development
On the other hand, a book that teaches us how to dress to attract a mate is not a form of personal development under my definition, because it doesn't focus on transforming or relating to our inner experience.
For this book's purposes, the way we feel about ourselves is irrelevant. Its goal is to get others -- namely, potential partners -- to approve of our appearance. I may follow all of the book's advice and still feel miserable about myself, but the book has nonetheless fulfilled its purpose if potential mates like my style.
This caveat is important because it keeps the definition of personal growth from encompassing every possible type of advice, and every product and seminar out there that seeks to teach us how to do something.
I imagine most of us wouldn't think of books on changing a tire, investing in municipal bonds, or mastering Portuguese cooking as being about personal growth, and this observation explains why -- the techniques in those books don't focus on transforming your inner experience. Those books, we could say, are about advice, but not growth.
The Consequences For Critics
One result is that, under my view, some ideas targeted by personal development's critics actually have nothing to do with personal development. In SHAM, for example, Steve Salerno treats magazines like Cosmopolitan, which teach women "how to paint themselves, primp themselves, and acquire enough sexual know-how to keep a man satisfied and at home," as examples of "self-help and actualization" (a.k.a. "SHAM") literature.
However, from my perspective, advice about putting on makeup that doesn't focus on transforming your inner experience is not "personal growth" advice. To say otherwise, I think, would likely expand the concept of personal growth so far as to render it meaningless. After all, if makeup tips amount to personal development, why not tire-changing tips as well?
Next time, we'll talk about the second element in my definition: the intent to produce lasting change.
What Is Personal Development?, Part 1: It’s All In The Intention
It just occurred to me that, in the "About" page of this blog, I promised you a working definition of personal development. It feels a bit odd for me to keep talking about personal development without giving you that definition.
So, here goes: "Personal development" perspectives and techniques are (1) consciously intended to work with our "inner experience," meaning our thoughts, emotions and sensations; and (2) meant to produce a lasting result.
We're In It For The Feelings
Arguably, human beings do basically everything they do with the goal of having some kind of inner experience. Whether we're meditating, giving to charity, getting an education, drinking alcohol, or something else, we're doing it because of the way we think that activity will have us feel.
To use a common example, we don't make money just for the sake of having a bunch of colored pieces of paper. We do it because of the feelings we think having and spending money will bring us. Perhaps we want the feeling of security that comes with knowing we'll have enough to eat, a sense of accomplishment, the thrill of knowing we can buy a flashy motorcycle, or something else. But in any case, what we're after is some inner experience.
Some might object that they make money to take care of others (their children or elderly parents, for example), not because it helps them feel a certain way. However, you wouldn't have any interest in taking care of others if doing so didn't give you a certain inner experience -- maybe a feeling of happiness, righteousness, or something else. In other words, if you were emotionally indifferent to whether someone else lived or died, stagnated or thrived, you probably wouldn't be helping them.
Where The "Conscious" Part Comes In
While it's true that we do most of what we do with the goal of having an inner experience, we aren't always consciously seeking an experience. In everyday existence, I think, most of us don't consciously contemplate how the things we do will have us feel.
We don't ask ourselves, for example, whether we'll feel better if we go to work or stay home, or whether listening to the car radio will make the commute smoother. Usually, we're just going through our daily motions.
By contrast, personal growth activities, to my mind, are things we do with the specific goal of transforming our inner experience. We do them consciously intending to create a specific mental or emotional state. As a simple example, I may say the affirmation "I am lovable" to develop more self-appreciation. Or, perhaps I'll do some yoga to get a sense of openness in my body.
By my definition, the specifics of an activity don't determine whether it amounts to personal growth. For instance, suppose (somewhat implausibly) that I'm in the habit of meditating every day simply because my parents told me to. I'm not doing it because I think it will bring me inner peace, happiness, or some other feeling.
In this example, meditation is not a "personal growth" activity for me, regardless of how others might use it, because I don't do it with the conscious goal of feeling a certain way. The intent is what's important, not the specifics.
In the next post, we'll talk about how approaches that work on our inner experience with the goal of producing a particular outer result -- for instance, visualization techniques that have us imagine business success to help us create it in the world -- fit into this discussion.
Personal Growth’s “Victim Culture,” Part 2: Support Groups and Selfishness
In this series, I've been responding to the common criticism that personal development encourages people to see themselves as victims, and discourages them from taking responsibility for their problems.
Recovery groups -- for example, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) -- are a frequent target of anti-personal growth authors. The critics have many concerns about these groups, as we'll see, but a common complaint is that, by encouraging members to share about their personal suffering, they trivialize the suffering of genuinely needy people.
The "Trivialization" Argument
The argument goes like this: recovery groups tend to serve as a forum for people to talk about challenges they're facing, or their past hurts. Giving people a place to talk about their emotional issues implies that those issues are really important -- that the suffering these people are enduring is significant. If I'm part of a support group, for instance, and the group gives me time to "check in" about marital troubles I'm having, that necessarily implies that my marital issues are important enough to merit the group's attention.
However, even if I'm having conflicts with my wife, there are clearly people in the world who are suffering worse than me -- people with terminal illnesses, living in war-torn countries, and so on. By treating my suffering as if it deeply matters, my group may encourage me to see these people's suffering and mine as equivalent. And if I start to see the world that way, I may become less interested in helping genuinely unfortunate individuals.
Wendy Kaminer, in I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, seems very concerned about this possibility: "Recovery gives people permission always to put themselves first, partly because it doesn't give them a sense of perspective on their complaints," she writes. "The failure to acknowledge that there are hierarchies of human suffering is what makes recovery and other personal development fashions 'selfist' and narcissistic."
What About The Facts?
Like many arguments against personal growth, this argument is usually presented as if it were common sense. Kaminer, for example, doesn't offer evidence that people in recovery groups, on average, give less to charity, express less concern for people in third-world countries, or do anything else suggesting a "selfist" mentality -- except to say that, in her own visits to recovery groups, she didn't hear a member remark that another person's suffering was worse than their own.
What's more, there's psychological evidence suggesting that people who join support groups actually tend to become more generous as a result. For instance, a New Zealand study of a support group for chronic pain sufferers found that participants in the group became more inclined to help others. Similarly, a study in Communication Quarterly reported that people in an HIV/AIDS support group "experience[d] increased self-esteem associated with helping others."
Granted, no two support groups are the same, so this research doesn't prove that the recovery movement in general creates more compassionate people. It does, however, cast doubt on Kaminer's claim that support groups foster selfishness in their members. What's more, these studies make intuitive sense -- oriented as they are toward mutual support and caregiving, it seems natural that recovery groups would help members come to understand the joys of serving others.
How About The Philosophical Navel-Gazing?
On a philosophical level, we can begin to see the oddness of Kaminer's argument if we look at the following example.
Suppose you and I were close friends, and I griped to you about marital conflicts I was having. I don't think you'd somehow conclude, with righteous indignation, that I must be equating my relationship troubles with the plight of, say, paraplegics. Nor would an outside observer conclude that, because you allowed me to vent about my problems, you must be encouraging me to see my marriage and things like paraplegia as morally equivalent, and thereby turning me into a self-centered person.
In other words, no one would morally condemn the kind of conversation Kaminer is complaining about if it took place outside a support group. There's no reason to make it wrong simply because it occurs in an AA meeting or a similar context.
But at a deeper level, do we really need to believe in what Kaminer calls a "hierarchy of human suffering" to be interested in helping others? We'll explore that question in my next post.
Personal Growth’s “Victim Culture,” Part 1: The Threat of Therapy?
In our earlier discussion of the "responsibility ethic," we talked about critics' common claim that personal development promotes an unrealistic sense of personal responsibility.
In this series, I'm going to respond to critics who take the opposite view -- that much self-help writing actually teaches people not to take responsibility for their lives. A frequent criticism of personal growth is that it encourages people to sit around whining about their emotional issues, rather than getting up and accomplishing something in the world.
Is Therapy Just A Blame Game?
The biggest offender, to the critics, is psychotherapy, because it often involves exploring how our past -- particularly our childhood development -- shaped the way we think and behave today. Therapy, in the critics' view, often gives us an excuse to blame our present problems on our parents, rather than simply bucking up and dealing with them.
For instance, in SHAM, Steve Salerno accuses psychiatrist Thomas Harris and similar authors of claiming that "you were basically trapped by your makeup and/or environment and thus had a ready alibi for any and all of your failings." Similarly, in One Nation Under Therapy, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel lament that "what the older moralists spoke of as irresponsible behavior due to bad character, the new champions of therapism . . . speak of as ailment, dysfunction, and brain disease."
I think these critics take a misguided view of psychotherapy. To them, it seems, people turn to therapy simply because they wish to stop blaming themselves for parts of their lives that aren't going well, and instead blame their parents or somebody else.
I doubt most therapists who explore their clients' histories would explain their methods this way. Of course, there are many possible reasons why a therapist and client might delve into the client's childhood. However, I suspect one common goal is to help the client let go of dysfunctional behaviors they continually find themselves doing.
Why Our Histories Matter
The theory goes, roughly, like this: many behaviors we do today developed in response to our childhood circumstances. For example, if our parents often scolded us when we asked them for something, we may have decided it was best to act totally self-sufficient, and never tell others what we want and need.
This show of self-sufficiency may have "worked" for us as children, because it protected us from our parents' anger. However, it may not work quite as well for us as adults. If we can't ask for what we want and need, intimacy with another person becomes very difficult.
Suppose a client came to a therapist with this sort of concern. The therapist might explore the client's past in order to show the client that this self-sufficient facade developed in response to the client's childhood.
The Power of Awareness
Now that the client is grown up, the therapist may help the client see, they no longer need this behavior to protect them from their parents. This awareness may help the client understand that it's now safe to let others know what they need and want.
As psychologist Kevin Leman whimsically puts it in What Your Childhood Memories Say About You, therapists' common practice of "asking about dear old Mom helps reveal patterns, and psychology is a science of recognizing patterns in human behavior."
For the therapist, then, exploring the client's past is not simply intended to help them blame their parents for their problems. Instead, the purpose of this exploration is to help the client let go of behaviors that aren't serving them -- to solve their own problems, we might say -- and thus to lead a more fulfilling life.
In that sense, I think it's fair to say that therapy actually promotes, rather than retards, the growth of personal responsibility.
Growth As An Opiate, Part 4: “Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness” Cuts Both Ways
Earlier I explored the argument, sometimes made by critics of personal growth, that practices for cultivating peace and happiness, like meditation and affirmations, are socially harmful. By encouraging people to "look within" for happiness, rather than basing their satisfaction on material rewards, personal growth makes people less interested in righting the economic unfairness of our society.
In other words, if people become convinced that "money doesn't buy happiness," they'll be less interested in redistributing income toward the less well-off -- because, after all, having more money won't make lower-income people happier anyway. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Bright-Sided, "if circumstances play only a small role . . . in human happiness, then policy is a marginal exercise. Why advocate for better jobs and schools . . . or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy?"
I don't think this critique fully grasps the implications of the "money doesn't buy happiness" theory. To left-wing critics like Ehrenreich, this concept seems to counsel fiscally conservative policies like cutting taxes and rolling back the welfare state. In fact, however, one could use the assumption that money doesn't buy happiness to support policies more to Ehrenreich's liking.
Taxes and Happiness
One might argue, for instance, that because wealth doesn't determine our happiness, we might as well increase taxes on the rich. If it's really true that money doesn't buy happiness, redistributing wealthy people's income won't decrease their wellbeing or their incentive to produce. And if the ex-wealthy find themselves pining for their lost assets, perhaps they can just take up meditation and make it all better.
In fact, my friend Duff -- who, I suspect, shares many of Ehrenreich's political views -- makes a similar point in discussing Daniel Pink's Drive. Pink, says Duff, argues that people are more motivated by a desire for "autonomy, mastery, and purpose" in their work than the promise of material rewards.
If this is so, Duff writes, why not have the government impose a "maximum wage" -- for instance, cap everyone's annual income at $100,000? After all, reducing wealthy people's income won't substantially diminish their happiness, since studies show that their work satisfaction largely depends on their sense of meaning.
So, it seems, the notion that happiness doesn't depend on material rewards can be used to support either conservative or liberal economic policies. My larger point is that the idea that personal development is the linchpin of a right-wing conspiracy is misguided. So, too, is the idea that personal growth somehow promotes socialism -- which we'll explore in the upcoming series on self-development's "culture of victimhood."
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Thoughts On “Thinking For Yourself”
Critics of personal development often assert that, rather than reading self-help books, we should "think for ourselves." In fact, many critics even fear that personal growth products are actually stripping people of their ability to think independently.
"The self-help tradition has always been covertly authoritarian and conformist," writes Wendy Kaminer in I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. "Merely buying a self-help book is an act of dependence." Similarly, literary critic Stewart Justman writes in Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology that the self-help "genre seems inherently authoritarian, implying as it does that we live and act according to sets of instructions."
These criticisms certainly make personal development sound unnervingly Orwellian. But do they make sense?
Is Advice Anti-Thinking?
It's true that many self-help books offer us advice on how to live our lives -- how to find inner peace, parent our children, and so on. But this alone can't be enough to strip us of intellectual independence. After all, books on origami, changing tires, investing in bonds, and so on also offer advice, but no one seems to be concerned that these books are "brainwashing" anyone.
Kaminer seems to recognize that the mere fact that self-help books give advice doesn't make them "totalitarian." Thus, she says she's not interested in critiquing "practical (how to do your own taxes) books." Instead, she is aiming at books with "a strong emphasis on individual, personal, or spiritual development." In other words, it's only people who give advice on personal or spiritual development who threaten the cognitive freedom of their listeners -- not those who tell you how to fix your car.
I think the trouble with this distinction is that it neglects the vast amount of advice on personal and spiritual development that writers outside the self-help genre offer. Philosophers, at least since ancient Greece and probably before, have wrestled with the question of how one ought to live. The world's religions also have pretty clear ideas about how we should develop spiritually. But I suspect Kaminer wouldn't claim that we shouldn't read books on philosophy or religion because they might control our minds.
Is Simplicity Sinister?
On some level, I think Kaminer is aware of this objection, and thus she tries to distinguish personal growth from philosophy and religion on the ground that self-help teachers' advice is overly simplistic. Personal growth books, she writes, encourage an intellectual "passivity and search for simple absolutes."
I actually agree that much personal growth advice is simplistic. I think the personal development blogosphere, for example, could stand to churn out fewer "50 Quick Happiness Tips"-style posts, and dive deeper into what really creates motivation and suffering in human beings.
However, the fact that some self-help advice may be simplistic doesn't necessarily render it sinister and manipulative, as Kaminer seems to believe. In other words, another person's mere act of offering you simple advice doesn't turn you into a mindless zombie under their command.
Suppose, for instance, you come to me with all kinds of concerns about your relationship, and I tell you that you should leave your partner. My recommendation in this example is certainly simple, and perhaps simplistic, because it doesn't address the underlying feelings and behaviors creating your relationship issues.
However, it would be absurd to claim that, merely by offering you simple advice, I've put you at risk of becoming my brainwashed slave -- just as it would be silly to argue that a book called "5 Simple Steps To Doing Your Taxes" threatens its readers' mental autonomy. You're free to accept or reject my advice -- or, at the very least, my advice won't make you any less free to do so than your current cognitive capacities allow.
Sometimes Simple Is Superior
What's more, in some cases, simplicity is a virtue. The most complicated advice or viewpoint is not always the most helpful one. I think there are great social advantages, for example, in simple moral rules like "rape is wrong" that leave no room for exceptions. A society where people accept such a rule, I think you'd agree, is better off than one where the morality of raping someone depends on a nuanced cost-benefit analysis.
In other words, I think it's entirely possible to both "think for yourself" and read a book, or listen to someone, offering simple advice -- even if it's of the self-help stripe. What's more, the simplicity of a message alone doesn't rob it of merit.
Self-Help and Selfishness, Part 4: A Postscript On Compassion
In the interest of clarity, I want to add a brief note summarizing what I'm saying in this series.
I believe there are two basic ways to think about compassion. The first is to see it as a way of acting. If you take certain actions in the world, in other words, that makes you a compassionate person.
People, of course, have vastly different ideas about which behaviors are compassionate and which aren't. Some think of compassion in terms of individual acts, such as giving to a person begging on the street. To others, compassion has more to do with a certain distribution of resources in society -- if we work toward a nation where people have roughly equal incomes, perhaps, we are compassionate people.
The second way of thinking about compassion is to see it as an emotion, or a sensation we experience in the body. For me, when I am feeling compassion, I experience a warm, open sensation in my heart area. Some might describe this in more mystical terms as a sense of "union with all that is."
Most People See It As A Behavior
It seems clear that, in Western culture at least, people usually take the first perspective -- that you are compassionate so long as you behave a certain way. It doesn't matter how you feel while you are doing the act. If you give to a charity, but only so that your name appears on the charity's website, you are being compassionate nonetheless.
I think this perspective is one reason why, in the West, we don't tend to see practices for cultivating a felt sense of compassion as particularly important. Why bother doing practices like Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, we might think, when we can go into the world and actually help people?
I think the trouble with this perspective is that it renders the concept of compassion vulnerable to abuse. It enables people who don't actually experience the felt sense of compassion to use the ideal of compassion as a weapon against others, for personal gain.
The Consequences
Look at typical political debates, for example. Each side accuses the other, in venomous and belittling terms, of lacking compassion, honesty, morality and so on. Ask yourself: would they make such accusations against each other if they actually experienced compassion as a feeling -- that sense of warmth and openness in the heart I described?
On a larger scale, many political and religious ideologies have claimed to be rooted in compassion. Christianity is said to be based on the compassionate teachings of Jesus. Marx claimed that communism was a compassionate political philosophy. And yet, of course, people have committed atrocities in the name of both worldviews.
Would these abuses have occurred if the people responsible had genuinely experienced the feeling of compassion, rather than simply believing in the abstract ideal? (I don't mean to pick on Christianity or communism per se -- I think any doctrine or philosophy, in the hands of someone who isn't actually feeling compassion, can be used to justify destructive behavior.)
In other words, when we're in touch with the felt sense of compassion -- not just the philosophical abstraction -- we become far less inclined to hurt others. This is why I think practices that help us actually experience the sensation of compassion are so important.
There are many practices aimed at this, and different approaches work better for different people. In my own case, I know that heart-opening exercises in yoga are particularly helpful. But the point is that these practices, far from being forms of "woo-woo navel gazing," are actually key to creating the kind of world many of us desire.
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