The Gulf Between Compassion and Chaos

By David Markowitz

This year has filled many people with mixed hope for the future. Combine civil unrest and racial injustice with a pandemic—not to mention unrelenting whispers of climate change and mass atrocities around the world—and it would be reasonable to feel glum about where we are today and what tomorrow might bring.

A potential metaphor for this year might be that of Sisyphus, who was punished for his boastful and deceptive nature by pushing a boulder up a hill. When the boulder nearly reached the top, it would tumble to the bottom, forcing Sisyphus to restart for eternity. In 2020, once we found a reason to be hopeful, another event made us start the believing process over again.

Despite all that has occurred, let me give you one reason to be optimistic. If we look at popular literature, namely the books catalogued by Google and data archived in their N-gram viewer, the evidence suggests two seemingly opposed concepts—compassion and chaos—can tell us an uplifting story.

As the following figure indicates, compassion and chaos were once used disproportionately from 1800 until the early 1900’s (the y-axis indicates the percent of words in the Google Books database that are compassion and chaos). In that period, the word compassion appeared far more often than chaos, but eventually flipped in popularity just after the 1918 pandemic.

Since the 1920’s, chaos has been more prevalent than compassion. One could expect that world wars and social turmoil affected what people wrote. More recent history, however, suggests we are on a trajectory where compassion exceeds chaos. Are people discussing a “lack of compassion,” “compassion fatigue,” or positive aspects of compassion? It is hard to tell, though it is also encouraging to see that writers now discuss compassion more than its chaos. When compassion is set aside or falls out of public discourse, we risk the weakening of our social relationships and the urgency to make positive change in the world.

Use this evidence as motivation to widen the gulf between compassion and chaos. The more we talk and act on compassion, the more we can address pressing needs of today and make for a better tomorrow.