Kind People Love To Hate. But...

I am hesitant to put this argument forward, because it criticises women more than men.  When I do that, I like to find a balancing point and say "Here's the male equivalent to that problem," even if I don't pursue it and leave it as a mental exercise for the reader. Also, it criticises single and childless women (plus some divorced women) and I don't have a balancing POV on that either, saying "Aaaand, here's the opposite thing that women married with children do that is also a problem." I barely touch on that. If people want to supply either of those counterbalancing theories, feel free.

I also keep renaming this, suggesting that it is not quite a connected set of thoughts.

To keep it simple, I'll link to Pew Research for one-stop shopping on the demographics of voters.  Females in general vote more often for Democrats. Single and divorced women lean even more toward Democrats. Childless women lean even further left, though it becomes more difficult to find good numbers on what factors are driving the differences. 

Democrats center help for disadvantaged groups in their advocacy. Depending on who you want to make look worse, you can say that Democrats care more about people at a distance that they don't actually have to deal with. As a lifetime volunteer for causes and a person who made his living in a helping profession, let me assure it's different when you can go home and get away from whoever it is you are helping.  On the other hand, one could criticise Republican women as those who only care about their own families, or their extended families, or the families of their friends and neighbors. They only care for those up close. 

The mainstream denominations have a significantly higher percentage of women than men. Evangelical denominations vary widely, but in aggregate have slightly more women than men. I had a hard time sorting out who was being called mainstream and who evangelical here.  American Baptists are definitely mainstream, but Southern and Independent Baptists tend evangelical.  There are similar splits among Presbyterians and Lutherans at least, though less pronounced, as far as I can tell. I am not the first to notice a strong preference for Democrats among mainstream Christians, reversed in evangelicals, and fewer children on average in the former, though I am not finding childlessness numbers.

There is this tendency for women without children to gravitate toward compassion for people they feel are disadvantaged, but does it go further? Are they more likely to choose the targets that skip over circles of commitment, so that illegal aliens and trans teenagers and homeless people off their meds become preferred targets of compassion? I am also seeing, not only online (an unreliable sample of attitudes) but from my career working primarily with women (also possibly an unreliable sample) that such women are angry in their activism. Ordinarily this would be a set-up for contempt for these women, dismissing their compassion as a replacement for children, but I am going in a different direction.

I have gone far down this road, so let me double back and note yes, men also do this.  Married women do this. Women with many children do this. I am simply stacking the filters one on top of another to see if something clear emerges. 

I have mentioned many times over the years how much kind people love to hate. I have been dismissive and insulting about it, seeing it as evidence that their compassion is cheap, that it is not real compassion. If they are rescuers looking for victims, it diminishes their motives. But what if it is perfectly good compassion gone awry? In village days a person not married with no children still had plenty of opportunity to interact with them. Females more than males, but not exclusively.  These days it is not just fewer children for the individual women, driving them away from closer empathy, but fewer children of their peer group - fewer nephews, fewer baby showers, fewer holding babies at picnics, or getting to know young T Ballers, and soccer players at your friends' houses. Fewer church pageants, fewer school plays. You don't know those children anymore. And more mobility means you have less of it in your neighborhood as well. 

So you start mothering the people on the news or described on the internet.  It may even be supercharged in some sort of compensation.  You may identify with their distress and grow angry at their lot, becoming a crusader on their behalf. My compassion is so great that it includes even these! My own experience is that compassion at a distance does not much work. Let me explain.  It might work fine on helping them.  Your energy and even anger might move mountains to bring them food, or bring them justice, but compassion needs to complete the circuit. We are not built to complete kindness at a distance.  It will always be unsatisfying. Loving the more and more unlovable, until you love the most despised of all is usually more gradual. Artists portray the scales falling from our eyes and seeing the humanity in those we thought hateful and unlike us, but artists also condense things because they are good at perceiving essences.

Compassion is most important to your psyche first on an individual level, then family level, then group level, then national level, then international level. We are made that way. The smaller concentric circles are like grades in school. If we try and skip steps we accept worse and worse substitutes for real kindness and generosity. We find our desire to protect grow in tandem with hatred for those who we want to see as their persecutors. If they are not really persecutors, no matter. We can write terrible things about them on placards anyway. Plus, it is a genuine risk to get involved with that single mother down the street with a hyperactive boy and a sullen little girl. It might cost you without anyone knowing about it and giving you credit.

I should correct that to say that while expanding out into the Bailey is designed to be gradual, so that each point is defended with our will, the mark of it being spurious is that the retreat to the Motte is abrupt. It has a kind of super compassion attached to it, but are you trying to be one of those women who are so good that you can love and rescue even someone like that? That can go very bad.  Compare to the young women who fall in love with dangerous criminals like the Boston Marathon bombers, with fantasies of rescuing them because they are so misunderstood. 

So it is not just fake kindness put on for show.  It may be a very natural compassion twisted. Real generosity and kindness are difficult. Escape hatches to easier versions look attractive.