Argument, Shock, and Compassion

My rhetoric class is reading the memoir Mot by Sarah Einstein, a story of the unlikely friendship that the author forms with a mentally ill homeless man.

One of my students said the book shocked her, that it was the first time she had read something and been truly surprised since she was in middle school and read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. When I asked what had shocked her, she said it was the way that Sarah cared so deeply for someone who was not a romantic partner, someone who was so unlike her in so many ways, the way she gave time and resources and money with a generosity that so few of us would expect of ourselves or others.

I chose this book in part for its act of radical compassion, for the ways it doesn’t fit any of the easy narratives we know or expect.

The class is all about argumentation, but I tell my students that we should argue with compassion. That compassion should not be antithetical to argument, but rather one of its key ingredients. So often we assume that we already know what someone will say: person X is Y so they will say Z. But when we allow ourselves to shock or to be shocked, we open up so much more space for insight and conversation.

This, I think, is part and parcel of compassion: a deep listening.

I was recently in a discussion with a friend about core values and I realized again how much I value compassion as my central way of existing in the world. But compassion is a complicated beast to tackle, in part because of how it can be associated with the ways that women are conditioned to apologize, to take the blame, to be small/silent.

But, as I tell my students, compassion doesn’t mean that we have to accept every counterargument as reasonable or that we can’t hold others accountable. Compassion—radical compassion—should be loud and bold, it should embrace those who struggle even as it speaks up for what is right, for what the world can and should be.

In many ways, my writing of Knock was my own (small) act of radical compassion. As it starts to make its way out into the world, my hope is that it can shock and be shocked, that even as it speaks, it has the capacity to listen.

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Knock is still available for pre-order!

And: I can't recommend Sarah Einstein's Mot highly enough. It is a gorgeous and challenging book.