Books Addressing Advanced Social Science Concepts and Compassion

November, 2007

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Some books speak to advanced concepts in compassion or are written in an academic style not easily readable by the general public.  Below is an listing of topic headings under which these books are grouped.

There are books, and articles, that can be downloaded from this site that address advanced concepts in compassion development.
Click on the buttons at the top of the page: healing, support, mystic or ultimate (these are the first 4 advanced books listed on this site).

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Title: The Hand of Compasson: Portraits of moral choice during the holocaust

Author: Kristin Renwick Moore

Publisher/Year: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004

Summary: This book looks at "rescuers", people who braved danger during WWII to save Jews (and others) from execution. In the author's words: "The imputus for rescuer activities originated not in religion, or a conscious, construction or utilitarian calculus but rather in how they thought about themselves and about others around them".  It is a view of not being seperate from humanity but part of it, linked to what ever is happening.  How is it that people can act on this view when others did not? Several people interviewed said that "they had no choice", driven to act, and the theory behind this is in part what the author seeks to present to us. She says "the habits of caring for others had become so integrated into rescuers' sense of who they were that these habits created the kind of altruistic personality".  She continues, "I conclude that the cognitive processes by which rescuers viewed others - their categorization and classification of others and their perspective on themselves in relation to these others - played a critical role in identity's influence on moral action. The cognitive process included an affective component that served as a powerful emotional reaction to another's need."  The common theme through out the transcript was that the recuers saw themselves the same as those who were being persecuted and thus had to act.

Comments:  This books seems to be not only a follow-up to her earlier book "The Heart of Altruism" but also follows along the vein of Sam P. Oliner's book "Do Onto Other's".  This book is an intense read, both due to the topic and due to the author's search for a theory to explain the reason why rescuers did what they did. The author provides the reader with much of the interview transcript, and it is clear that her looking for a theory has shaped her interpretations of the information (and sometimes the questions asked).  The transcripts seem to be aimed at at phenomenological decription of what the person experienced at the decision making point of acting as a rescuer, and for the most part they appear to do this.  But there is one piece missing in the analysis - the sense of mystery or not being able to really explain why (this is also in Oliner's book and not addressed).  Some of the transcripts contain this, and it is a common phenomena associated with strong acts of compassion, but not addressed by the author.  Such a sense of "something lost in the translation" speaks to the character of the phenomena.  For me the absolute gem of the book is highlighting We instead of I thinking/acting as a critical part of compassion. The book weakly speaks to compassion as an innate human quality, barely touches upon empathy and speaks a bit to "pasing it on" through a section on moral examplars.

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Reviewer: Dr. W. David Hoisington

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Web page author W. David Hoisington, Ph.D.