What sets humanity apart from the animal kingdom is not the ability to work with tools, the obsession with clothing or the predisposition for comprising jokes. It is mercy, a thing found nowhere in the natural world unless left there by mankind’s better angels. Her imagery would always appear exactly when we needed the universe to leave a raindrop in our eyes, drawing us out and necessarily away from ourselves.
Yet just as wisdom is the antonym of warring, and death by unnatural causes the void from neglected virtues, mercy is the opposite of ego, with mercy’s lone requirement being a modest stepping back or stepping down, a step beyond ourselves for the transaction to face completion. Without it, the world as it stands and the world as we know it provides no fulfillment. There is no magic cure free of sacrifice and help was never on the way. No element to Church or State or Industry exists to assist you, or functions as a rescue mission for your best interests, your livelihoods or your well-being, as the pursuit of power or wealth or authority arrives distinctly from mercy’s lacking. Mercy only occurs by the individual’s conscientious deliberation, rather than accident or hindsight or groupthink.
What others want is often an obstruction to mercy, with the act popularly regarded by way of selfish justifications as unnecessary wastes of time, weakness along the lines of character flaws. Mercy is always a gift, but it is not always a kindness, for the giver or the recipient. What we ourselves might want has nothing to do with mercy. It’s about foregoing what we feel we need in that moment for the sake of others who, whether by circumstantial oddity or by prolific machinations, hold deficiencies to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness more problematic, more troublesome than our own. It’s about recognizing that for ourselves, and opting to do something about it ourselves, rather than wait for nature to take its course or for social Darwinism to prove once more how malevolent it inherently is.
Today my dad would turn 72, were he still alive. He hated his birthday as a child, it generally being the day he was expected to return to his schooling after the big holidays. His body was found in a field 23 years ago. It was the decades of overworking which slowly crippled his physical and emotional being that gave the bottle more effect than it warranted. His was a sad story, of a life entirely free from mercy’s warm embrace. The smallest gratitudes from family, co-workers and strangers could have eased his fall. But the optics of ego are irredeemably the most vocal of plaintiffs in any given situation, as that is the American way. Only the political class would accuse the sort of person who’d return from an underpaid eighty-hour work week, to spend whatever remained of his conscious time and energy not watching television but fixing appliances for desperate neighbors free of charge, of not working hard enough in life.