I have never been of the school of thought that philosophers of ages past are incomprehensible and irrelevant due to their having been superseded by contemporary thinkers. I have always found it peculiar, for instance, that Plato’s works are sold in the History section of every Borders I have ever been to; the philosophy section begins with Nietzsche. It is as though the Academics, Stoics, Neo-Platonists, and Church Fathers are to be regarded as cultural curiosities, interesting because they were once interesting, but now fit to be left behind in order to make room for thinkers who understand modern man. A leading presidential candidate has described her American society as post-modern, by which she meant that our age had been cut off from the moorings of tradition and needed to redefine what it meant to be human. One doubts that she feels anything was lost thereby.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that reading Plato was more instructive than reading anything about him, distaining a corpus of literature cobbled together by bloodless academics as “dreary modern book[s] . . . all about ’isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.” I am inclined to agree. Plato’s greatness lies in his perceptiveness about the permanent features of the human condition, man’s fallible nature, and his relevance lies in the fact that we are still the same sort of creature he knew in Athens so long ago. His Republic, his thought-experiment ideal society, which adumbrated many of the features of the modern totalitarian states, he knew to be built on a lie. This is a standing reproach to the post-modernists, existentialists, and others redeemers of earthly man. I suspect it is why they cannot abide him.

I had occasion to think about this in the course of my thesis research. Among my many sources is Seneca’s treatise On Mercy, written to the young emperor Nero early in the first century A.D. Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, and his purpose in writing his admonition was to try to instill something of the ethic of his school into his prince. This involved urging Nero to care for his fellow man, to practice philanthropy in the purest sense that Seneca would have known it.

In the first place, Nero is reminded, as if he needed to be, of the awesome power he wielded; he is “the judge of life and death for nations.” Certainly less welcome were the promptings to bear in mind that he was a mortal like anyone else, and as such, he was to identify with his subjects and have concern for their welfare. One of the most powerful passages in the text deals with Seneca’s exhortation to self-criticism, he hopes that Nero will be able to declare to himself, after studying his conscience, that mercy is

"always in residence; such guard do I keep over myself as though I am going to render an account to the laws that I call forth from the darkness of decay into daylight. One man’s youthful years moves me, another’s advanced age; one I have pardoned for his high standing, another for his low; whenever I discovered no excuse for pity, I spared the man for my own sake. Today I am prepared to give the immortal gods a full tally of the human race, should they require a reckoning from me."

He and his people are part of a single community, separated along hierarchical lines but bound together by a common law. Nero is answerable to the gods for the welfare of his subjects, and his mercy will be a function of that concern, exercised on behalf of the gods by their earthly representative.

Having made clear his intent, Seneca proceeds to define exactly what mercy is. Here he is careful to differentiate between what he terms ‘mercy’ and ‘pity’ (it is perhaps a fault of the translator's imagination that 'pity' appears in the quote above). Mercy is “forbearance,” applying reason in order to control “the mind when one has the power to take revenge.” It is power restrained, enforcing law while condescending to the weakness of human nature. Mercy is for the repentant, “those capable of reform,” for those who have stumbled in a way anyone might, and who deserve empathy on that score.

Pity is irrational. Seneca states by way of analogy that mercy is to pity as religion is to superstition. While mercy is a thoughtful concession to human weakness, pity is an emotional, superficial reaction, “a failing of minds that feel unduly distressed by suffering.” Seneca thought it the province of “the worst specimens of humanity; old women and wretched females.” It was “a mental sorrow caused at the sight of others’ wretchedness, or a sadness induced by the suffering of other, which it believes happen without their deserving them” This sadness “blunts the mind’s powers, scattering and restricting them.”

Seneca related all of this to his Stoicism, which taught that virtue rendered the wise man imperturbable, and thus immune to melancholy, a state which Seneca felt “not suited to discerning facts, to thinking up useful solutions, to avoiding dangers, or to weighing justice.” For him, the distinction was plain. Mercy was the product of virtue and the rational part of the soul, while pity was the result of a disordered emotional state, whereby the mind, overwhelmed by sadness, seeks to deliver itself of its torment by removing the cause of the gloom. Mercy was public minded, its goal was the compassionate application of rules, in a way mindful of fallible human nature, in order to achieve justice. Pity, on the other hand, was selfish. To pity was not to wish to uplift one’s fellow man, but to remove him as a cause of psychic discomfort.

Jung once wrote that “sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” and Seneca would perhaps have agreed. The selfish drive of pity could have important antisocial consequences. Seneca writes to Nero for this very reason, that the young Emperor will use his powers of life and death rationally, not emotionally. For Seneca it was no less an act of injustice to release upon the community an unrepentant predator than it was to condemn the penitent. This was the problem with his aforementioned vociferous women. In their urgency to end their personal distress, “moved by the tears of the most abandoned felons,” they would, “if they were allowed, break open their prison.” Pity made them incapable of differentiating between the weak and the incorrigible, not looking “to the cause of these men’s condition, but to the condition itself.”

Seneca did not fear the feelings of women. They had no power in Rome and he did not seem to think highly of their abilities in any case. But Nero, who held power as emperor, was a different matter. He was at the center of the state, and his character would go a long way in determining what sort of society Rome would have.

Seneca clearly feared, more than anything, a state unmoored from reason, sentimental and brutal, where the flux of feeling was the sole guide to behavior. He wrote with a tone of cautious optimism. His admonitions to Nero were an acknowledgement that the slip away from rationality could be subtle. Pity was a counterfeit virtue, so superficially similar to mercy that it was easily confused with it. Seneca wrote to make Nero aware of this fact, to be mindful of his own inner life, and to urge him to live according to virtue.

Sadly and famously, he failed. Nero’s name became a byword for cruelty and decadence. Seneca, for all the pains he took, ended his days with an order from his pupil to commit suicide. By then Nero, worse than a plaything of sentiment, had become a slave of appetite. His own suicide, unlike that of his teacher, was a cowardly attempt to avoid punishment rather than a manful acceptance of fate.

I thought about this in the context of my own times. What is ‘progressive’ thought if not the amalgamation of countless diverse strands of sentimentalism driven by the cloying engine of pity? It is those who live in cities who love the jungle the most, feeling sorrow for every acre of vegetation laid low by the same forces of material progress that built their air-conditioned high-rises. Similarly, the animal rights movement finds its home among those whose experience of fauna is largely to limited to anthropomorphized media images and tame beasts in safe settings; when they venture into the wilderness to make friends, they get eaten.

But it is especially within the context in which Seneca wrote, crime and punishment, that progressive opinion serves to illustrate pity in action. For Seneca, the criminal is an individual who has chosen to commit a crime; flawed like the rest of us, his actions have served to put him into a new, negative relationship with the community. Repentance can bring him back, but there will always be those who will seek to prey on their fellow man, and it is the duty of the ruler to use judgment to sort the weak from the truly evil. Progressive thought, by contrast, divides humans into groups, along superficial lines of race and social class, and the individual is rendered a cipher who serves to illustrate characteristics of the mass. The flaws which cause men to commit crimes are not individual, but systemic. Repentance is impossible because the criminal has done no wrong as a person, rather, it is society that is flawed and must change. To use discernment in individual cases is to ignore this larger social reality, and what is worse, to be intolerant.

Progressives seek to take away the agency of the criminal, to render him the end result of social forces beyond his ken and control, in order to put into the hands of the progressive the ability to affect such changes as will result in the end of the progressive’s discomfort at social inequality. The progressive cannot change the criminal, as this involves facing up to untoward facts about human nature, some amount of difficult work, and even danger. But he can change society, which is much more far more pleasant, especially when paired with a high-paying job haranguing the government.

Pity is antisocial because it is inherently selfish. It is dehumanizing and cowardly, concerned only with superficialities, and above all, irrational. Mercy is benevolent and reasonable, a virtue that everyone should seek to cultivate. Seneca, writing two-thousand years ago, saw through to the heart of a distinction we so often fail to make, confusing one for the other, and falling into the trap he feared. Would that we would learn from him before we relegate him to history.