Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century. Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.

An interesting conversation going on over at Althouse, Sentimentality/tenderness and the gas chamber by Ann Althouse.

Read the whole thing but the meat is here.

But why is opposition to tenderness an argument against what Nazis represent? And what's with the 2 versions of the aphorism? What meaning is there in the shift from sentimentality to tenderness? And how closely do the thoughts of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy connect to present-day debates about empathy and trigger warnings?

MORE: In fact, O'Connor, like Percy, used the word "tenderness." She wrote:

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him.... Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

Walker Percy — who claimed not to realize he was appropriating O'Connor — wrote:

Beware, tender hearts! Don’t you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers. Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century. Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed. More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together. My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads. To the gas chambers! On with the jets!

Interviewed about that passage, Walker said:

It is the widespread and ongoing devaluation of human life in the Western world -- under various sentimental disguises: "quality of life," "pointless suffering," "termination of life without meaning," etc. I trace it to a certain mindset in the biological and social sciences which is extraordinarily influential among educated folk -- so much that it has achieved the status of a quasi-religious orthodoxy.... Although it drapes itself in the mantle of the scientific method and free scientific inquiry, it is neither free nor scientific. Indeed, it relies on certain hidden dogma where dogma has no place. ... The first: In your investigations and theories, [thou] shalt not find anything unique about the human animal even if the evidence points to such uniqueness. ... Another dogma: Thou shalt not suggest that there is a unique and fatal flaw in Homo sapiens sapiens or indeed any perverse trait that cannot be laid to the influence of Western civilization. ... Conclusion: It is easy to criticize the absurdities of fundamentalist beliefs like "scientific creationism" -- that the world and its creatures were created six thousand years ago. But it is also necessary to criticize other dogmas parading as science and the bad faith of some scientists who have their own dogmatic agendas to promote under the guise of "free scientific inquiry." Scientific inquiry should, in fact, be free. The warning: If it is not, if it is subject to this or that ideology, then do not be surprised if the history of the Weimar doctors is repeated. Weimar leads to Auschwitz. The nihilism of some scientists in the name of ideology or sentimentality and the consequent devaluation of individual human life lead straight to the gas chamber.

A lot of nuances. From 30,000 feet, I'd buy in to the argument that misplaced empathy often incites well intentioned actions that often/usually/almost always have significant unintended negative consequences which can outweigh any putative benefit that was originally being sought.

To the extent possible, it is always best for local and poorly understood complex problems to be solved locally. Good intentions are not the same as good outcomes.