RPL Lecture Examines Compassion in Societal Structures

In a recent RPL lecture, guest speaker Marc Gopin and HDS Professor Swayam Bagaria examined the role of compassion in its functional and moral capacity to reshape how political and religious systems respond to crisis.

Two people sit in chairs and have a conversation against beige backdrop

Marc Gopin (left) and HDS Professor Swayam Bagaria discuss during a recent RPL lecture examining compassion within societal structures. Photo courtesy of Reem Atassi.

On October 15, 2025, Religion and Public Life (RPL) hosted Marc Gopin, director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, for a lecture titled, “Compassion and Moral Reason at the Core: Reimagining Religion, Liberalism, and Human Rights.” The conversation examined the role of compassion in its functional and moral capacity to reshape how political and religious systems respond to crisis. The lecture was followed by a response by Swayam Bagaria, Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at Harvard Divinity School (HDS).

Gopin centered his discussion around the claim that technology has evolved, but our moral imagination is still struggling. “We have decoded the genome, harnessed artificial intelligence, expanded communication across continents at the speed of thought. Yet our moral imagination has not kept pace,” he said. 

For Gopin, the gap is structural. He framed compassion as a “trained human capacity for perception, moral clarity, and action” that can be built into how societies function. Drawing from religious traditions and neuroscience, he described it as a form of moral intelligence that can hold conflict without collapsing into fear or resentment.

He built the rest of his argument around what he called “structural compassion”: the idea that compassion can and must be embedded in the way societies organize themselves. Tracing its moral genealogy through the various prophetic traditions of rakamim, agape, rahma, and karuna, he argued that religion and liberalism both collapse into cruelty and resentment when stripped of this ethical core. 

“Freedom, prosperity, and rights are valuable only insofar as they cultivate compassionate relationships across difference,” he said. Compassion, in this framing, is foundational instead of being understood as ornamental. It was central to Gopin’s argument that compassion is the structure that holds it all together.

In his response, Bagaria agreed with the moral clarity of Gopin’s vision but described it as a “view from the mountaintop,” which attempts to be addressing everything with the intellectual ambition of one big idea. Bagaria pushed further, questioning the scientific grounding of Gopin’s claims, noting that concepts like “cooperation” and “mirror neurons” are far more contested than often presented. He presented compassion as one of many productive moral affects; suspicion and other less “affectionate” ways of relating may also play a role in how societies cohere. The response grounded the conversation in the tension between moral vision and structural reality, acknowledging the ideals must contend with the limitations placed by scale and science.