# 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. November 03, 2025 - [ Event Coverage ](/news-categories/event-coverage) ![Two people sit in chairs and have a conversation against beige backdrop](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-11/10152025_Oct%2015%20RPL%20photo_thumb%20crop.jpg?h=3b7af8d0&itok=qcLwPWVJ) 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](https://crdc.gmu.edu/) 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](https://www.hds.harvard.edu/people/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. ### Video Transcript expand\_more SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: Compassion and moral reason at the core. Reimagining religion, liberalism, and human rights. October 15, 2025. TERRENCE JOHNSON: A land acknowledgment. We sit on land on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusetts, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusetts tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. Tonight's talk is part of a year-long series on religion, liberalism, and human rights. The programming aims to bring together leading scholars to reflect on the promises and limitations of liberalism and human rights activism. We are honored to have with us today Dr. Marc Gopin, Director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution and a James H. Laue professor at the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. Professor Gopin has pioneered projects at CRDC in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Israel, Palestine. He directs a unique series of overseas educational and experiential learning, ranging from conflict and peace intervention in Palestine and Israel, to support for Syrian activists and refugees in Turkey and Jordan, to pioneering educational classes in the Balkans and Northern Ireland. Dr. Gopin has trained several thousand students over these decades in conflict healing and peace building, where complex cultural, religious, and psychosocial elements play a key role. He is also a widely respected rabbi and spiritual advisor to many of us in the academy, the author of several dozen journal articles and essays and several books, including Bridges Across the Impossible Divide-- The Inner Lives of Arab and Jewish Peacemakers, and Holy War, Holy Peace-- How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East. And his 2021 book, Compassionate Reasoning-- Changing the Mind to Change the World, presents the case for compassionate reasoning as a moral and psychosocial skill for the positive transformation of individuals and societies, with a focus on moral reasoning, compassionate research and practice, neuroscience, social network theory, and comparative religion. After the lecture, we'll be joined by our wonderful colleague, Professor Swayam Bagaria. He'll offer a formal response. Professor Bagaria's research investigates the dynamics of multidimensional belief networks, including spiritual and religious beliefs within contemporary societies, with an emphasis on India. Following his remarks, we will collect our food. In the session, we'll continue with audience questions from your tables. We will then engage in small group discussions. Each table is provided with guiding questions to facilitate reflection on the topics presented. The reverse side of the worksheet offers space to summarize each group's conversation, which we will then be shared with all participants at the conclusion of the dinner discussion at around 6:45, 6:50. Again, let us welcome Dr. Gopin to the podium. \[APPLAUSE\] MARC GOPIN: It's wonderful to meet all of you. I'm just going to speak for a bit, give the formal talk, and then hopefully have a great discussion later in small dialogue groups. The title of the talk is "Compassion, Liberalism, and the Future of Human Rights." The modern world faces a paradox of its own making. "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." Loneliness, inequality, ecological collapse, and resurgent authoritarianism gnaw at the heart of civilization. Liberalism, religion, and human rights--once humanity's great hope--now struggle under the weight of mistrust and fragmentation. At this crossroads, we must ask a foundational question, what moral force can renew our shared future? My answer, as I argued in compassionate reasoning, is both ancient and revolutionary, compassion, not as sentiment, but as a trained human capacity for perception, moral clarity, and action. Compassion does not erase conflict. It transforms how we meet it. It does not abolish disagreement. It turns disagreement into a site of learning and service. In an age of social and planetary peril, compassion is not weakness. It is realism of the highest order. Drawing on prophetic religions, Tibetan Buddhism, neuroscience, moral philosophy, and the behavioral evidence of cooperation in animals and ecosystems, I developed the methodology of compassionate reasoning as a practical framework for restoring moral coherence to modern life. It is more than an ethical theory. It is a method for thinking, feeling, and acting that integrates attention, reason, and imagination toward the best possible outcomes for all involved. It is both emotional intelligence and moral calculus, a process by which freedom and responsibility can finally be reconciled. As I wrote in the book, global collapse or progress is the choice we face, and the training of our minds and bodies in truly collaborative approaches to ethical challenges is essential to the future. The central claim is simple yet transformative. Freedom, prosperity, and rights are valuable only insofar as they cultivate compassionate relationships across difference. When liberty and dignity become tools for service rather than trophies of status, democracies stabilize, communities heal, and human beings can flourish. Religion, liberalism, and human rights each emerged as responses to human vulnerability and injustice, each transformed civilization, yet each becomes brittle when detached from compassion. Compassionate reasoning restores the moral bond that once linked faith, reason, and justice into a single moral architecture. Prophetic religions often placed compassion at the center of justice. The Hebrew prophets condemned ritual without mercy, learned to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed. In Isaiah, the Hebrew word "rachamim," compassion, shares a root with "rechem," womb, evoking visceral sheltering care. Christianity expressed this through agape, self-giving love, that serves even enemies drawn from the same deep Semitic reservoir. Islam placed rahmah, mercy, at the very heart of God's 99 names. Buddhism, through "karuna," identified compassion as the path to awakening. When these traditions forget compassion, however, they mutate into their opposites--tribalism, cruelty, and domination. History offers tragic proof--inquisitions, pogroms, holy wars, and conquest launched in God's name but serving only human self-aggrandizement. Compassionate reasoning attempts to restore religion's true test, not doctrinal supremacy, but the capacity to serve those outside one's fold. As I wrote in that book, whether someone's compassionate path to care for others and to care for the world is more academic or more practical. Compassion and reasoning are wedded partners for the improvement of life and for building a peaceful world in which we can flourish. And here's controversy. Liberalism, too, was born of compassion's impulse that no person should live under tyranny. Yet over time, liberalism fractured into competing schools without an underlying ethic that orients these strands towards the vulnerable. Liberty devolves into license and equality into resentment. A compassionate liberalism re-anchors autonomy within solidarity, balancing the freedom to pursue the good with the duty to protect the vulnerable. Human rights gave liberalism a universal grammar of dignity, but law alone cannot sustain empathy. When rights become slogans devoid of relationships and relationship building, they provoke backlash. People do not fall in love with footnotes. They fall in love with care. The challenge is to rehumanize rights--to see them not as cold entitlements but as acts of care performed through law. Compassionate reasoning bridges this divide by asking, does this belief, policy, or ritual expand compassion beyond its boundaries? When the answer is yes, the secular and the sacred can converge. In my work of elicitive peacebuilding over these many decades, I've seen that genuine peace emerges in relationships, in particular between enemies--not from dominance but from dialogue, not from coercion but particularly from care. The people who gain the most entry into the worlds of their enemies, who build the most trust, are those who show personal compassion. Compassionate reasoning thus becomes a civic spirituality, a bridge between law, conscience, and the yearning for belonging that defines human life. Our age is not defined by cruelty but by indifference, a numbing of moral attention. The danger of mass communication is not that we see too little suffering--and this is important--but that we see too much without guidance for what to do with it. Compassionate reasoning teaches that attention without regulation produces paralysis, while attention guided by compassion produces engagement. The question is never simply, do I feel, or do you feel somebody else's pain? It's how shall I respond constructively. Neuroscience is the key here-- clarifies this moral distinction. When empathy remains untrained, it overwhelms the nervous system--this is pure science on this--triggering distress and avoidance. In compassionate reasoning, I observed that when confusion rooted in overly active empathy affects us about serious matters, it can lead to despair and withdrawal. Science tells us we human beings can deal with some confusion. But the more that that confusion piles on, the more exhausted we get. Compassion training transforms this overload into moral resilience, enabling the mind to perceive suffering without being overwhelmed by it. And the opposite of indifference, then, is not sentimentality but skill, this cultivation of inner stability that allows feeling to become service. Compassionate reasoning operationalizes this skill, helping individuals and institutions pause, regulate, and respond to suffering with clarity and courage. To grasp the power of compassion, we must distinguish it from empathy--two words that are seen as synonyms in the English language. But in many other languages is they're actually different. Empathy allows us to feel another's pain. Compassion motivates us to heal that pain. Empathy can collapse into distress-- a phenomenon that neuroscience refers to as empathic burnout or empathic distress. Compassion, by contrast, activates neural networks--very different neural networks of reward, resilience, and affiliation. Neuroscientist Olga Klimecki demonstrated this vividly, quote, "Whereas participants reacted with negative affect before training, compassion training increased positive affective experiences, even in response to witnessing others in distress." On a neural level, compassion activates regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral tegmental area-- in the middle-- centers associated with positive emotion and affiliation. Compassion literally therefore re-wires the brain for joy in service. In compassionate reasoning, I translated this science into moral practice. That's my training is ethics. Compassionate reasoning unfolds in five deliberate stages--pause and regulate your own mind--the reactive mind--perceive suffering clearly, both in oneself and in others--engage reason to identify shared values and consequences, act, imagine compassionate options that maximize dignity and minimize harm, act and reflect, learning through feedback loops of service or experience. It is moral neuroscience in practice, a pedagogy of the prefrontal cortex. It does not replace emotion with logic. Instead, it marries emotion and logic to achieve compassionate outcomes. This synthesis has ancient roots. Tibetan Buddhism's karuna meditation trains the mind to convert empathy into compassion. The Dalai Lama calls compassion, the radical realism of interdependence. Likewise, the Abrahamic injunction be merciful as your father is merciful, both in Luke and also in many rabbinic texts. The same period of the second Commonwealth period captures the same neuroethical truth. Mercy is the most intelligent use of emotion. Philosophy too affirms this unity. Hume saw the minds of men as mirrors to one another. And now we have mirror neurons and major research on mirror neurons. Adam Smith began the theory of moral sentiments by reminding readers--this is very important--how selfish soever man be supposed. There are evidently some principles and his nature which interest him in the fortune of others. Smith's forgotten moral psychology is the missing sibling of his economics. Compassion for him was the social glue that made liberty viable. Peter Singer extended this through evolutionary reasoning. Reason requires us to extend the circle of moral concern beyond kin and tribe. And now we have the science to prove it, even about trees, in terms of this universe of consciousness, compassion, and altruism. Compassionate reasoning fulfills that mandate not by preaching universal love as an isn't ideal but by training it's deliberate practice as a skill. Carol Gilligan, in a different voice, reframed morality as care. Care becomes the self-chosen anchor of moral life. Her insight transforms liberal individualism into mature interdependence. Evolution supports this convergence. Cooperation is not a moral luxury but the adaptive advantage. Bonobos console the weak. Elephants mourn. Dolphins aid the injured. EO Wilson captured it succinctly. The humanities and the sciences share the same creative wellspring, the urge to make sense of the world. And when science and ethics converge, compassion ceases to be sentimental, and it becomes a form of empirical realism. As I wrote in compassionate reasoning, a habit is effectively a strengthened neural pathway. Moral habits of thinking and doing affect the physical evolution of the mind itself. We can see this now. Compassion, then, is not an emotion to be admired but a neural discipline to be practiced--the happiness that comes with good health, a good metabolism, and compassion for others. And there's clear evidence of all of this. I continue. It is the happiness that comes with good moral reasoning. And the evolution of the brain and the evolution of ethics are therefore inextricably related. But freedom without compassion degenerates. And this is the dark side here that we're living through. Freedom without compassion degenerates into domination. The misreading of Adam Smith is emblematic. The Wealth of Nations is often cited to sanctify self-interest, while the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which emphasizes that sympathy and fairness are essential market prerequisites, is overlooked. When self-interest loses its counterweight, capitalism becomes vulture capitalism, wealth without responsibility, growth without empathy, and profit extracted from our decay. Psychologically, greed behaves like an addiction. It's a dopamine-driven, desensitized, insatiable experience. The consequence is civic erosion, declining trust, polarization, and despair. People experience the market not as mutual benefit but as exploitation. Rights language cannot by itself compete with humiliation and medical debt. In compassionate reasoning, I compared the dynamics of moral corruption to those of public health. Hatred and greed are social pathogens. We do not want to kill bullies--I wrote therefore. We try to heal and to treat, not make matters worse by creating cycles of abuse. This analogy suggests a compassionate approach to the vector control it's called, addressing the social and informational environments that perpetuate hatred and moral neglect. And I'm working a great deal on algorithms right now in this regard-- online algorithms. Compassion becomes both treatment and prevention. Compassionate reasoning reframes prosperity as stewardship. Wealth is legitimate only when it alleviates suffering and builds communal well-being. This requires structural compassion, fair taxation that funds health and education, labor practices that honor time and dignity, corporate governance that links rewards to well-being, and environmental guardianship that treats the Earth as home, not as a hunting ground. Policy alone is insufficient without a moral infrastructure. Citizens capable of regulating emotion and imagining the good of others-- that's the key. Imagine civics courses that we could teach mindfulness, conflict transformation, and compassionate reasoning alongside literacy. Finland's kindness curriculum and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index point the way. And there are many other examples churning up from Taiwan to Iceland. Historically, compassionate policy stabilized democracy. The Roosevelt reforms embedded compassion into law through the establishment of Social Security and labor rights. Their erosion under neoliberalism reopened the door to authoritarianism, the false promise of order without empathy. Freedom survives only where citizens practice inner self-governance, a personal constitution of compassion and kindness. As Smith warned--and this is Adam Smith--the disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and the powerful is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. Compassionate reasoning answers that warning with a counterhabit--admiration for generosity, not for accumulation. Ideas fade. Habits endure. Ideas come and go. But habits, they change history. For compassion to guide the future, it must live in the daily rhythm of society of the community. Neuroscience confirms that repetition forges neural pathways. What we rehearse, we become. And this is tied to the default network, which I didn't talk about in terms of future thinking in the brain. Consumer culture has demonstrated how quickly habits of acquisition can be formed. We can also deliberately train habits of compassion. This has been proven. Religions intuited this through ritual. The Sabbath interrupts productivity's tyranny. The Eucharist ritualized service and giving. The Muslim prayer cycle synchronizes gratitude, key prosocial emotion. Buddhist meditation trains attention towards nonharm. Each ritual domesticates transcendence into a sacred habit. Compassionate reasoning extends this wisdom into civic life. I've written that language itself becomes a cure, a power, a healer. The word becomes a supreme act of power. And here it's thanks to a lot of work in psycholinguistics, a way to protect to enlighten, to lead, to attract others who otherwise would become adversaries. Ritualized compassion thus becomes both communication and culture. It's the moral muscle memory of civilization. Yet ritual's danger is exclusivity. That's the key underbelly of ritual. When identity hardens, compassion shrinks. The corrective is universalization. A ritual is valid. I know this is radical. A ritual is valid, especially in my tradition. A ritual is valid only when it extends care beyond its boundaries. A prayer that blesses the stranger stands higher than one that curses the foe. To institutionalize this principle, I propose compassion metrics akin to public health benchmarks in the future of civilization. We need a compassionate people 2030 set of goals with achievable metrics and benchmarks for each year. And maybe our organized religions need the same. A compassion audit of institutions and maybe religions could ask, do our policies expand or contract compassion? Do our algorithms amplify empathy or rage? Do our rituals include the marginalized or purposely exclude them? In this way, aspiration becomes practice, and practice becomes structure, and structure becomes law, but a law that can't be undone by the mob. Ultimately, compassion must become as habitual as consumption once was, the guiding rhythm of conscience and public Life. Compassionate reasoning is a kind of whole-of-brain experience. The power of it is using all parts of the brain together to create unshakable habits and perspectives. People who practice it daily are not perfect, but they are prepared. They meet conflict and despair and sorrow with a trained mind, not a raw nerve. The crises of our age, fragmentation, authoritarianism, ecological peril can't be solved by liberalism, religion, or human rights in isolation. Each is a brilliant cathedral built on a cracked foundation, the neglect of compassion as a governing principle. Compassionate reasoning offers restoration. It integrates prophetic conscience, liberal fairness, scientific evidence, and evolutionary insight into a single moral architecture. It asks not merely what is right, but what response reduces suffering while preserving dignity for all. So this isn't sentimentality. This isn't emotion. It's enlightened pragmatism. Neuroscience shows compassion strengthens resilience. Economics shows that it stabilizes markets. Ella Smith. Politics shows it sustains democracy. Ritual shows it can be learned and passed on. And ecology shows that cooperation sustains life systems--a fact or an experience or phenomenon that so many animals seem to know better than our current organization of human life. Philosophy shows compassion, grounds ethics. As I wrote, even when the Earth itself and all other nonhuman forms of life are suffering beneath the weight of human greed, compassion and moral reasoning remain humanity's path of evolution. The measure of progress, then, will not be GDP or weapons or data speed, but the depth and breadth of compassion embedded in our institutions, technologies, and daily rituals. To cultivate compassion is to ensure our survival not as an empire but as a community of care. The future belongs, in conclusion, to those who make compassion, not a passing feeling but a habit of mind, a structure of reason, and a way of life. And it is for those who dare to live that way in public. Thank you. \[APPLAUSE\] SWAYAM BAGARIA: Thank you so much, Marc, both for the talk as well as the book. My short response to everything that Marc said is I agree, but academics are not paid to agree. So I'm going to earn my keep. And I read a few chapters from your book. So I have a larger context within which to draw my own conclusions. My first response of agreement because a little bit more complicated when I realized that I agree with everything that you said, insofar as I would love for the world to be in the way in which you presented it to me. But I think things might be, in my estimation, a little bit more intransigent. And I just want to hear your thoughts on a few issues that I'm going to bring up. You can use it to elaborate some things from your book or what have you. You can pick and choose. So I have five cluster of issues that I want to bring up. One is this thing. The main issue is that just the motivation, the motivation for coming up with one big idea to reconcile a lot of different things from economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, anthropology into one big argument. And while I really like the ambition of it, I returned to a quote by a legendary philosopher, R.M. Hare--the moral philosopher who came up with this idea or defense of preferential utilitarianism. And he was one of those "one big idea" philosophers. And towards the end of his life, he wrote this essay called a "Philosophical Autobiography," in which he had this quote. And I found it very intriguing. So I'm just going to read that. "I had a strange dream or a half waking vision not long ago. I found myself at the top of a mountain in the mist feeling very pleased with myself not just for having climbed the mountain but for having achieved my life's ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear. And I saw that I was surrounded on the mountain top by the graves of all those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the same ambition and thought they had achieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that ever since the hard-working philosophical worms had been nibbling away at their systems and showing that the achievement was an illusion--" and for me, I think there is something--and this is disciplinary. So I'm an anthropologist by training. In psychology and anthropology, we tend to atomize the questions of moral reasoning and then see it in a more piecemeal basis. In philosophy, we tend to have unitary and coherent pictures of how things are supposed to be doing or how things are supposed to be. If I had to ask a question around this issue, when does compassionate reasoning fail? Because that, for me, will give me an anchor for what does it not address. Because as it is presented right now, it seems to be addressing everything. It seems to be a view from the mountain top. And I want to hear you to see if that's what you thought as well. The second one is just the way in which you draw on evidence from the sciences. I'm going to mention one example--the example of cooperation. Now, I don't think that compassion necessarily leads to cooperation. Most of the latest evidence in evolutionary biology will basically suggest that since cooperation is about cumulative cultural knowledge, you need a lot of suspicion about the other person, a lot of suspicion of their misdirection or their deceptive signaling, because your life depends on the social learning that you will accrue from them. So in some ways, there is more room for what we would consider to be--or parts of ourselves that we would like to dismiss, even in ideas like cooperation that were built on it. So in some ways, compassion is great, but other forms of relating to the other, which might not be as affectionate as compassion could also, for me, have productive functions in cooperation. So for me, I'm curious as to the evidence behind--even the mirror neuron stuff--that it was overhyped. And then people realized that you can also mirror aggression. And mice basically did that last year in a Stanford paper that was published. So for me, how is it that concepts that seem to me to be contested can become the foundation of a moral philosophy? The third issue that I wanted to bring up was this question about--just the concept of compassionate reasoning. And at different points in your book, I thought it did different things. So in some ways, in your talk, you mentioned that there is some emotional regulation element to compassion. So what compassion allows you to do is to prevent your worst impulses from acting out in the way in which you traffic in discourse with other human beings. In some other points in your book, it seemed to me that you were talking about metacognitive processes, like taking somebody else's perspective or open mindedness. The third thing is trying to identify or excavate shared values in some ways, which is what I thought you were doing with the histories of religion. For me, when I look at these different components of this idea of compassionate reasoning, they seem to have different goals. I don't think metacognitive processes do the same thing as emotional regulation. So I'm curious as to how do you-- what is the concept in terms of if you were to specify a set or a sequence of steps that could be called a training in compassionate reasoning? What would that look like? I'm happy to pause. Marc, please let me know. Yes. MARC GOPIN: it's great. I'm not going to remember. SWAYAM BAGARIA: The fourth one-- and maybe I'll close with this-- is just this idea of institutionalization. And so again, I'm an anthropologist. When I remember Durkheim's idea of how institutionalization can lead to what is otherwise interpersonally great into a form of solidarity, which becomes mechanical-- so he has this idea that there's organic solidarity, which is very interpersonal. But as soon as you institutionalize it, you have to break that idea into different goals that other people can achieve for themselves. And then there is some way in which the institutions create a coincidence of interests. So you don't have to be the same kind of person for the coordination to occur. And for me, when I was thinking about your project, a lot of the stuff-- even in your book, it's a lot about great people, great mediators, or great sort of exemplary people, who were able to show or demonstrate the skill in practice. My sense is that institutionalizing it will not be as direct as suggested. And I'm curious to hear about whether there is something about the very mechanics or the process of institutionalization that will inevitably change the very nature of the concept of compassionate reasoning. And then it will have to be fragmented, or it will become a little bit disjointed. And in some ways, I think Bhutan's Gross National Happiness is a good idea in theory. But a basic look at the economic indicators will show really huge unemployment, massive outmigration of young people because they're like, we can't build careers here and things like that. So I'm curious as to what the institutionalization of such an idea will look like. I have tons more, but I'm very happy to stop. MARC GOPIN: OK. SWAYAM BAGARIA: Thank you, Marc. Yes. MARC GOPIN: Thank you. SWAYAM BAGARIA: Thank you. MARC GOPIN: That's wonderful. OK. So I'm going to do in reverse. My brain thinks in reverse. SWAYAM BAGARIA: Yes. MARC GOPIN: Let's go with the last one, and then we'll go back. So just institutionalize that these are all amazing comments. I've been thinking about a lot of these things for 20-30 years. This is all in the making. And I'm going to get to that. That part of what's not in this book that you've asked about is dependent upon theories that I didn't and practices that I didn't mention, even in this book, because it's just too big. But I'll get to it. But institutionalization is the great caution. And what I tried to say here was that from the Dalai Lama all the way to a very advanced, anonymous rabbi, like rabbi emunah in the Talmud and others that understood what it was to internalize something and to try and practice it, the moment to turn it into a ritual of somebody saying 25,000 times God is compassionate and merciful, and it goes through one ear and out the other, or from their mouth to their ears, and that's it, that's an institutionalization that didn't register because it didn't become a practice. It became a mantra. Now, mantras have their virtues, but not if they aren't internalized and turned into word and deed, or even the resistance to certain words and deeds. So that's the difference between sacred experience and organized religion. They're different. Organized religion is a highly institutionalized way of obedience to other people doing the same thing you're doing. So Durkheim is welcome because that's exactly what we're trying to see. And honestly, it's a strong critique of the Enlightenment as well, because the Enlightenment, in some ways, was the secularization of high Christian ideals and others that wanted to transfer, especially in people like Bentham and John Stuart Mill. But John Stuart Mill was subject to an awful childhood of brutality. In training, there was no thought to how do we turn the values of consequentialism and utilitarianism. The greatest happiness for the greatest number do no harm and all of these things. And Bentham had some of these things. It was great. He didn't how to teach it to a 10-year-old. There's no curriculum. How did they expect it to be internalized? Well, they didn't think about it much. And that was their loss and our loss. So it is about this becoming both external and internal as a transformative experience. And Dalai Lama knows that. He knows that his authentic effort to reach out for 50 years to Chinese leadership, despite always being rebuffed, was an internal spiritual process for him that a lot of his community are not happy with. They don't have the same feeling. They suffered immensely. It's a very strange thing to want to help your enemies, to want to be kind to your enemies. And yet the Bible in Exodus and Numbers and Deuteronomy and in Luke and in Proverbs, they said, yeah, we want you to do that. And it's going to be tough. But you know something. You're going to transform their brains by doing shocking things to help them. So it was a discipline. Where did that go in terms of affiliation with organized religion? Which organized religion do we of in the Abrahamic tradition that had those, that internalized how you care for an enemy? None. So we don't know what this would be if it was internalized and if it became the core of the spirituality. So I'm envisioning a kind of reformation of institutions, but also philosophy and secular Enlightenment that also didn't learn how to internalize this in their citizenry. I do think that Iceland and Taiwan and others are-- I just was listening to this brilliant minister in the Taiwanese government, 38 years old, and she was describing the internalization of trust between leader that has led to a wholly different approach to the online experience, et cetera. And it's very, very interesting how little of the insanity we have that they could have with the onslaught from China and people. So this is subtle. And you're absolutely right to be suspicious of institutionalization or Durkheim's. Let's go on to the number three. What's number three? SWAYAM BAGARIA: concept of compassionate reasoning. So the metacognitive aspects, the emotional regulation aspects. MARC GOPIN: Yeah. OK. So part of that is the weakness of my-- it's shorthand. Compassionate reasoning is shorthand. Compassion is a watchword. Reasoning is a watchword for, in the book, a subtle combination of four schools of ethical thinking-- virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology, et cetera. So it's a shorthand. I don't expect compassion to be all of those. It's a shorthand for one of the healthiest pro-social emotions I can think of. That rarely is associated with something corrupted. But a lot of other emotions have them. They've been bastardized in one way or another. So I'm interested in that. I'm interested in how many people fight for justice on two sides, and they're just going to kill each other. I'm interested in how empathy makes people depressed and burned out. And why does this compassionate service lower your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, increase your life expectancy? I mean, that's crazy. So I'm interested in what is that, that we could try to identify better. And you're right. Mirror neurons was a burnout. You can be a sociopath and have mirror neurons because you watch as a predator the other person very carefully. That's not compassion. Compassion is a biochemistry and a joy that we can identify now in neural pathways and in biochemistry. So I agree with you. Don't just go with the latest research. It has to be a flirtation with science, not an obedience to every latest discovery. Number two. SWAYAM BAGARIA: That was the science-- the evidence there. MARC GOPIN: What did I miss? SWAYAM BAGARIA: The view from the mountaintop. The first one was the motivation, like the distinction between the way in which philosophy tries to-- MARC GOPIN: Yeah. And you said that it was awfully idealistic. And hair is looking down and he said, it didn't matter. It didn't turn out to matter. So we have no choice until the day that we can't work anymore to try and get up to that mountaintop. As philosophers and thinkers, we have to try keep perfecting the best that we can do. But here's the thing about that mountain view. I didn't include my previous work. I don't think compassionate reasoning can change history unless the other work that I did on social network theory and to make the Earth whole is married to a robust strategy of maximizing compassion in society, in public health, in the rule of law. It's going to take thousands of creative people and other institutions to do that. So the scaling up is something beyond what I've written about, but it can't happen without that. So this isn't like you and I are going to become compassionate. The world's going to change. Yes, our little part of it will, but it's only going to be if there's a scaling up effect, an actual rational planning for that. And I think some countries and regions have done that. I think Taiwan is really working on that because they're under great assault. Iceland, Denmark-- there's many new curriculum. But I think curriculum isn't even enough. It has to be a different kind of conversation beyond political parties, for example. So you're absolutely right. It's not a magic bullet. It's more like a stimulus to a certain direction. I don't know if that helps. SWAYAM BAGARIA: No, perfect. Thank you, Marc. I mean, I have responses, but I'm going to shut up. And I think if anybody else has questions-- do we open it up for questions, Clarence? Yeah? CLARENCE: One or two that we're going to grab dinner and then have more. SWAYAM BAGARIA: Perfect, OK. CLARENCE: Before we go to dinner, let's take one or two questions. SWAYAM BAGARIA: Yes. Shell? CLARENCE: Please. AUDIENCE: You, Marc. It was great. It was great. I have a question that I try not to-- I don't want it to be a trite question. But in terms of the aspirational trajectory that you articulated, both in your talk and then in your responses to Swayam, I wonder whether there are two dominant structures that exist in the civilization that we live in, that you're working in because we're all working in, that are ultimately counterproductive to what you want to achieve. The first is capitalism. The second is nationalism. So I understand the way in which you want to insert a particular kind of compassionate frame within the capitalist-nationalist paradigm that we all live in. I couldn't help when you were talking. I kept having Marx in my head. Because in a certain way, Marx is really saying-- although he's not speaking in your register. He doesn't have that language-- that the capitalist-nationalist frame feeds human nature such that the kinds of things that you want us to become, we really can't become because of greed, because of insularity that nationalism produces. I'm thinking of whether you can speak a little bit to the capitalist-nationalist paradigm that we live in and whether we're really like salmon swimming upstream. We can try to be better capitalists, nationalists. But ultimately, those two frames will really prevent us from getting where you want us to go. MARC GOPIN: Right. Well, the overview over the last few hundred years is certainly proving Marx's cautions about runaway capitalism. That's for sure. And I didn't even mention the word "nationalism." Have you noticed? And I don't think that there's a marriage of compassionate reasoning and nationalism, actually. I think there's much. And I don't like the word "capitalism" too much. I'm much more interested in thousands of years of human private enterprise and commerce. And in that sense, I do believe there's been highs and lows of commerce feeding a peaceful civilization versus destroying a peaceful civilization. So in some ways, this is a search for paradigms and exemplars in history. So I think that there are exemplars of when moderate wealth was responsible and created stability. Just as an aside, I get obsessed. Today, I was obsessed with-- oh, I'm playing with algorithms on TikTok and other places, and I'm testing when things go viral. And they mostly go viral because there are bots that are sensationalizing certain things-- very profitable-- and maybe outside influence. And so guns was something that took off. And I'm now up to 100,000 views on something, which is crazy. Nobody cares about my wisdom comments but guns. And it's all repetitive. It's clearly robotic. But I was interested in the fact that as I looked at it and heard the arguments, I started to look for the democracies that have the least amount of murders per 100,000-- the robust ones that are less than 1/7 of the United States. And it wasn't necessarily those who had the strictest gun laws. It was those who had the most-- Marx would be happy-- the most equality on a financial level. And that's incredible. So we're talking about Switzerland having plenty of guns and totally different structure of health, safety, security, and wealth. So there's a science to this, I think. And nothing is perfect. So I don't want to dismiss out of hand the possibility of private enterprise like he did. I think that's wrong. But I do think that there is better and worse. And we are in very, very tough shape with the usual greed and naivety of an oligarchic class that thought they could handle limitless wealth. And it turns out that just like in Germany, the moment you get to a certain level, the fascists will take the money and kill the capitalists too. And that's the stage that we might be in at this point. So it's very bad. We have to dream beyond. Moral imagination is imagining what could be. And what I'm suggesting is that with greater attention to personal training and collective community training and training of business, business people at Harvard. I mean, Harvard is the biggest manufacturer in the world in one area. Do you know what it is? Billionaires. It produces the most billionaires in the world. So right here, there is a potential to make a shift in what it is to be wealthy, that we're not doing it. I'm not blaming Harvard for that. I'm saying all of us who've been comfortable with academia and everything we just said. Well, just a liberal education will take care of it. Baloney. It doesn't. That's my whole critique is of a liberal education. Compassionate reasoning is not a liberal education. It's a very specific form of psychological and ethical discipline that enters into habits and thoughts and practices. So in that regard, nationalism-- I'm not going to go into it too much, but I don't have-- there's an inherent contradiction between an ethical valuation only of your own nation and the idea of universal values, of compassion, of justice, of fairness, of equality. It just doesn't work very well. So there are people who say they're liberal nationalists. And as a compassionate actor, I will work with them. I've worked with many extreme people. I've worked with people who might be considered terrorists. But my ideal-- and this is a talk about ideals-- does not include a heavy commitment to my nation only. It doesn't seem to work. Patriotism is different, but nationalism is pretty toxic. AUDIENCE: So first of all, I'd like to do-- let's once again thank Marc and Swayam for this great-- \[APPLAUSE\] MARC GOPIN: Thank you. SWAYAM BAGARIA: Thank you, Marc. MARC GOPIN: So much. SPEAKER 2: Sponsored by Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2025 the president and fellows of Harvard College.