The search of a heartless world for a heart

When we are caught in the dilemma of justice or mercy, we know that the modern world's stance takes the side of justice, and even of justice presented within quantitative limits, for example as equality. In the 7 articles he wrote in a row on the relationship between justice and mercy, Erol Göka also set out the complications of this striking choice of modernism. The manifestation, felt in all our lives, of this sovereignty of quantity, which in the world we live in has turned into the iron cage of rationalism, is in fact nothing other than a lack of mercy.

The institutional measures that regulate social relations, law, justice and responsibility relationships in the modern world also carry the claim of leaving no room for any personal, emotional characteristics in people. But since no institutional measure has the possibility or likelihood of encompassing all the possibilities in human relations, personal characteristics, left unattended because they are not trusted at all, confront us as a complex at the first opportunity.

Of course, Göka would explain the psychiatric dimension of the matter better. But the complications produced by an order of social relations that has tied all behavior to law, to statute, to rules, even to the rules of etiquette, cost all of humanity very dearly. There is much we would see if we looked at modernity from this angle alone.

Modernity, as a project designed together with the Enlightenment, put forth a set of detailed rules and institutions aiming to stop human rights violations and increase the importance of human life. Yet in the meantime, in the shadow of these rules and institutions, the wars with the highest numbers of fatalities in human history were recorded: the number of people dying in a single war reached the number of people who died in all the wars in the whole of human history. Discrimination based on ethnic, religious or class difference took somewhat more complicated and ruthless forms. The lives of thousands of people are being sacrificed for some temporary interests, and wars yield worse results with each passing day, etc.

As we noted before, although a ton of measures have been taken regarding the incidents we call femicides, there are explosive increases in domestic violence against women and children compared with the periods when measures were not taken.

What, for example, are the reactions shown toward the "foreigner," here in particular the Syrian, who has had no effect on one's life, who has caused one no harm, who has not appeared before one anywhere in one's life, even though one knows under what conditions he took refuge in the country and sees it every day on television, an indication of? Those who feel no empathy for the lives lost and shattered behind bombs that rained suddenly one night, and who, because what is left of those lives merely brushed the corner of their eye, give it a flick themselves and join the massacre from where they stand, to make up for which deficiencies of their own do they do this, I wonder?

Today, in the health sector, the Turkish people has reached a level of service that the whole world looks upon with envy compared with 17 years ago. Are not the whisperings, like "Syrians are treated free and without queues, while we suffer," which have become a refrain on the tongues even of people who experience no deprivation whatsoever in benefiting from these services, symptoms of this loss of mercy?

Has even the welfare state concept done right, I wonder, by exhibiting an approach that tries to put mercy under the guarantee of the state instead of leaving it to human conscience? The state's pursuing a policy of mercy is not a bad thing, of course, provided that it does not insist on a mutually non-interfering division of labor between the state and civil society on this matter. But the state, in the end, is not free of the initiative of those who govern, of their qualities of mercy, of their economic means, and the state can never keep up with all human situations. In that case the vacuum created by people whose humanitarian feelings and practices have been dulled becomes the disaster of society too.

For years there has been a left or social democratic politics that belittled this society's own civil mutual aid and solidarity as a "culture of charity" and described it as a useless pursuit that kept the state from doing the job of the welfare state. According to them, the state should have done what these people do, within certain rules and measures.

Yet this is not an approach that solves the urgent problems of people who are hungry, who are in need, whose wounds are still bleeding today.

As the left characterizes this path as an unnecessary meddling that softens the contradictions of the existing system, it both remains far from understanding the general dynamics of human existence and merely shows that it is devoid of mercy.

Yet mercy is the essence of the matter, and the more this mercy is left lacking, the more, as Karl Marx said, "the search of people for a heart in a heartless world, for a soul in a soulless world" determines all the dynamics of change.