A student once asked famed anthropologist Margaret Mead about the earliest sign of civilization among peoples. We might expect Mead to have pointed to something made or constructed to advance the fortunes of a community, like a clay pot or a grinding stone or a fishing hook. But Mead offered a different answer: “a healed femur.” Mead explained that healed femurs are not found where people lived by the law of the jungle (the survival of the fittest). A healed femur provided evidence that others cared, that others did the injured person’s hunting and gathering while the leg healed. Mead pointed to the evidence of compassion as the first sign of civilization.
Tragically, compassion is on the decline in our nation. The 2025 Compassion Report, conducted by the Muhammad Ali Center, “reveals troubling trends, including growing polarization, with 61% of Americans saying they feel a decline in compassion in the last four years, and 70% expressing a desire for reduced aggressive political rhetoric. Respondents also claim a decrease in empathy toward marginalized groups.”
In the postscript to his book Water from my Heart, Charles Martin stresses, “Let me say this directly: Indifference is the curse of this age. We need to hear that. Indifference is evil, and it could not be further from the heart of God.”
For the sake of civilization, the citizens of our nation need to turn away from indifference and return to compassion.
According to Our Daily Bread, “A third-grade science teacher asked one of her students to describe salt. ‘Well, um, it’s…,’ he started, then stopped. He tried again. ‘Salt is, you know, it’s….’ Finally, he said, ‘Salt is what makes French Fries taste bad when you don’t sprinkle it on.”
You could say something similar about compassion: Compassion is what makes our nation miserable when it is lacking.
Without compassion, citizens grow more and more disillusioned with our nation and more and more irritable toward one another. Without compassion we become more and more distrustful of each other, bitter toward others, and divided between ourselves.
On the other hand, Albert Schweitzer pointed to the miraculous power of compassion, though he referred to it as kindness: “Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
May we do what we can to restore compassion (or kindness) to our nation.