I admit I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Facebook, and I am a member. I look at pages of Facebook bloggers every day . . . a dozen times a day, in fact. In fact, I do not know what I would do without it: bits of trivia; geographical, oceanic, and celestial images accompanied by information on the various subjects; biographical information about all sorts of people; and a variety of musical subjects. Finally, Facebook does more than anything to keep us up to date with the evolution of the English language.
For some time, I have worried over the number of animal rescues—chicks, ducklings, kittens, and whatever else people rescue from storm drains—fawns rescued from sink-holes; women who hoard racoons, collect owls and foxes; and heart-warming stories about lions, gorillas, and raptors set free from captivity in zoos and circuses—into the wild. The emphasis on saving animals just goes over the top. It just goes beyond common sense.
The British author John le Carré really has the final word on the subject of saving things—in other words, the most important thing to say about it. In his novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the main character in the novel, spy-hunter George Smiley says,
"I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral . . . . Each of us has only a quantum of
compassion, that if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of
things."
Most authors use their main characters to reveal personal things about themselves to the reading public. Le Carré is no exception. He uses the "quantum of compassion" phrase again in his follow-up novel, titled Smiley People. The spy-hunter Smiley comes out of retirement to investigate the muder of a Russian defector from and finds in the victim's personal effects a letter from a Russian woman in Paris, who fears she will be murdered next. Not surprisingly, Smiley cannot take much more:
Each man has only a quantum of compassion, he argued, and mine is used up for the day.
You either spend your quantum of compassion on stray cats, racoons, and owls, or you invest it in something more worthy, but also more personally engaging, and even dangerous! That more people do not invest their compassion-quota into something more significant suggests they no longer have a personal objective or sense of intentionality about their lives. Like le Carré said, they never get to the centre of anything.
Another British writer, E. M. Forster suggested something similar about animal rescuers:
They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the
years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and piety shows cracks, their wit becomes
cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy. . . . They have sinned against Eros and Pallas Athene. . . .
Those allied deities will be avenged.