Just as the song of the turtle dove is heard in spring, so the call of bleeding hearts is heard at times when resistance to brutality is gaining traction. The asylum seeker advocates who are now being called bleeding hearts won't be upset, because up to now popular support for the government policies has made protest unavailing. Cracks may now be opening. At all events the epithet is an interesting one and rewards reflection.
To call someone a bleeding heart is an insult, not a description. It has no meaning but does have connotations. It implies that its recipients are driven by sympathy for people who do not deserve sympathy, and are guided by emotion, not by reason. Apart from being weak minded they are also effete and ineffectual. They lack ticker. The phrase evokes popular images of Jesus associated with the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart. They often represent Jesus as an effete young man pointing appealingly to his wounded heart.
So, all in all, to be a bleeding heart is to be an apology for a virile human being. But for all that most people accused of being bleeding hearts would not want to disown the phrase but to explore its use in order to illuminate the differences between themselves and their critics.
The first point of difference lies in the idea of undeserved sympathy. Critics believe sympathy is something that people must deserve and be worthy of. 'Bleeding hearts' see it as something that we owe to our fellow human beings by virtue of the fact that they are human and in pain. It is a natural expression of a shared humanity.
So it would be proper to feel sympathy for a dishevelled and bloodied dictator after his capture, for example. Sympathy does not imply that we minimise the suffering of his victims or diminish the sympathy we feel with them and our outrage at his deeds. But it does lead us to curb our anger and to ask how it would be right to treat him. Just as it does when we see the sufferings of the asylum seekers on Manus Island and in Australia.
The second point of difference lies in the intellectual rigour we demand of ourselves and of others in considering what it is right for us and our representatives to do. For 'bleeding hearts' the ethical question has precedence over other questions.
In the case of asylum