The psychological re-creation of suffering the essential vehicle of compassion and tenderness fails easily if the sufferer is not a namable or visible individual but only a totality, which has no subjective states of mind, so to speak. It has been noted that English communal life has been characterized, throughout its history, by extraordinary justice toward persons and by equally great injustice toward groups.

XREF: Connects to discussion of statistical vs. identifiable victims — the 'identifiable victim effect' in moral psychology and Steven Pinker's work on why large-scale suffering fails to move us.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 5839