We bring justice, compassion, grace, mercy, peace, and all the soft values to life in the Cosmos–in as much as we allow ourselves to be alive to one another and all living things. It is the gift of life to care about the living. And it is my bet that Neanderthal had an over-abundance of the Soft Side and that Homo-sapiens took care of that in short order–with the tendency flowing on against all those who aren’t enough like us to suit us throughout the universe. We are the bane of life. Give us forests and watch what we do with trees, no? “Fill the earth and subdue it!” was prophetic, or perhaps just boastful bar-talk among celebrating conquistadors.
The soft values have a hard time of it through most of civilization. The Wailing Wall, in all of its manifestations, stands as a metaphor of soft being traumatized by hard–or, perhaps of hard being victimized by harder, and biding its time in the service of bringing revenge to bear upon the conquerors. The world is a tough place to go about living, with the Law of the Jungle remaining in place throughout time: The big fish eat the little fish and the little fish swim through the holes in the nets hauling the big fish to the cannery. Serving the soft values in a hard world is the art of living with what we are given in light of the best we can imagine over time. The Sisyphean work against the way things are over time.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 