empathy ???
A few weeks ago, Derek Chauvin was found guilty of three counts of murder — third and second degree, plus manslaughter. It was a victory for many, but a very hollow one — it only proved that there is so much more work to be done in our criminal justice system — that even the fact that we were worried about the income of the trial was a mark of our country's racist criminal justice system.
I listened to clips through many podcasts, and I felt distraught and angry as I imagined the many facets of Floyd's murder — yet, the trial seemed so far away from me. The world is full of devastating events at the moment, and I don't want to seem flippant by using them as a segue to talk about my own thoughts. Each should be witnessed and understood in their own right. But at the same time, I've found that these events have converged at a time when my experience and orientation toward the world is changing, as well, thanks to a host of influences that have built up over the past few months and weeks.
In The Secret Life of Groceries, by Benjamin Lorr, readers meet several different people who are representatives of the injustices that underly our food systems — a kindhearted, tireless entrepreneur who is burying herself in debt to get her product on the shelves; a long-haul trucker who bears indignity after indignity as her occupation also buries her in debt; and a man who had been enslaved in the Thai shrimp industry for more than a decade, losing his best friend and a hand over those years. After reading the book, I went as I usually do to the reviews online. One of the most common criticisms was that Lorr shows us this mosaic of misery, and how we are all complicit in it simply by purchasing food, and yet he shows not even a hint of a way out. What is the purpose of this misery, then? What good does it do?
A few days after finishing Lorr's book (which I do recommend), I was reintroduced to the idea of compassion fatigue in an essay collection by Elisa Gabbert. Compassion fatigue is the feeling of numbness you get after you've been caring about something too intensely for too long. It applies to our individual lives — for example, how caring for a sick loved one for months or years, or being kind to strangers while working retail all day, can shorten our patience or our capacity for kindness in other aspects of our lives. And it applies to the wider world. When we are bombarded with tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, perhaps we feel dips in our ability to care and act toward the next injustice.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that empathy has become my battle cry, my raison d’être as a writer and reader and creator and person in the world. But perhaps empathy isn't the panacea to the all the world's ills, the way I thought it could be. Perhaps there is only so much I can feel, and so much I can do about those feelings, before It all begins to feel ineffectual and small. And perhaps that’s my own fault — the fact that I can’t see the results of my actions doesn’t mean I’m not making a difference, in minute ways. As David Mitchell wrote in Cloud Atlas, “What is the ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
On one hand, compassion fatigue feels like an ill of the privileged, who can afford to feel fatigued after being forced to think deeply about racism/poverty/etc., without experiencing it themselves. But compassion fatigue can affect anyone, in many different contexts. In a world where everyone witnesses the trauma of strangers every single day, compassion fatigue feels like a monumental idea to reckon with if anyone is to be of any good to anyone else.
In the 1960s, the sight of police attacking young African Americans with dogs and clubs was enough to shock the country toward civil rights legislation. Today, the shock of the video that captured George Floyd’s murder was powerful enough to bring people to the streets. But I can’t help but feel we are reaching a saturation point. There is only so much of other people’s trauma we can absorb in this fleeting way before we become overwhelmed, unsure of how we can prioritize problems and tackle them, which causes we can invest our energy in, which people we can extend aid to — because we can’t help everyone.
Around the same that the Derek Chauvin trial was happening, I was reading Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward. In it, she painstakingly revisits the memories of five young men, including her brother, all of whom she loved dearly and all of whom died within four years of each other. Jesmyn's childhood sears on the page; stories of violence and desperation, intermingled with incandescent moments of joy. And Ward captures something in each of these five young men, often tender, sometimes heartrending. Even those words seem inadequate for what Ward does in this book — in some ways, she resurrects them, as well as her childhood and her community.
This book perhaps speaks to the advantages of reading deeply and not widely. In watching the news, especially about mass tragedies like the pandemic, it’s difficult to fathom the pain of every individual and their families. A helicopter flies over a patch of earth in Delhi pockmarked by funeral pyres. Another helicopter flies over the infernos raging in California, swallowing homes in an instant. These birds-eye view shots are meant to shock us — but they are so easily digestible, and we are so accustomed to faraway suffering in the world, that the image might not stay with us long.
On social media, people often condemn others for not paying attention to the latest shock or injustice. But while I'm not yet convinced empathy is limited, attention certainly is. We simply cannot learn about the entire world, let alone save the entire world. With this in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about my role in society. The question is becoming both How do I contribute? and What do I contribute to?
Elisa Gabbert, the essayist, writes about how the tragedies that get the most response, both in aid and attention, are those that elicit the most visceral reactions. More earthquakes and civil wars — less famine and everyday oppression. This is also something we learn about in policy school. Yet, we also learn that the programs that make the biggest difference are those that don’t do damage control, but those that try and address problems before they happen. Building resilience and adaptation capacity. Creating systems in which the government cares for the people and the people care for each other, even in times of catastrophe.
A few weeks ago, a friend asked our group chat to look over a presentation they had made about activism. A large portion of the presentation outlined different kinds of activism, with an emphasis on serving local communities. Through mutual aid, donating to basic needs, and working toward community preservation, we can contribute to a culture of care that enables systemic change.
It reminded me of a comment a classmate had made a few months ago in a class discussion. We were talking about redistribution by the government, and most of the class was talking about how the US government wasn’t doing enough to take care of Americans. Then, one of my classmates said, “When we see a problem, we often think the first step is to throw more government at it. But maybe that's not always the solution. There are other ways of helping people. I give a certain amount of my paycheck to different charities every month.”
At the time, I shrugged him off as a libertarian who didn’t understand our country’s systems. Which could very well be the case, but upon further reflection I think that there is some merit to what he said. Why must aid come from some disembodied governmental arm we’ve never seen before, whose agents and methods we don’t trust? This line of thinking can apply to libertarians but also to marginalized communities who have been failed by government agencies and laws over and over again.
Of course, I am still a staunch advocate of things like universal healthcare and paid maternity leave. In Scandinavian countries, home to some of the strongest social safety nets in the world, the levels of trust between people are much higher than in other countries, implying some sense of community. Is that because of the safety net, or perhaps reinforced by the safety net?
America is a unique case when it comes to building trust between neighbors. Research has found that diversity is actually bad for peace, up to a certain point. Homogeneity biologically and anthropologically translates to easier trust — we have evolved to trust those who speak and look like us. Meanwhile, very diverse societies have been shown to be able to coexist, as well. The problem comes when there are only a few ethnic groups, because that often results in one dominating the others, or civil war. That’s reflected in our country’s past and lingering white supremacy, and it is only getting worse as the country becomes more diverse, minorities gain more political power, and the white majority feels like it is losing its grip on the country, losing the country itself to outsiders.
This idea first came to me in the book How Democracies Die, by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. The writers argue that the reason that American democracy has been stable for so long is because of moderates. There have been people willing to compromise and to sacrifice some of their power or stronger beliefs for American ideals and the good of the whole country. This is why our democracy seems to be breaking down now — because either side of the right and left refuse to compromise and have painted the other as antithetical to their existence. However, the authors acknowledge that this compromise was possible because of the subjugation of a significant amount of the population — African American slaves, who were later excluded through segregation and disenfranchisement. Also included — women, immigrants, people of color, the differently abled, and other marginalized communities that have, until very recently, been denied any significant voice in American politics. The challenge America faces, the authors posit, is reaching stability within this new diversity. This is an unprecedented undertaking, as there is no country in the world so diverse while enfranchising nearly all of its population.
Mutual aid is a powerful force in marginalized communities, binding them together in the face of systemic oppression — but I also wonder, at what point does mutual aid become insularity? At what point do we only care for those that look like us, or are near to us, or who were kind to us first? What might a global mutual aid look like? And how do we pick and choose where to put those resources to do the most good, or take care of the things that matter most to us? How do we choose between our local foodbank, our art galleries, our bail funds, or aid funds to India's COVID crisis or modern-day slaves in Thailand? How do we even decide what should matter most to us?
I think another idea underlying mutual aid is that as everyday people, we are limited by the massive power imbalances in our society. The wealth gap between the bottom 50%, the next 45%, and the top 5% in this country is mind-boggling. Why should we have to choose whether to donate to our local food bank or the crisis in India, when Elon Musk could sign a single check to end hunger in the United States? This is where systemic change comes in. Perhaps mutual aid as it exists now wouldn't need to exist if we all had more equal access to resources.
Elisa Gabbert raises another question. If there is such a thing as compassion fatigue, if we only have a limited capacity for empathy, then can empathy really be a guiding force for our ethics? This, she writes, was the conundrum that led Immanuel Kant to argue for the categorical imperative — an objective obligation to do the right thing, no matter your feelings. Feelings are fickle; principles of right and wrong can be ironclad. Of course, what is “right”? How might “right” be different in the short term and the long term? How might “right” be different for one group versus another? This is perhaps something Kant never had to contend with — a globalized world in which my decisions today affect thousands of people throughout the planet, from the pollution that blows to West Virginia thanks to my 5-hour bus ride home, to the child slaves that have assuredly worked on some gadget I own, or food I buy.
In policy school, we dive into these kinds of questions as we consider what makes “good” policy, from the local level to the global level. There are several theories, such as utilitarian, which argues that anything that increases the aggregate welfare of society is good, no matter the distribution; or libertarian, which says that good policy is that which increases individuals’ freedom to choose. What my professors stressed over and over again is that no approach is perfect or comprehensive, and how we conceive of “good” policy is dependent on our own ideas (or the ideas of the organization we work for, which would hopefully match our own.
Personally, there are theories that jive more with me and those that jive less, but I don’t have any definitive answers. I think back to when I was in high school and I was so convinced that I understood the world. My ideas of right and wrong were very black and white, and I was comfortable with regularly publishing them in our school newspaper, for all 732 of my classmates to read. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve only become more convinced that I know jack shit — but also that other people know jack shit, too. Surefire perspective comes from ignorance — from a tunnel vision that only allows you to see one angle — or from rigid prioritization, which is less dangerous but perhaps just as vulnerable to ethical conundrums. Am I right to prioritize environmental justice and climate change mitigation in my work? To donate mostly to food banks and environmental orgs? What about the ASPCA, or LGBTQ+ youth shelters, or NGOs in subsaharan Africa? Is it better to give $20 to a few causes, or $1 to as many as I can? Reader, I simply do not know.
I stand by the idea that storytelling is a window to the world and a force for "good," whether that is philanthropy, mutual aid, or collective organizing. A story allows us to see a person more complexly and completely than we could in a photo or a news clip, which are only single snapshots in time. A story allows us to grow alongside other people — that’s why character arcs are so important in novels. We want to feel the emotions alongside the character or the subject — to feel as they did in the beginning, and then have that feeling change by the end. At least, that’s what I hope drives us to read stories, in whatever form they may take. Rather than galvanize us to take some action or help some specific group — which stories can and have done — perhaps an equally valuable aspect of them is that they push us to understand other points of view, other ways of life, and become more sensitive to people different from ourselves, even outside of the context of that particular novel or movie. Contact theory holds that people from conflict or post-conflict ethnic groups are more likely to reconcile when they live in close quarters, because it allows them to see each other fully, as fellow humans. We can't be neighbors with everyone, but we can certainly try to read stories about them.
What I think I still believe in is this — the basis of all things I do must be reading, learning, witnessing, and perhaps most important, striving to understand people whose experiences are very different from mine. All that, but with the understanding that I will never be able to understand everything, only so much that I can make a decision that brings safety, security, and love to another person who needs it.
That feels very wishy washy and unsubstantial, and perhaps it will change in the next month, or the next decade — but it's the best I've got so far.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon, and take care,
—mia xx