Who Cares?

What do you care about?

That’s an easy question to answer. You care about your family. You care about your friends. You care about the people you love. That’s pretty much a given. But we care about other things, too, don’t we? We care about political causes, we care about social issues. We also care about art and entertainment - we care about music and film and theatre and TV. And we care about sport - at least some of us do.

But when we say we care about all these things, we don’t really mean the same thing at all times. Do we? I’m not sure.

Let’s look at the people in our lives. If you say you care about your children, or your siblings, or your partner, or your parents, or your friends, what do you mean by that? What I think you mean is that you feel better for having them in your life, that you want them to be happy, and to be safe, and that if you are able to make any contribution towards helping them be happy and safe, you will try to do so.

Of course there are varying degrees of this: you’re probably going to go to greater lengths to ensure the happiness of your child than of your old college pal; but the principle is the same. You care about these people on a person-to-person level, you care about them as individuals, and your caring has an active element.

Now, can the same be said about your care for, say, the people of the Middle East? Of course, some people do go to extraordinary lengths to try to save or improve the lives of people they’ve never met. Is that the same thing as caring for someone you love?

As for myself, if you show me a news report of a thousand people being killed overseas, and ask me if I care, I’ll say of course I care - I always care about people’s suffering.

But do I? Because I’m not going to do anything to help those people. Or at least, very very little. Maybe I’ll donate to a charity. Which is nice. But I - and I’m pretty sure, most people - don’t care about people outside my own rather small bubble to any extent beyond a vague and completely practically useless feeling of compassion when I hear about bad things happening to them.

Moreover, I seem to care much more about things that I myself would consider to be much less important. These things tend to increase in importance depending on proximity. I care about the war in Ukraine, but I REALLY care about the conditions in Australian schools. Australian kids are important, and it’s important they get an education, but is their education more important than Ukrainians literally getting slaughtered? I don’t think so, but can I deny that I care more about the former than the latter? I don’t think I can, because my intensity of feeling is so much stronger when I hear about shitty deteriorating public schools than when I hear about another bombing far-off Europe.

Though to be honest, can I really claim to care about either of them? I’m not doing anything to help. I’ll help my family, I’ll help my friends, I’ll take action to improve their lives if I can, even in the smallest way. But people with much bigger problems? Well, no. All I muster is, “Oh that’s terrible” - and how much I care is shown by how passionately I say it.

I feel like a pretty terrible person, when I think about this. But in my defence, I think most people are the same. Even much better people than I, people who devote large amounts of time and/or money to attempts to improve the lot of others around the world, don’t devote that time and/or money equally among all causes, do they? There’s too much going wrong in the world to “care” the same amount about it all - whatever the word might mean to you. You’re going to care more about some issues, and about some people, more than others, and there’s no way that that decision is going to be based on which issues are objectively the most pressing.

But it gets worse, I must say. Because I care about the Melbourne Storm, and the Sydney Swans, and the Australian cricket team, and the Australian rugby team, and every four years I care about the Olympics. And frankly, if you measure caring by intensity of feeling, I care about these things much more than schools, or mental health policy, or the homeless, or cancer, or AIDS, or war in Ukraine, or genocide in Gaza, or Donald Trump. All that really really REALLY important stuff, all the horrible news stories flooding in of dreadful suffering, of death and disease and neglect and devastated lives…that gets “That’s terrible”. My team losing? That gets a curtain of gloom descending over my whole life, at least briefly. I feel bad for people in pain and dying. I feel DEPRESSED about a game of football. That is pretty fucked up, isn’t it?

Now, I do have a rational mind. If a mischievous fairy offered me the choice between peace in the Middle East and the Storm winning the grand final, I would choose peace. Honestly, I swear it. I want an end to war and famine and hatred and oppression. I want it more than I want my teams to win. But my response to my teams not winning, compared to my response to war and famine and hatred and oppression? Well, it’s kind of embarrassing.

So what does that mean? Emotional responses are involuntary, so it’s not like I’m choosing to care less about one thing than another. But maybe if I can’t help it, that just means I’m a broken human being. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, but it’s a sobering thought: that human existence can quite simply warp your moral senses to the point where it seems perfectly normal - and it does seem perfectly normal - to invest more emotionally in meaningless cultural ephemera than the lives of your fellow human beings.

Or mayb it’s unavoidable, and it’s not so much that I’m a broken human being than that I am, simply, a human being, and being a human being means being kind of a dick, always and forever. Maybe. But then there ARE human beings, aren’t there, who seem able to be at least a little better than this.

I spend more time thinking about movies and music and comedy than I do about climate change. That’s not because I think movies and music and comedy are more important than climate change. But clearly, in some way, they are more important to ME - because my brain, unbidden, dedicates such a huge chunk of itself to them, and such a tiny slice to climate.

If I give more of my mental space, and more of my emotional energy, to A than to B, even though I genuinely believe B is more important than A, does that mean I care more about A than B, or about B than A? Is time and energy devoted a measure of care? Is strength of feeling a measure of care? Is caring about something to do with how we feel about it, or how much we want it? Or is it all abstract, and the only true measure of caring what we would do for another person?

I don’t know. I’d love to hear what other people think. In fact, I care deeply about it.