About Who Cares? by David Berreby
Who Cares? is about why people don't care about things (and people) they should care about. Like Covid precautions. Climate change. Refugees. The opioid epidemic. Families within a mile or two of you who don't have food. The elderly relative you hardly ever call. The pile of junk out back you never seem to get round to sorting out. Your list will differ from mine. But I bet you have a list.
I don't mean the rhetorical question, why don't people care?, which expects no answer. That one is just a way of saying "everyone should care about this thing I care about!" Behind it lies the assumption that our natural and routine state of mind is indifference to almost everything. We always need prodding!
I think that assumption is wrong. Confronted with a painful fact at any scale (global: the climate is flatlining local: That shivering girl in the tattered coat is asking for spare change), people often do care, or do want to care. Then they talk themselves out of it. That talking-out-of-it doesn't get enough attention. Before we make people care more, we have to understand what causes them to care less.
So that's what this newsletter is about: How people get themselves not to care. And how, by understanding that, people could manage their caring (and uncaring) better, to make us all less helpless and miserable in the face of our problems.
So, wait, you're just going to riff on this question every week?
No! I mean, maybe a bit, sometimes. But mostly I'll have things to tell you, that you don't know. I have been writing about human behavior for a long time. I'm well positioned to turn up writing and research around this question. I hope a community of readers will form to test the strengths and weaknesses of those ideas.
And so that's mostly what we'll be doing. That project entails looking at religious and philosophical work from different traditions. Also movies, TV, novels and even news that relate. But, most frequently, it means looking recent and ongoing research in various academic and corporate settings.
What kind of research?
Well, here are some things researchers are up to:
Looking for ways to get people to care meaningfully about climate change.
Explaining the links between care and trust (do people not care about Covid prevention measures because they don't trust the experts? Or do they not trust the experts because they don't care?)
Describing the relations between indifference, caring and identity --- why people care so effectively for people "like us" or "with us" (and, conversely, how they shrug off the pain of those who aren't "our kind.") A lot of work and thought has gone into these questions in the years since I wrote a book about them.
Explaining why people care for an individual but not large numbers of individuals (Stalin --- if Stalin really said this --- summed it up: "If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.")
Understanding explosions of care, when widespread indifference seems to implode overnight --- so, for example, sexual abuse by powerful men was known and talked about for years with a shrug, until, *bang*! Time was up.
Documenting and describing how care work is imposed on people --- mostly women --- and why that work, and those who do it, are ignored (that's right --- we don't care about care, and it’s important to learn why).
Defining what it means to care in the first place (here's where the philosophers and anthropologists come in).
Figuring out if (as many people seem to think) the conditions of modern life push people to be uncaring. (Historians, sociologists, psychologists, biologists and critical theorists will be heard from.)
Figuring out what aspects of human care can be replaced or supplemented by technology (for example, by machines that help care for the elderly). And what consequences will follow from automating care. (This links to the subject of my other newsletter, Robots for the Rest of Us.)
Those are just a few examples. There's a lot to discuss.
Why don't you just write a book about it all, then?
I probably will! Off I will be, reading pdfs and books and emerging to formally and officially interview people. But if I only do that, the result won't be as good as it could be. This project needs conversation and debate, the unearthing of ideas and facts, that emerges when a community of interested souls comes together to think out loud, together. So, I hope you'll join me. After all, it is completely free.
Free? Great! For how long?
There may come a day when I create a paid tier for people to engage more deeply (for instance, commenting on draft chapters, or taking part in a focused discussions, or getting access to full transcripts of interviews). But that's not happening any time soon. You have nothing to lose by trying this out.
Hmm. This could be a jumble of different ideas and facts that aren't really related.
Could be. That's an occupational hazard for a writer ("Entropy, housework, Buchenwald, divorce,/Those damned flamingoes in your neighbor's yard/All hangs together if you take it hard," as Richard Wilbur once put it). And that's a reaction I've gotten to a fair number of notions I've had during my writing life. Sometimes, doubters were right, and I had to toss the housework-and-flamingoes manuscript away. But sometimes they were wrong, because the connections I saw were real.
There is a surefire way to see whether an idea is flummery or for-real (and it's also the only way): Work it out, write it up. So that is what I am doing here. With, I hope, your participation.
If you've ever asked yourself how people can be brought to care effectively about climate change, racial justice, the opioid epidemic, poverty, masks and vaccinations (to name a very few problems people shrug off), then this newsletter is for you. If you've got a nagging feeling that people used to be more concerned for one another, used to be kinder; if you're troubled when you find yourself hurrying by a fellow human being who's asking for help, then, again, this newsletter is for you. I think by discussing this problem, we can figure a few things out.
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