Caring and Not Caring About Ukraine
What does it mean to care about Putin's invasion, as pols start arguing about whether Americans should?
Take a look at this short video. On Twitter and elsewhere on the Web, it's explained that he's a father sending his little daughter and family to safety while staying behind to fight the Russians. Though we have no confirmation that this is true, it's certainly plausible.
There's no doubting the anguish of these people, in any event. It is the sort of image that breaks hearts, and makes people care about what's being done to Ukraine now by Russian forces.
But what does it mean to care? After the moment of empathy for these people, what comes next? We are, I hope, past the point where we think we're doing anything meaningful by liking or upvoting or whatever. But maybe we write a few words, along the lines of "you are in my prayers." Maybe we actually pray, and put Ukraine in our prayers. The cost to us there is very low, while the reward — seeing one's self as a good person — is high. In other words, what looks like concern for others in these acts is often just narcissism.
Suppose we want to take an action that involves more than us just talking to ourselves. We could, for example, give money to help assuage the suffering of Ukrainians caught in the conflict. (You can do that here, for example, or at one of the sites on this list.) We could give time and effort, too. And that's far more consequential than talk.
I wonder, though, as the conflict drags on, if citizens of Western nations will extend their sense of "caring" to include tolerance for stress, discomfort and fear. Will we be able to say, "OK, gas prices have gone up, but it's because Biden is working to thwart Putin, and that's a good cause"? When your bank goes offline due to a cyberattack, or the lights go out, will you be able to say, "it's OK, this is the cost of fighting the Russian Empire"?
This is the mentality of people coping with wars and natural disasters. I’m not sure it’s possible to sustain in a crisis that is experienced only through media. Especially as the voice of "let's not" is already being heard in the land.
J.D. Vance, for example, is a Republican Senate candidate whose spiel is Trumpist anti-"elites" rhetoric. He thinks (or says he thinks) concern for Ukraine is B.S. In a podcast interview a few days ago, Vance said, "I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."
Like most justifications for not-caring, his is framed as a choice between the crisis he wants to ignore and another problem, which is supposedly more important. We should care about that instead.
Vance’s alternative, supposedly more important thing to care about — the "real crisis," he said in a statement a few days after the “don’t care” comment — is fentanyl, brought across the Mexican border into American cities and towns. (The statement seems to backpedal on the indifference, saying the suffering of innocent Ukrainians is a tragedy. Maybe, as a number of people speculated, someone told Vance there are some 80,000 Ukrainian-Americans in Ohio.)
This is the latest chapter in an old American dispute —on one side, people who want to engage with the wider world; on the other, people who say, it's none of our business, we have no reason to care. Both sides are highly susceptible to being co-opted by political actors, meaning that what begins as one argument (what should concern us?) often turns into a kind of performance: I care about suffering children here. You only care about them there.
A White House Meeting On How to Combat Indifference
The Washington Post's Maxine Joselow had a great scoop yesterday when she reported that there'll be a roundtable next week at the White House on the problem of people's indifference to climate change. It looks like it will address both the lip-service kind (believing or saying you care — but taking no practical action) and the denial kind (attaching yourself claims that there is no crisis). Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, will lead the roundtable discussion of 17 scientists and social scientists. Her prepared remarks asked why, since the U.S. signed on to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, "we have seen a constant drumbeat of denial, delay, distraction." Such "past inaction is haunting us," she told Joselow. "And so the question is, how do we accelerate effective action?”
Attendees include a number of researchers trying to explain how and why people fail to "get" the climate crisis, and what can be done about it, including Shahzeen Attari of Indiana University, Katharine Hayhoe at Texas Tech and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard. It'll be interesting to see where this discussion comes out.
Why this "newsy" edition?
With a topic that's broad, lively and compelling, there's an endless stream of news that's relevant. Trying to follow it all is a mistake. As I discovered on my other newsletter, Robots for the Rest of Us, struggling to keep up a steady patter of on-the-news writing means constantly setting aside the work that takes more time and thought. Working like that is like eating nothing but candy: Quick bites aren't very satisfying and they take up room that otherwise would go to more nutritious fare.
So there won't be many "this-just-in" posts in this newsletter. I'm not here to chase headlines.
This week is an exception.
Why? Because (a) there is an actual conference coming up at the White House about the problem of people's indifference to climate change (kindly take note, people who think indifference is not a valid subject for a newsletter or a book); and (b) the Ukraine crisis, besides being a really big deal — a major historical shift — is a reminder that questions of indifference really are inescapable. Even if your take on Putin's war is that you don't care what happens there, you can't escape needing to have a take. This is one of those crises that changes our material conditions (rising gas prices, re-opening the fear of nuclear war, creating the prospect of disruptions in the infrastructure we depend on) and so demands that we decide what we care about and why.