How Can You Not Love What I Love?
Others shrug at your romantic, aesthetic or political passion. What do you do?
Here’s an odd thing about English: It has only one set of phrases for a deep, passionate, maybe even obsessive attachment. We say someone “fell in love” with X. “Can’t stop thinking about” X. “Cares about X more than anything else in the world.” “Is passionate” about X. “Eats, sleeps and breathes” X. “Can’t live without” X.
So few words for so many different kinds of experience! X can be a person (in which case you’re in love with her or him). Or X can be a political candidate or movement (in which case you’re deeply committed to it). Or X can be music or art, a hobby or pastime --- in which case you’re a huge fan of her/him/it). Or X can be God.
Yet there is some truth in the way we use the same language for all and any. That is one facet of care that, I think, is the same for all devoted people, whether the object of their devotion is widely seen as important (like climate change) or widely seen as ridiculous (like the Klingon Empire).
That experience is your dismay when someone says your devotion is misplaced. When they say, in effect, “I don’t care (much, or, at all) about her/him/them/it, so why do you?”
One common response to that moment is rage. What do you mean Jane isn’t good for me? Butt out! You saw my favorite movie and fell asleep. Your taste is the worst! You say you aren’t worried about inequality? You’re a fool. Another common response is to take the object of your care into protective custody within yourself. Jazz bores you? Ah, well, have it your way (as you vow never to mention jazz to this oaf ever again). A third sort of response is to return indifference with indifference: Who cares what you think?
None of those moves is going to change anyone’s mind. So what? The point isn’t to persuade the indifferent person; it’s to defend your own feelings. You want to walk away unshaken by this reminder that the world doesn’t share your devotion to your person or cause or aesthetic. So you do what you can to make that happen.
There’s usually no harm done when people protect their passions from others’ indifference. But people get into problems when they imagine words that protect their own feelings can also be words to win others over.
I think this is where we are with a lot of rhetoric about climate change. Take, for instance, this passage in the psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe’s recent book, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis. Weintrobe is out to describe the capitalistic forces in daily life that push people away from care, towards indifference. I’ll discuss her account of humanity’s ambivalent nature, with its impulses toward both care and uncare, in another post, soon. But for now I’ll just note that her stance is that it’s pathological to put anything ahead of the climate emergency. Hence, she writes, about a bureaucrat:
A UK civil servant working for a minister who had publicly rubbished climate science said, ‘We take the science seriously, but it is only one factor. Other important interests and interest groups often pull in a different direction to the science.’
This is, Weintrobe writes a few lines later, denial. “She was in effect saying scientists can be ignored and the laws of physics are negotiable.”
Except she wasn’t. The woman was actually saying, in effect, “I am a political operative and political operatives listen to different constituencies. Some of those constituencies care more about other things than they do about climate science.”
Weintrobe doesn’t like this. Neither do I, if you’re keeping score. But this is politics --- a meeting ground of people with different cares, competing for advantage.
Yes, the system is rigged, with vast sums of money being spent to mislead people about climate science and reward politicians for doing the bidding of corporations that don’t want to see change. Yet the fact remains that those corporations aren’t the only ones who manifest indifference to climate change and the actions needed to prevent it from getting even worse than it is.
Take a look at this story, by Joshua Partlow in The Washington Post, about counties in North Dakota and elsewhere that have passed laws to slow and hinder installation of wind and solar power operations in their jurisdictions. This is all done to protect the coal industry, and it’s politically popular with people for whom coal furnishes a job and an identity.
I personally find this depressing and infuriating. But I don’t think my expressions of anger and sadness will convince so much as one coal miner that he should change his mind. On the contrary, whatever the subject and whoever the people involved, “who cares what you think?” is anti-persuasive. It triggers the defensive process of telling yourself that your cares are important, and never mind others’ indifference to it.
I’d love to tie this post up with some tidy call to action, describing how people should talk with those who don’t care about what they care about most. But I don’t know what it would say. I do think, though, that Step 1 is probably guarding a clear line between attempts at self-soothing and attempts at persuasion.