There Are Innumerable Reasons Not to Care
Or, why you should touch an electric fence from time to time
Welcome to the final edition of The Sunday Wisdom for 2023. It was a great 52-week run. Here’s to the next! May your 2024 be full of silliness, randomness, absurdity, thrill, and most of all, fun. Happy New Year!
In May 2022, The Washington Post had published a gut-wrenching story about a seventeen-year-old girl Susan who is navigating the complexities of an unexpected high-risk pregnancy in Sierra Leone.1
The story helps us understand the incredibly difficult life and death choices people must make in a country which consistently ranks as one of the deadliest places on earth to have a baby.2
Before COVID-19, most African countries were able to collect only about half of the blood they generally needed for urgent transfusions. But blood donations dropped by 17% after the pandemic, making matters worse. Physicians in Sierra Leone now advise women to get their own blood. Because the hospital rarely has any emergency supply. It doesn’t come as a surprise that one in twenty women in Sierra Leone die while giving birth.
When the story of Susan and her struggles to survive was shared online, the first thing most people noticed was, how did she become unexpectedly pregnant? Did she have sex without protection? If so, where does this surprise come from?
Now as it happens, that question is answered in the story, which I encourage everyone to read. But I want to take a moment to focus on the responses. At first glance they appear to be merely offensive.
A seventeen-year-old girl, whose own mother had died while giving birth to her, is having to navigate an impoverished healthcare system, while facing the peril of sharing her mother’s fate. Despite these pressing concerns, the only thing most people can focus on is, why on earth did she have unprotected sex even though she’s fully aware of the risk of an unplanned pregnancy?
But these responses aren’t one-off cases. Any time you come across a story where someone is going through a tough time, you find such remarks. They go beyond mere offensiveness. There’s a nearly universal inclination driving such reactions. Like a shared tendency to look for reasons not to care. More specifically, to find reasons not to intervene when something is going wrong.
At a logical level, I kinda get it. A new horror pops up every time we open the news. It’s impossible to even comprehend, let alone respond to, all of these crises. So we look for reasons not to.
So that we don’t have to take responsibility or feel guilty of not doing something, we say things like, they did that to themselves. They shouldn’t have gone there in the first place. It was stupid of them to leave the door unlocked. There are bad guys on both sides. What’s done is done. Those idiots deserved it. She knew the risks. She should have used protection. It’s a coping mechanism.
Nobody can care about everything all of the time. There are limits to empathy. 150 thousand people are going to die today. If I grieve each of those losses the way I would grieve the loss of a loved one, I wouldn’t be able to function. This much is true. But this is also true that it is only by caring that we can do better.
Maternal mortality in Sierra Leone has declined by more than 10% in the last five years because people chose to care. The healthcare system there is getting stronger in part because people chose to care. These improvements are happening because of commitments from the government. Because of the incredibly hard work of healthcare workers and support staff. Because people are choosing to care every day. Because people are choosing to focus their attention and resources to help bring about a world where no one dies for want of a blood transfusion or an emergency c-section.3
If our way of making up for our limited capacity for empathy is to disregard the sufferings of others, at a human level, we’re doing them and ourselves a great disservice. The truth is, there will always be a reason not to care. People do make bad choices. Governments are corrupt. If a person or a cause has to pass some imagined purity test in order to receive our compassion and attention, we won’t be able to extend it to anyone. Including ourselves.
This is not about whether someone should have expected a pregnancy. This is about whether someone should be able to expect to survive a pregnancy. Expected or not, no woman should die giving birth.
YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A BIG BLOB OF GELATINOUS OOZE
People physically or emotionally close to us appear as detailed individuals in our minds, whereas people physically or emotionally far from us are blurry blobs. We tend to treat individuals much better than blobs.
If you’ve worked at any no-so-small organisation you might have experienced this first hand. If you never interact with interns except the one day when you’re in charge of training them, you might think of them as “university students responsible for doing the menial jobs that others don’t have the time to do” rather than “this guy who once saved a friend from killing himself.”
If you’re less connected to or less aware about someone, you see them less as a person and more as a blob. As I’ve written in elitism, blobs are simple. If a blob disagrees with you, that’s because it’s a big dumb sack of gelatinous ooze. That’s why we hear remarks such as, “The sales team is stupid,” or “These leftwingers are taking the nation backwards.”
During the era of European colonialism, the colonisers often viewed indigenous populations as primitive and less civilised blobs. Mostly because to their lack of understanding of their unique culture and customs. Since these weren’t individuals with remarkable stories and struggles, but stupid and abstract blobs, they could easily be exploited and mistreated.
The policy of apartheid in South Africa enforced racial segregation and discrimination against the majority black population of blobs. This institutionalised segregation contributed to a lack of empathy and understanding between racial groups and further increased the divide between the whites and the blacks, who saw each other as nothing but abstract gelatinous ooze.
The technical term for this behaviour is psychological distance. It’s the degree to which people feel removed from a phenomenon. Whether this distance is due to a lack of exposure, a lack of knowledge, a temporal difference, or being physically separated, all four create a distance that in some way limits exposure or frequency, that eventually turns human beings, societies, cultures, tribes, clans, countries, etc. into abstract textureless blobs.4
Psychological distance affects how we act or feel about something. It shapes our response to events based on how significant they seem to us. When psychological distance is large, we tend to think in abstract terms, and focus on generalisation. “The poor and the uneducated.” When psychological distance is small, our thinking is more concrete. We focus more on the details. “The family which is neck-deep in debt and doesn’t have enough means to send their kids to school.”5
Our willingness to intervene or extend care is intricately tied to our perception of importance. When we’re far away from something psychologically, it seem less important to us. When we perceive something as less vital, we are more prone to detachment and apathy — be it towards a human being who is navigating a high risk pregnancy or a nonhuman animal, such as whales.
ITS FUNCTION IS UNKNOWN, BUT IT SAVED THEM, AND US
The fact that a humpback whale can sing was entirely unknown to humans until the 1950s. U.S. military personnel who’d begun listening for Russian submarines were astonished to realise that the strange sounds they were hearing were coming from whales. Soon, word got to whale scientists Roger Payne and Scott McVay.
Payne’s 1970 vinyl record of humpback songs became an instant sensation. When he and McVay published “Songs of Humpback Whales” in Science in 1971, the journal’s cover featured a visual representation of the structure of a song. Their first paragraph noted, “Humpback whales produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds for a period of 7 to 30 minutes and then repeat the same series with considerable precision.… The function of the songs is unknown.”
Whales are the original composers of the deep. Their songs contain elements that make up themes that they repeat in a specific order. A male humpback will usually complete the song, then repeat it numerous times, singing for hours on end. Humans have been using rhyme at least since Homer and probably long before. It’s a way of remembering. The songs of humpback whales also employ rhymes, just like humans.
We now understand that a whale’s unique and eerie singing is a cultural trait that can change over time. Each year, all adult male humpbacks in a particular ocean sing the same song, but the songs vary between oceans. Each ocean has its unique genre of music and style. There’s a Pacific song, there’s an Atlantic song, and so on.
Not only that. The song in each ocean evolves every year. New elements are often added to the song, and they spread slowly among the whales, like a trend among them. Eventually, they all end up adopting the same changes.
Imagine you and your friends have a favourite song that you all love to sing together. Each year, someone adds a new twist or a catchy rhythm to the song, and slowly, everyone in your group starts incorporating these changes.
When the humpbacks in Hawaii and Socorro Island, Mexico, changed their songs simultaneously, despite being separated by nearly five thousand kilometres of ocean, researcher Ellen Garland and her colleagues referred to it as an “unparalleled” cultural shift on a massive scale, something not seen in any other nonhuman animals.6
How the songs function among whales remains unknown. Females do not approach singers. Nor do other males. So this much is certain that they are neither used for mating nor for communication. But whale songs served a much simpler purpose for us humans: they weaved into our emotions, marking a significant moment in our connection with life on earth and beyond.
In 1979, National Geographic magazine inserted a disk of humpback songs into ten million copies of their flagship magazine, the largest-ever printing of any recording. Not only was Payne’s life changed, his recordings changed whales and humanity.
The recordings had an immediate and powerful impact, rescuing the whales from the brink of extinction. Fuelled by the profound beauty captured in these recordings, the “Save the Whales” movement gained full momentum. Humans learned that whales are not things, rather, neighbours living with us in the world. This realisation was so influential that whales transitioned from being mere components of margarine in the 1960s to becoming revered symbols of the burgeoning environmental movement in the 1970s and 80s.
After the first recordings, musicians such as Paul Winter, Judy Collins, and David Rothenberg began making music with humpback songs. As the volume of the music came up, the blasts of the harpoon cannons receded. Within a few years, whale hunting was largely ended.7
FIRST, PLEASE TOUCH A NEARBY ELECTRIC FENCE
All vertebrates have possessed the emotional hardware for a very long time, but does this imply that animals experience emotions in a manner comparable to humans? Many indicators point in that direction.
Researchers have even found oxytocin in fish, a hormone that makes moms happy and helps partners love each other more. Can you believe that fish can feel joy and love? Well, we can’t exactly prove it, but if we’re not so sure, why do we often default to thinking that they’re guilty of not feeling that way?
Scientists have been saying animals don’t feel emotions for a really long time, and most people believe them. But what if we could be kinder to animals just in case they do feel things? Won’t that be safer and better? Instead, we treat them like they’re just things.
Consider comments made by Germany’s professor of fisheries and fishing, Robert Arlinghaus, co-author of a study on pain in fish for the German government. In a 2013 interview, he stressed that fish cannot experience pain like we do from the injuries they suffer when they are caught because they do not have a neocortex8 and therefore they can have no conscious awareness of pain. Apart from the fact that other scientists do not agree with him, this is more of a rationalisation of his hobby of fishing than a reasoned and objective scientific opinion.
Every Christmas9 gourmets passionately put forth a familiar argument, especially when it becomes customary to adorn the festive table with delectable crustaceans.10 At the forefront of this shellfish showcase stands the lobster, which is served up on a platter as a status symbol after being boiled bright red. Boiled alive, that is.
While vertebrates meet their end before entering the cooking pot, it is deemed entirely acceptable to plunge crustaceans into a seething cauldron with all their senses still intact. It can take agonising minutes — minutes — until the relentless heat penetrates every inch of the creature, obliterating its delicate nerve endings. But pain? How can that be? People assert that crustaceans lack a spinal cord, implying they are incapable of experiencing pain. Or so they say.
Their nervous system is configured differently from ours, and it’s even more difficult to prove pain in crustaceans than it is in species that have an internal skeleton like we do. Scientists arguing on behalf of the food industry insist that the animals’ reactions are nothing more than reflexes.
Professor Robert Elwood at Queen’s University in Belfast disagrees. “Denying that crabs feel pain because they don’t have the same biology is like denying they can see because they don’t have a visual cortex.”11
Apart from that, it’s common sense that pain is a component in reflex actions, as you can easily test for yourself if there’s an electric fence nearby. If you put your hand on it and get an electric shock, you have no choice but to pull back right away, whether you want to or not. It’s pure reflex on your part, something you do without a moment’s thought, but that doesn’t make the electric shock any less painful.
This exclusive, human-centric way is not the only way to experience intense and possibly conscious emotions. Evolution, contrary to our simplified assumptions and hopes, is not a singular, linear process. Birds, some of which have extremely tiny brains, serve as a compelling illustration that intelligence can manifest through diverse routes. Since the age of their ancestors, the dinosaurs, their development has followed a different path from ours. Even without a neocortex, they can perform mental feats of the highest order.12
The only way we’re able to comprehend emotions is as we experience them. This is the only way we might be able to understand what’s actually going on inside animals’ heads. But even if the structures in their brains differ from ours and these differences mean that they probably experience things differently, that certainly doesn’t mean that emotions in animals are inherently impossible. It simply means that it is more difficult for us to imagine what their emotions might feel like.
The same could be said for human beings. It’s impossible to know how each and every human being is going through without us knowing them really well. The least we can do is acknowledge this as a fact and still extend possibly the most meaningful and compassionate gesture in the world: care.
Only South Sudan and Chad count higher mortality rates.
Creators Hank and John Green have partnered with Partners in Health to radically reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. You can learn more about it in this video. If you want to make a small monthly donation to their project, here’s the link. If you have to pick between becoming a paid subscriber of this newsletter and making a donation, please, make a donation. By all means! You’d be saving lives.
Psychological distance partly explains why climate change reforms are deadslow. Earth’s average temperature has been steadily increasing over the last few hundred years, ever since the industrial revolution kicked off. While all countries are affected by environmental issues, certain areas of the world feel these effects significantly more than others. Countries closer in proximity to the issue tend to place a higher level of importance on an issue as opposed to countries that are farther in proximity.
This is one of the reasons why grassroots social and political initiatives are so effective.
To read more fascinating stories about whales and other animals, make sure to read Becoming Wild by Carl Safina. Here’s a word of advice. If you see Carl Safina as the author, pick up the book blindly . Especially, if you’re interested in the animal world.
The resonance of the whales’ melodies affected us so profoundly that a recording of humpback whale songs is now part of the sounds on the Voyager spacecraft. Our message to the vastness of the galaxy has carried the soulful tunes of the humpbacks beyond our solar system. It’s like a message in a bottle, a heartfelt expression of humanity’s aspirations, as if we’re wishing that beings with greater intelligence in some distant corner of the universe will grasp the profound meaning embedded in the enchanting language of whale songs.
The neocortex, which is part of the triune brain arrangement, is responsible for all our fancy thinking, language, and problem-solving skills. Read more about it here.
In mostly western countries.
Crabs, lobsters, shrimps, and the lot.
Visual cortex is the part of the brain responsible for sight in people.
In birds, a region called the dorsal ventricular ridge oversees similar tasks and functions as our cerebral cortex. In contrast to the human neocortex, which is built up of layers, the equivalent area in the bird brain is made up of small clumps, a fact that fed long-standing doubt that it could perform a similar function. Today we know that ravens and other species that live in social groups can match, and in some cases even exceed, the mental prowess of primates. This is further proof of science’s practice of arguing too cautiously when in doubt about feelings in animals, denying them many mental capacities until there is positive proof that they possess them. Instead, couldn’t we simply (and just as accurately) say: “We don’t know”?
So done with 2023, wishing you a Happy 2024 :)
Insightful and well said. Thanks for sharing.