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And I am resolved to love you
With whatever means are mine
-- Five O'Clock People, "Sorry"
There is a pernicious argument tactic that goes something along the lines of: "The thing you're complaining about is less important than this other thing over here, so you have no right to complain." Sometimes it comes with an explicit "Because you should be using this energy to address this more important issue"; sometimes that's merely implied.
There are all sorts of useful ways in which to point out why this isn't actually proving anything (I can engage in fan debate about My Little Pony implied canon and donate to Doctors Without Borders), but that's not exactly what I want to talk about. Let's take it as given that this is bad form in discussions.
What I'm pondering today is the limit of energy for caring.
The world is vast, and it contains multitudes. The world is complex, and it contains thorny tangled problems. (Can you tangle up barbed wire? Probably. I imagine it'd be no fun to try to untangle and coil.) Any one person's energy is finite, and god knows mine certainly is. And it comes in all sorts of flavors, which can separately limit me. Emotional, mental, physical... I can't work on my Greek after three hours straight of focusing on it any more than I can go climbing right after a four-mile walk in the heat.
Which means that under that nasty, illogical argument, there is a grain of truth. There is a limit to how much we can actively care about at one time, if only for our own sanity. Much like the slippery slope fallacy, or the appeal to authority, or ad hominem attack, these logical fallacies so often work in arguments--or at least distract from the issue--because they're flavored with a hint of something true, or copying patterns of what is true. I can overdose on tragedy. I can run out of resources to send to charities, time to volunteer, blood to donate, energy to care. When I forget my limits, I can end up in quivering paralysis thinking about--any number of issues. Climate change? Yup. How the car culture of the US makes it likely that I'll be seriously injured (or cause injury to someone else) via car at some point? Ayup. The inevitable gender programming of culture that'll be imposed on any theoretical future children of mine, despite my best efforts? That kind of thing can keep me up at nights.
...and that wraps back around, in a sense, to why the argument--"Stop caring about this! There are more important things to care about!"--doesn't work. Some problems are too damn big and complex and pervasive for me to have the energy to try to care/do/donate/act usefully in their direction. But smaller symptoms? Maybe I can do something about that. Maybe I can at least get some energy back by venting about the peripheral issues, when trying to grapple with the central ones is going to turn to weeping and despair.
Maybe. It's a vast world, and it contains multitudes, of people and problems both. Maybe I need to get back to working on the fourth through sixth principle parts of the verbs of a dead language. Are there more important things in the world that I ought to be doing? Maybe. But this is what I can do right now, so that's what I will do. Even the little things matter, one way or another, in the end.
With whatever means are mine
-- Five O'Clock People, "Sorry"
There is a pernicious argument tactic that goes something along the lines of: "The thing you're complaining about is less important than this other thing over here, so you have no right to complain." Sometimes it comes with an explicit "Because you should be using this energy to address this more important issue"; sometimes that's merely implied.
There are all sorts of useful ways in which to point out why this isn't actually proving anything (I can engage in fan debate about My Little Pony implied canon and donate to Doctors Without Borders), but that's not exactly what I want to talk about. Let's take it as given that this is bad form in discussions.
What I'm pondering today is the limit of energy for caring.
The world is vast, and it contains multitudes. The world is complex, and it contains thorny tangled problems. (Can you tangle up barbed wire? Probably. I imagine it'd be no fun to try to untangle and coil.) Any one person's energy is finite, and god knows mine certainly is. And it comes in all sorts of flavors, which can separately limit me. Emotional, mental, physical... I can't work on my Greek after three hours straight of focusing on it any more than I can go climbing right after a four-mile walk in the heat.
Which means that under that nasty, illogical argument, there is a grain of truth. There is a limit to how much we can actively care about at one time, if only for our own sanity. Much like the slippery slope fallacy, or the appeal to authority, or ad hominem attack, these logical fallacies so often work in arguments--or at least distract from the issue--because they're flavored with a hint of something true, or copying patterns of what is true. I can overdose on tragedy. I can run out of resources to send to charities, time to volunteer, blood to donate, energy to care. When I forget my limits, I can end up in quivering paralysis thinking about--any number of issues. Climate change? Yup. How the car culture of the US makes it likely that I'll be seriously injured (or cause injury to someone else) via car at some point? Ayup. The inevitable gender programming of culture that'll be imposed on any theoretical future children of mine, despite my best efforts? That kind of thing can keep me up at nights.
...and that wraps back around, in a sense, to why the argument--"Stop caring about this! There are more important things to care about!"--doesn't work. Some problems are too damn big and complex and pervasive for me to have the energy to try to care/do/donate/act usefully in their direction. But smaller symptoms? Maybe I can do something about that. Maybe I can at least get some energy back by venting about the peripheral issues, when trying to grapple with the central ones is going to turn to weeping and despair.
Maybe. It's a vast world, and it contains multitudes, of people and problems both. Maybe I need to get back to working on the fourth through sixth principle parts of the verbs of a dead language. Are there more important things in the world that I ought to be doing? Maybe. But this is what I can do right now, so that's what I will do. Even the little things matter, one way or another, in the end.