Here is a headline from today’s newspaper: “Six Members of My Family are Hostages in Gaza. Does Anyone Care?” Her question invites us to marvel at indifference. As someone who lives far away from Gaza and knows no one in Israel, it would be true to say that I only care about the author’s family in some basic way. And, the response to her question that came to mind was this: When Israel denied Palestinians permission to leave Gaza, even to conduct business as routine as a medical test, did you care that Gaza’s residents were in a sense hostage? My point being not to catch someone in hypocrisy but to deflate the sense of thaumasmus her headline generates so that we might see care’s close relationship to indifference.
Thaumasmus: to marvel at something rather than to state it in a matter of fact way.
What purpose does thaumasmus serve in the middle of a horror show? Beware its invitation to turn our attention. Caring is a matter of orientation, not volume. What would more caring prompt us to do that we do not already know needs to be done? It is cruel to withhold humanitarian action from Gaza until everyone figures out how much we all care. (Don’t think our inaction stems from a need to analyze evidence.)
Here is a headline from no newspaper ever: No One Cares. The mere act of reporting a story brings it within the universe of Things About Which We Care, which is why statements of fact often feel more humane than expressions of emotion and why journalism so often feels manipulative. It feels especially so when it commands our attention.
More troubling than any lack of care is the likelihood that someone will convince us to consolidate and pool it. Care financing is the real business of social media. Crowdsourcing care is the cynic’s take on democracy. While social media hollows out collective action, the archaic technology that is international accords and agreements suffers the realization that care is always cruelly bias and easily co-opted. To care about some one thing requires not caring about something else. That is care’s dull condition, and also why the personal is political, and also why we so often resort to some sense of bureaucratic indifference to fill in the gaps.
A diary kept by Ziad in Gaza illustrates the choices that care necessitates and why it is best understood as the other side of indifference. Ziad began his account when he evacuated from his home in October and has continued writing through the weeks that have become months of bombings. Amidst social breakdown and while living with strangers, he took in one and then several stray cats. Ziad faithfully reports on each cat’s condition, including the one that recently became pregnant. The first orphan cat needed treatment for an injured eye and Ziad and his sister went to some lengths to secure it medical attention. They are always on the look out for cat food.
If assessing their choices by How Much We Care, we would ask, should Ziad and his sister be concerned about cats while people go hungry? Are they mad? Immoral? Some might defend them by quoting the popular bumper sticker, “commit random acts of kindness.” Each of those responses mistakenly assumes that care aligns with goodness. But the most deliberate, radical acts of care always telegraph its terrible exquisite truth: its justification stems from the selective fact of it, not from any innate virtue. The care economy turns just, indifference becomes a superpower, not when randomized or ideologically coherent, but when operating like a lighthouse—a Manara—which is the name that Ziad gave to the cat.