Suffering, Empathy, and Climate Change

We are in a predicament.

If like me, you haven’t managed to disengage from digital symbiosis, you’re probably aware we’re in something of a predicament.

Of course, our species wouldn’t exist without millions of others overcoming, or failing to overcome, predicaments of one kind or another. Life is built, driven, and founded upon conflict. Suffering is its byproduct and enduring it stimulates growth. Nietzsche, perhaps the most famous advocate of such misfortune, claimed that:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering […]has produced all the elevations of humanity so far…”

We may not be Beethoven — who lonely, miserable and deaf, created arguably the greatest music ever composed — but we only have to recall the emotional upheaval of puberty to see that suffering is inscribed within our very DNA. Many spiritual teachers, like Ram Dass, look upon it as a kind of grace, and the first noble truth of Buddhism is often (mis)translated as, “life is suffering”.

However, though this integral aspect of existence may be a catalyst for growth, such knowledge does not exonerate us from the responsibility of attempting to alleviate it from others (along with our fellow creatures). Despite its position on the dais of human achievement, we are not in a position to be suffering’s arbiters. In fact, something deep within us, beneath our layers of conditioning, seeks to help others in whatever way we can.

Caught within a multiplicity of drives

Freud outlined with his theory on the pleasure principle that when we are confronted with some force (either exerted externally or internally) that produces pain, our instinct is to avoid it. This may be an unpleasant memory we unconsciously repress or a situation we consciously avoid that could engender an unpleasant sensation. There is a vast array of examples of this principle, ranging from the immediate (taking a drug to stave off withdrawal symptoms) to the delayed (lifting weights to improve the chances of sexual gratification).

Essentially, we are caught in the energetic tension of a multiplicity of drives. These rise and recede according to biochemical processes and social conditioning. Under the sway of this pulling and tugging, our capacity for empathy becomes limited. Unfortunately, empathy is not taught as much as it should be, and why would it be? That would conflict with the hegemonic ideology of individualism.

But there are further challenges to empathy.

According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, roughly 150 people is the maximum number of relationships the average human can maintain. We know firsthand that it is easier to empathize with people we already know, otherwise, suffering can be rendered abstract. These sobering words from Stalin reinforce this:

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Yet, it is not just our capacity for empathy that is inadequate, but our inability to conceive of objects beyond our spatial and temporal conception.

Hyperpassivity and hyperobjects

A notable expression that’s often bandied about today is “instant gratification”. If you’ve managed to trawl through this article to get to this point then (the quality of my writing notwithstanding) you’ve succeeded where most will have undoubtedly failed.

Within a world that now feels like an amalgamation of the works of Philip. K. Dick; with our sense of being and identity enmeshed within the transhumanist mainframe, we have immediate access to innumerable, instantaneous forms of pleasure. What unites the most popular of these forms is the little amount of effort required to sustain engagement. The success of TikTok and the recent addition of shorts on Instagram and YouTube are clear signs of the direction we are heading.

During our consumption of this kind of media, we are in a state of passive absorption as opposed to active participation.

Rather than hyperactivity, I would call this hyperpassivity.

Despite what some may say, this hyperpassivity is not necessarily a reflection of our generation’s flaws, but of the underlying train of progress; it moves at an ever-increasing velocity unable to be apprehended by its passengers. As the philosopher, Slavoj Žižek says:

“The light at the end of the tunnel is actually that of an approaching train.”

Now, more than ever, our unchecked drive for pleasure and its tyranny over empathy is the main hindrance to confronting the predicament we are in — and we are in a predicament.

Philosopher Timothy Morton has termed climate change a hyperobject. These objects are beyond our conceptions of space and time rendering them, though they do indeed exist, indissolubly abstract. In Morton’s words, they exist:

“…interobjectively, which is to say that they consist, of, yet are not reducible to, interactions between a large number of entities.”

To take the leap from absent-mindedly disposing of a plastic straw to the destruction of marine life, or turning on a light switch to devastating droughts in Africa, is something that seems beyond our current faculties. Relegated by the tyranny of the pleasure principle, far removed from a capacity for empathy that is (despite occasional and short-lived responses to simulacra) limited to a close circle of family and friends, ecological awareness is the biggest challenge we face as a species.

What can we do?

Climate change is an entity lurking below the waves of our perception.

Occasionally we think we’ve caught a glimpse of the white wale but we can’t be sure. We become distracted by the play of light upon the surface, or the sight of an approaching ship on the horizon.

That is our predicament.

Despite the dialectics of suffering, we need to use what wisdom we have to attempt to alleviate it in others; train ourselves to empathize with sentient beings existing outside of our milieu no matter how seemingly abstract the task; practice awareness of the relationship we have with the technology fused to our brain’s reward center and resist the electronic signals urging us to the plugin. Again, in Morton’s words, we find that:

“Culture has entered an age of asymmetry in which the nonhuman matches human cognition equally, but not in a neat Goldilocks way. Rather, humans are sandwiched between two giant beings that increase one another in a feedback loop: (human) reason and hyperobjects.”

Whether we know it or not we are enmeshed within the conceptual morass of the Anthropocene. With this in mind, the kind of empathy that needs to be cultivated is radical. One that seeks to encompass the entire planet along with its plethora of life — it must be more than just a logical calculation.

When all is said and done; when all the data has been assessed and corroborated, truly radical empathy may be the only way to curb our predicament.

If you would like to support me directly you can buy me a coffee.

You can also support me by signing up to Medium using my referral link. Not only do you get full access to Medium, but you will be helping me realize my dream of writing creatively full-time!