Culture of Uncare or Pandemic of Inhumanity

Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe coined the term "culture of uncare" to explain intentional efforts to sever links from one another and from the environment.

She calls it "severing links," but the word that comes to mind is alienation. We've been alienated from our environment, from our work, from others, and from ourselves. The neoliberal capitalist system has been far too successful at breaking us away from our own sense of integrity, of wholeness, as it works to turns us into unquestioning cogs in the machine.

This manufactured uncaring, the loss of a capacity to care, is at the heart of why we can't actually do anything about climate change, or covid, or all the horrific conflicts going on right this minute. Marx predicted that capitalism would naturally, eventually, self-destruct as inequity got too extreme for people to accept. But that was before (just before) we understood that burning fossil fuels could have a profound effect on the stability of our ecosystems. Marx wrote about alienation in 1855, and John Tyndall started looking at how carbon dioxide concentrations change the climate in 1859. Now we're frozen in place, watching industry continue to expand while the world literally burns. We won't make it to the glorious end of capitalism. 

Meanwhile, the number of homeless in my city is astounding. People are calling for donations of tents and boots and blankets to help people make it through the winter. There's possibly a plan to build another community of tiny homes, like the one we have right beside the landfill. We used to have a rotation of churches that took people in at night, but there got to be too many people, and they had problems with fighting and open drug use. We have tons of schools and offices that are all heated and empty overnight, but something might go wrong if we opened their doors. Instead, we get the school kids to have sock-drives so people can better survive sleeping outdoors with toasty warm feet. 

I'm not sure there is a level of inequity that could wake us from this uncaring. We're far too quick to argue that there's something wrong with those people. That will never be us. They brought it on themselves. That includes the growing number of people disabled by covid or forced to migrate from climate change (depending where they're migrating from). We can only attempt to wake ourselves up.

Weintrobe says, 

"I suggest the specific aim of the culture of uncare is to uncouple us from genuine caring just enough to sap our will to insist on change. Our current way of life is largely dictated by the needs of a globalised deregulated economy, founded largely on the principle that the polluter never pays, short-term profit is all and true costs are discounted. The result of this form of globalization is that everyday products we now buy are produced in ways that hugely damage the environment and the social fabric. How do we live with knowing we are necessarily implicate din at least some of the damage? How do we square this with our ordinary sense o decency, our deep-seated need to be moral caring human beings and our awareness of depending on a health Mother Earth for our survival, both literal and spiritual? How do we manage the emotional discomfort when we see the logic of our daily lived lives so often pulling in a different direction from thinking in a joined up caring way about reality?

In such a situation the culture of uncare performs an ideological function. This is to insulate us from experiencing too much anxiety and more disquiet. It provides us with justifications for what we know deep down is an inherently damaging way of living. These justifications are our cover stories, and usually not thought about at a particularly conscious level. They are designed to screen out awareness of troublesome feelings of anxiety, guilt and shame. Our cultural cover stories enable a damaging way of living to proceed relatively unimpeded in the short term, making the necessarily damaging lives we live within the global economy more palatable and bearable." 

It's a mindset that goes by many names: instrumental, consumerist, extractive, narcissistic, entitled, manic. Weintrobe says,

"Each of these descriptions highlights important aspects of the mindset - the sense of self-importance tending to hubris when unchecked, the sense of special entitlement to super-sized portions and super-sized comfort, the narrow mindedness of a purely consumerist position, use of manic defences to rid the self of experiencing unpleasant unwanted feelings and the shallowness of experience that results from this, the drift to regressive more childlike modes of thinking, the growing sense of entitlement not to have to tolerate any conflicts or difficult experiences, and the general corruption of truth and language. . . . This mindset is tailor made for the new deregulated global economy as it encourages rapacious consumption. . . . 

Havel discussed how taking care is synonymous with struggling to live in a truthful way: only when the truth is faced can the real cost be counted and responsibility felt. . . . uncare tends towards a totalitarian outlook, one that increasingly books no interference and no alternative points of view. For uncare, in a triumphal phase, care is increasingly seen only as what drags it down and impedes it." 

Neoliberal capitalism requires the othering of people in order for us to tolerate zones of sacrifice in other parts of the world. Now we're tolerating, in our own country, more deaths from disease of people under 44 in the first half of 2023 than in all of 2020 and 2021 combined. We're acclimatizing to more and more deaths of young people in our own neighbourhoods. I've already heard people say that heart attacks in teenagers have always been a thing that happens - like hurricanes and floods have always happened. The children dying of disease here are easily preventable deaths, but mandating N95s will adversely affect the economy. 

We're at the point that covid is everywhere, so who cares if I add to it. It's like littering in the street. Once one person leaves garbage laying about, others are likely to toss their cup rather than carrying it home. Who cares, right? I do. I'm that weirdo that picks up litter, and I adamantly refuse to spread diseases, somehow cursed with a vestige of personal responsibility.

In yesterday's Guardian, Karim Khan used the equally appropriate term "pandemic of inhumanity,"

"We are currently experiencing a moment of profound human suffering globally. A pandemic of inhumanity has taken hold, from Darfur to Ukraine, form the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan to the seemingly forgotten voices of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar, and now the intolerable tragedy that is deepening in Israel and the State of Palestine and threatening to spread wider. These human rights emergencies are interconnected. At their heart they are driven by a common crisis: a failure to give value to the lives of all people.

Amid this landscape, we must reject desensitisation. We cannot allow ourselves to be anaesthetised to this level of anguish. We must always remember that those we see pulled from the rubble, those awaiting news of family member abducted or killed, are the same as us. We should approach their plight with the same sense of urgency, empathy and compassion that we would if they were our own children, parents, friends or loved ones."

I would add, we need this sense of urgency when we see rows of steaks at the grocery store or a long line of traffic down our main streets. And it's funny what a shift that takes. We can be fully on board with stopping an atrocity far away, but any thought of no longer eating beef or driving a car, which could save billions of people by slowing down climate change, is written off as lunacy, as an exaggeration or a mere display of caring that has no real effect (as opposed to an email to your MP about supporting a ceasefire).  

And I would also add, we need this sense of urgency when we see rooms packed with people without any kind of mitigation in place despite the open and virtually encouraged spread of covid, measles, and now tuberculosis, but that just makes people really mad.

It's all the same issue to me. We are very quick to dismiss connection with lives that are suffering. They're not us and can never be us. It's too hard to imagine otherwise, so we assume they did something to bring it on themselves - voted for the wrong person (even the children), chose the wrong place to live, didn't hustle enough to be able to afford a home in the first place, or wore the wrong clothes. Anything to distance them from us. It's a mindset that provides us with the illusion of safety. As long as I don't do those things, then the bad things won't happen to me.

Conflicts overseas are hard for us to affect, but that email can help. There are things we can do today to slow climate change and to reduce the transmission of disease. But first we have to shake off the anaesthetization of capitalism in order to be able to connect with the suffering of people and the environment. Weintrobe concludes, 

"When we are bemired in the culture of uncare we perhaps do not notice how often when people do take steps towards greater care, negative voices begin. 'That's just a drop in the ocean. It's all hopeless, here's the flaw in your argument, that's all very well, but what about x, y or z?' These kinds of remarks when offered casually, as they often are in the culture of uncare, have a destructive effect. It is as though when rising up to take a stand one is given a kick behind the knees. . . . It is easy to crush the life out of a bit of care and de-motivate people when their starting point may already be low. We need collectively to stand up to [this uncare mindset] more vigorously."