Why empathy is the only way forward
We in the Global North are treating the natural world as if it were a factory, a supermarket, a slaughterhouse and a rubbish dump and it’s time to settle the bill. Picture: Unsplash.
In 2022, I was invited to contribute to the second edition of The Slow Grind, Georgina Johnson’s anthology of writings by thinkers, activists and futurists. It was a privilege. Artist, writer, designer and curator Johnson is an extraordinary editor; a visionary, in many ways - and my fellow authors some of the most inspirational figures of our time. The volume is titled “Practising Hope and Imagination” - and it was sometimes hard to step into that space. Given what the planet faces, hope for me is a fleeting thing, jealously guarded.
What is less fleeting is my dedication to the concept of empathy and the challenge it presents to comfortable people - as well as its enormous opportunities for release from constructed narratives. To live life empathetically seems to me to be an evolved state. There is an exquisite congruence to empathy, the ability to see the world as it is and not break. It is a form of deep love. And yet, empathy is also painful, encompassing grief and guilt, anger and ambition, compassion and humility; the willingness to take on the difficult stories of Others and, for a while at least, fall with them. Perhaps that’s why true empathy is so rare. I certainly have not gained it yet.
In my piece for the book, ‘Why Empathy is the Only Way Forward’, I make the case that all oppressions are connected, whether they are oppressions of people, of animals, of nature herself. I argue that, to deem one sentient as deserving of rescue while another is not (because we don’t hear their voices, we don’t understand their language or because their bodies are useful to us) is a continuation of old ways. I put this forward because there are still too many good people, including climate and justice advocates, who fail to grasp this - and, until that changes, are simply reinforcing the status quo. Empathy for people, for animals (yes, the ones we eat), for nature is key to the systemic change we need to get through this.
Here is an extract from my article. Even better, to buy a copy of Slow Grind: Practising Hope and Imagination, visit www.theslowgrind.world.
“Activist and philosopher Noam Chomsky once wrote, “[the] success [of Extinction Rebellion] will depend on the general raising of consciousness” [1] [but] it is not only Chomsky’s ‘consciousness’ we need to awaken, it is each of our individual consciences. We need to care like we have never cared before - for people we don’t know, animals we don’t understand, nature that we have taken for granted. And we need to recognise ourselves as part of a larger whole, in which the harm done to one is revisited on the other. We need to have empathy.
We, in the Global North, are both spoiled and spoiling. We are spoiled with choice: every new car, mobile phone, washing machine, pair of trainers, luxury handbag. In parallel, a vulnerable person’s life is spoiled to produce non-essential items for us, the takers of culture, despoilers of beauty, annihilators of the future. We are treating the natural world as if it were a factory, a supermarket, a slaughterhouse and a rubbish dump and it’s time to settle the bill.
Thinkers have been trying to take us back to the roots of this dis-ease, to help us find the tools for a response that cuts through pointless chatter and deliberate obfuscation to the sore heart below. Climate Change is, after all, dependent on perspective. Eric Holthaus, a climate journalist, who studies the racial imbalance of climate change, wrote: “Climate change is what happens when the lives of marginalised people and non-human species are viewed as expendable.” [2] That is a choice, says, Holthaus, that those in positions of power make every day.
The words that resonate with me most are those of systems theorist Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, in an article for Insurge Intelligence called White Supremacism and the Earth System. Writing in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, Ahmed says: “The convergence of events we are witnessing is a symptom of a wider process of global systemic decline. The ultimate hidden driver is a way of living and being premised on self-maximisation through plunder of the ‘Other’: whether Others are different humans, different species, or the planet itself.” [3]
A piglet lies near a small drainage hole on a small farm in Sub-Saharan Africa. Of the piglet, photographer Jo-Anne McArthur wrote: “My mind returns to this photograph, this piglet. I watched her for a few moments as she lay here looking at the outdoors through the drainage hole, and then lay her head down on the dirty concrete, as you see her here.” Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals 2022.
This, then, is what we need to challenge: the plunder of the ‘Other’. All the crises we face today, all those at the fundament of the emergency, are linked by the willingness of those in power - financial and structural power - to subjugate and exploit those they consider different, whose languages they do not understand, whose voices they refuse to hear, whose lives (and their impact upon them) they refuse to bear witness to.
How many Rana Plaza murders in the name of capitalism have to happen in order to shake us from our industrial trance? There is a flood of video material documenting the horrific destruction of this planet, its inhabitants, its more-than-human entities. I have watched indigenous peoples in Brazil striving to put out the fires consuming their homes with sheafs of dried leaves. I have seen motherless young pigs and cows and dogs, eyes wide with shock and distress, slaughtered for their bodies to be used as food, as fashion, as sites of experimentation. I have seen children as young as 8, working in driving rain to mine cobalt in the DRC for smartphones in the West. Why are we refusing to see this?
This makes me dizzy with rage and grief; I veer between both states. The rage can be disorientating: I still want to grab people’s shoulders and say: “Stop talk about shit. Stop believing shit.” And the grief? It is to exist across time; to see the future in the present. When I watch a herd of elephants crossing a savannah in a documentary, I see not only their beauty, but also their annihilation - at the hands of humans or the weather events we have caused (if you think that African elephants will survive beyond the end of this century, think again).
It is strange to feel so much distress for what is happening and even more for what is yet to come. And yet, I believe, it is also the only human, the only humane response to the world as it is today. Everything else is wilful denial. Grief is the inflection point between inaction and a call-to-arms; it is, as adrienne maree brown writes, “the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life.” [4] The only cure for grief is to grieve. And then to act. Because to know and to do nothing is the kind of madness that brought us here in the first place.”
Noam Chomsky. Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon (Eds.), ‘Internationalism or Extinction’, (February 25, 2020), https://chomsky.info/20200225
Eric, Holthaus, ‘The Climate Crisis is Racist. The Answer is Anti-Racism’, Sierra Club, (June 2, 2020), https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2020/06/climate-crisis-racist-answer-anti-racism
Nafeez Ahmed, ‘White Supremacism and the Earth System’, Medium (June 5, 2020),https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147
Adrienne Maree Brown, ‘Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds’, (April 2017).
