On Dying Hearts — And How They Might Be Born Again
Not unexpectedly, in pivotal moments of my radicalization, I return to James Baldwin. “I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country,” he said in a 1963 interview with prominent psychologist and civil rights activist Dr. Kenneth Clark. And more terrifying, still, is the persistence of this truth over the past six decades.
I won’t try and estimate how many headlines I’ve read in the seven years since “I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” from the Huffington Post’s now-defunct Contributor platform, but it’s the only one I remember verbatim. In a little over 600 words, Kayla Chadwick adopts the exasperated tone of many a blog poster, ultimately composing a piece that reads as a diatribe. It’s openly unresearched (“Perhaps it was always like this … maybe I’m just waking up to this unimaginable callousness.”) and personal, as is the case with intense, unprocessed emotion. This all supports her thesis: that she’s fed up — “done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.”
But it’s not really the content of the article that stuck in my memory, it’s the title. And I have company: “Over and over I hear that old headline,” novelist and The New York Times Book Review columnist Olivia Waite posts. “I have never returned to a headline as often as I’ve returned to ‘I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,’” remarks another social media user in response to abolitionist and anti-capitalist writer Joshua P. Hill’s question, “Do we want a society that cares for people, or that kills?” Replies include mention of a sticker marked with the sentiment. I can picture it pasted to a laptop next to the enduring slogan, “The future is female,” or on a Subaru bumper overlapping a sun-faded “coexist.” Many of us are consumed with frustrations akin to Chadwick’s, wondering how swaths of the United States and its government could actively and unfeelingly take away the rights and lives of people who are different from them. We make sense of it by asserting that conservatives must want — or, at least, be indifferent to — the suffering of others. It’s the only thing that makes sense, so why can’t they see it? If only they could see it, then of course they would change.
There’s a meaningful distinction between Chadwick’s title and Hill’s post concerning the psychology of the reactionary impulse, and the moment at which the conservative agenda is indistinguishable from reflexive hate. From “I don’t know” to “Do we want?” there’s a focus shift from hand-wringing to world-building, emotion to action. The HuffPost subtitle gets at it, I think, with, “a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society.” In a separate context, perhaps the article could follow this up. Perhaps it could include a deeper look into the fundamental divide: not simply caring versus not caring, but who, what, and how we safeguard, exploring care the behavior as opposed to care the feeling. We might as well dream big and imagine an explicit comparison of the center-left and progressives within this framework of care, asking, What does care look like, really, recognizable and true, even when it’s unsaid?
From a semantic angle — but come with me, for a moment — the problem is not of care but personhood. Right-wing reactionaries, the ostensible subjects of Chadwick’s piece, place their care where they do because they have narrowed the definition of humanity, which is to say the deservingness of care, to accomplish an organized campaign for power. And because we’re meant to believe in appeals to compassion and the utility of debate between red and blue, we cry out into the void, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people!” And then maybe we try explaining that Black and trans people are people. But of course we are all people, because how else would we be a threat to power? While lacking in numbers, the American right is antidemocratic as an ideology, a tactic, a requisite.
To attempt to explain that one should care about other people is to attempt to explain away the relief we feel when suffering isn’t ours. The fight for collective liberation is not grounded in widespread human empathy alone. Bearing true witness to terror met by apathy does not necessarily include the experience of being terrified, but a desire that burns so bright as to become a practice, neither selfish nor selfless, to create a society that privileges freedom over fear, expansiveness over ego. Do we want a society that cares for people, or that kills? Another way of asking that question: Whom (or what) does the infliction of suffering protect?
A two-party system sets up the dichotomy of good and evil, a pretense for the good guys to perpetuate imperialism themselves, too. More accurately, the distinction is between dead hearts and those pumped through with the blood of the poor, Black, brown, and otherwise marginalized. But nothing reduced to any two poles retains much nuance. Chadwick’s “I Don’t Know How…” is inarguably passionate, full of heart. Notably, however, Chadwick currently produces MSNBC’s The Beat With Ari Melber, a segment that has been silent on support for Palestine. In keeping with good versus evil, The Beat’s takeaway from Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech for the presidential nomination is her evisceration of MAGA. (For a different analysis of the DNC, also on MSNBC, read Zeeshan Aleem’s op-ed.)
In his “Open Letter to the Born Again,” originally published in The Nation on September 29, 1979, Baldwin wrote about Western Christian hypocrisy around Palestine in the context of the Andy Young Affair: Andrew Young — pastor, politician, activist, pastor, friend of Baldwin’s, and, at the time, US ambassador to the UN — met with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (violating an agreement with Israel) and withheld information from the State Department so the US might be more receptive to a UN Division for Palestinian Rights report. Young then resigned as ambassador upon iconically Evangelical President Jimmy Carter’s request. Said Baldwin:
But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.
Because there is no English word quite like love — and to this, I know Western Christianity agrees — an adjacent one, “heart,” takes on many connotations. To be human is to have a heart, be it bleeding or Purple, and those of us who live by the heart develop various coping strategies to deal with the grief inherent to aliveness. “But was she just saying that to garner Republican support?” my mom asked as I lamented Kamala’s vow to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Commanders in Chief, Republican and Democratic alike, impose mass death. Evidently, it’s a requirement of the job of United States president. In talking to my mom, a proud Democrat whose core issue has always been reproductive rights, we both came to understand that her hope relies on some degree of denial. Tears welled in her eyes as she explained that she refuses to think about the failures of the Democratic Party because the idea of a Trump presidency throws her into a panic. Her heart stays in the promise of incremental change. Right then, I clearly understood her politics through the lens of hope, knowing that we often hang onto things to preserve whatever hope we have, and learned how to express mine similarly. It’s difficult for me to view concessions to colonialism as anything approaching hope, but I comprehend plans that include them and still ultimately lead to revolution. I don’t think calling the ends of a linear political spectrum “holding on” and “letting go” adds significant nuance, but it may suggest the different ways we try to spare our hearts, sometimes killing them in the process.
I am terrified at the death of the heart. I see that it’s human, an effort to turn off some humanness because being human is hard, and generations of Americans in power have made it harder and frequently impossible. But I make “heart,” in its various interpretations, clear to me, as clear as Europe’s guilty Christian conscience, by simply looking to Baldwin’s.
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August 2024