When Apathy Is Okay

Most of your opinions don't matter, but some of them matter a lot.

I’m inclined to oppose abortion (keyword: inclined), at least in some cases. I try not to bring it up, but if it comes up, I self-identify as pro-life. I do this even though my views are nowhere near those of a typical pro-lifer, who is against abortion at least before viability and usually beginning at conception. The reason I identify as pro-life is because, even though I don’t know when a fetus ought to have moral status, I think that potentially allowing infanticide is prima facie worse than restricting women’s autonomy, so insofar as I’m concerned about the issue at all, I’m more concerned about the nine states with no limit on abortion based on gestational duration than I am about the fourteen states that prohibit abortion altogether.

There’s probably some threshold, many weeks after conception but several weeks before birth, when abortion becomes impermissible. I don’t know or particularly care when that threshold is, and it probably doesn’t prohibit a large percentage of abortions that actually take place. I also know that the people who study the issue, who have thought hard about the ins and outs of the debate, overwhelmingly think abortion is permissible at least in the early stages of pregnancy. If I actually read the literature, I would probably agree with them. But I just don’t think it’s worth my time to read the literature.

The truth is, I’m quite aloof from the abortion issue. I couldn’t care much less about it than I do now.

You might think this is perplexing, even appalling. My core value is that good things are good and bad things are bad, from the point of view of the universe. If abortion is murder, then that’s bad. And if restricting abortion means stripping women of their bodily autonomy, then that’s also bad. If I thought my opinion on the issue might affect the amount of good and bad in the world in any meaningful way, I would carefully weigh the evidence, and I would probably come down on the side against most abortion restrictions. But my opinion doesn’t matter, so I won’t.

The reason I say my opinion doesn’t matter is because, regardless of what I think or do, the number of abortions that happen in the world is probably going to be the same. I’m not a person of uterus-having experience, and I’m also (pantomimes limp wrist) y’know—not that there’s anything wrong with that—so I can say with pretty high confidence that I’m not going to get anyone pregnant or have a personal stake in whether a partner terminates their pregnancy. All my female friends are lesbians, and even if they weren’t I don’t think they’d be coming to me for reproductive advice. I live in a state that doesn’t have voter-initiated ballot measures, so my opinion doesn’t matter politically, either. And even if my state did have ballot measures, the chance that my vote would be decisive is vanishingly small.

I don’t believe that my opinion doesn’t matter about anything. I’m not a nihilist. There are plenty of issues with normative implications where it actually does matter what I think or do, or at least I have a good reason to think it could matter. It matters if I eat animals or not, because the amount of suffering caused by a diet that includes so-called “animal foods” is enormous, and the market actually does respond to consumer choices. So I’m vegan, and I spend a great deal of time volunteering in animal advocacy. It matters if I give money to effective charities, because it’s incredibly cheap to save people’s lives. So I give money to effective charities. It might matter if I choose to walk on grass or pavement, because you probably crush more bugs in the grass. So I don’t walk on grass whenever I can avoid it, and I usually scan the ground in front of me when I walk on pavement so I don’t step on anybody. It’s reasonable to think that it matters if I decide to vote or not, because there’s a lot at stake in some elections. So I spend some time weighing the arguments before deciding whether or not to vote.

There are also some things where I almost certainly won’t have any tangible impact on the world, but it’s still rational for me to think and care about them. I get personal satisfaction and a feeling of intellectual fulfillment from thinking and writing about international politics. I know that I’m going to have essentially zero impact on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, but I’m pretty good at understanding it and talking about it, and it pays the bills. (A share of “the bills,” in turn, goes to effective charities, and that actually does have an impact on the world.) You can say the same about the more pedestrian aspects of life. I once stood in the blazing sun for six hours, sweat drenching my clothes, etc., to watch Rina Sawayama play, like, four songs (limp wrist, nothing wrong with that, we’ve already been over this). It’s not morally important, but it was sure fun.

I don’t get similarly fired up about abortion. I understand that there are people who do, and I don’t think they’re “wrong” for caring. Maybe they actually do have to wrestle with the decision to end a pregnancy. That’s probably the best reason to care. Or maybe they’re concerned about it just because it has potentially tremendous moral import, even if they can’t do anything about it. That’s another perfectly fine reason to care about abortion—it’s a big reason why I care about foreign policy.

But you shouldn’t feel an obligation to form an opinion about abortion if you can’t affect it and you don’t have any other compelling reasons to care. And you certainly shouldn’t shame others for not caring. There’s a tendency on the progressive left to shame people for not signing on to every trendy political cause: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Stopping Asian Hate, Ukraine, Gaza, etc. It sometimes coerces people into doing pointless and even counterproductive things, like posting black squares on their Instagram to protest racism. Do you think that’s going to affect the number of unarmed black men who are shot by the police? Demanding that people have an opinion about these things is like demanding that they have an opinion about the speed limit in Timbuktu. Why should they care? What can they do about it?

I don’t know where people’s sociopolitical main character syndrome comes from, but I suspect it has something to do with the personality traits associated with left-wing politics, since you don’t see this sort of phenomenon with the same force on the right. Left liberalism is traditionally associated with prosocial traits and values, including empathy, altruism, and egalitarianism. It’s easy to understand why someone with these traits might feel compelled to stake out a position against all the horrors of the world, even if they haven’t thought much about what they’re accomplishing. Left-wing authoritarians, meanwhile, are distinguished by narcissism. You can see why a narcissist would be driven to opine about everything.

I don’t know if there are more normie liberals or left-wing narcissists out there in the world. Obviously, I’m rooting for Team Normie. You can reason with the normies. You can appeal to their values and explain how there are things they can do that make the world worse or better—like eating animals and giving to effective charities, respectively—and there are things that don’t. Convincing people of anything is hard, but you can break through to a normie a fair amount of the time. I was once a normie: merely vegetarian, but for no particular reason; and not very concerned about other people’s wellbeing. The same is true of most people who are now committed to doing tremendously good things, and not just things that help them fit in.

You may think that all these points are just anodyne. Most of the things you do that affect other people are already widespread and strongly reinforced social norms. You don’t go around stabbing people, being racist, shoving grandmas, and lighting puppies on fire, and neither does anyone you know.

But it’s not as if the only interesting and contentious things that you can have an opinion about are the ones where your opinion doesn’t matter. Most people don’t actually think diligently about the consequences of their actions. They don’t do much for people who are far away from them, even though they can do a lot. They don’t seem very concerned about the welfare of farmed animals, even though they could make a huge difference in thousands of animal lives. (When you read that sentence, did you think of fish? Farmed invertebrates? Fish younglings?) And most people don’t think about how their actions shape the far future for those humans and other animals who are going to be alive long after we’re dead.

Disengaging from day-to-day politics and culture war drama is not the same as giving up. Quite the contrary. To be rationally and selectively apathetic is the opposite of complacency. It is to cease being preoccupied with what you cannot change, while dedicating yourself to improving the lot of those for whom you can make a difference. It is to live up to that solemn invocation of the great and wise Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, give me the courage to change
  What must be altered;
  Serenity to accept
  What cannot be helped
  And insight to determine
  One from the other.

And to learn from the men in the classic story who, when the ocean threw up her starfish onto the shore to suffocate and die, cast the live ones back into the sea to fight another day.

Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing—the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.