'I really feel like my soul is getting dirtier and dirtier'.
These were the words of a speaker at an Amnesty International event I attended on Saturday 9th of December. The talk panel was held to support AI’s annual ‘Write for Rights’ campaign, when members from all over the world come together to write letters of support and appeal to select victims and perpetrators of human rights offences. This year, though, it feels as if there are too many human rights violations to even count, let alone write.
Saturday was a very busy and informative day, but I think what stuck with me most was the opening panel discussion. Listeners were prompted to look within and examine the state of their souls. It is no secret that in every action and inaction we become complicit to some extent in the many moral issues which plague our world. It is very difficult sometimes to even exist when, as mentioned by another speaker at the event, every day we partake in war through engaging with content on our smartphones and computers.
With every swipe, click, purchase, we in some way contribute to the suffering of another.
In a world such as this, I often find myself facing an awful reality:
That I hardly know how to justify myself.
Really, I barely have a clue.
And it frustrates me that I am made to feel this way. Not even a hundred years ago, there’s no way someone of my relatively impotent, unimportant status would have found themselves in such a position. I would have been too busy trying to get the vote. Or looking after the children of my war-torn husband. Trying to figure out how to survive the winter after a particularly poor harvest this summer.
But times change, and people get power. Then they get angry. And selfish.
I’m not deluded, that this frustration is incredibly self-centred. There are children dying all over the world yet here I am moaning about the moral complexities of being a barely-potent bystander. But then I have to question, isn’t that how we should be feeling, for these current systems to keep functioning? Self-centeredness is curated through echo chambers, marketplace-dating and veiled images of conflict. Every way we engage with the rest of the world, I feel, discourages us from seeing other people as souls.
But I believe at the core of this all, we have hearts. We have minds, and feeling. We all have some extent of choice as to what we do with our own emotions. And here I’m not making any grand sweeping statements about individual exceptionalism - many people’s capacity to choose is dreadfully hampered by unjust circumstances or institutional prejudice. We are not automata.
I wrote about empathy last year for my New Year’s post, and I wanted to circle back around to the idea of kindness and understanding. Empathy is a very scary thing, I think. Especially when we’re surrounded by a multitude of narratives asserting that we’re not doing enough to fix the world.
This is the crux of our current quagmiral state. The thing I find most frustrating about every socio-political dialogue, be it around global warming, body image, protest amongst other things, is that so much space and time is taken pushing the notion of blame. Take climate change, for example. There seems to be this unspoken rule that before any constructive action can occur that we must categorise and calculate who is most to blame for this emergency state, through which we forget to recognise that it is an emergency.
It struck me whilst eating a banana in Amnesty International’s Tokyo office and musing the ethics of assigning reparations that we are trapped in the 11 o’clock number of Stephen Sondheim’s musical classic Into The Woods. In moments of frustration I find myself cosplaying Bernadette Peters as the show’s antagonistic Witch. Hair tightly permed and glittering cape at the ready I dramatically swoosh through internet comment sections, my inner monologue declaring:
‘You're so nice. You're not good. You're not bad. You're just nice. I'm not good. I'm not nice
I'm just right! I'm the Witch. You're the world [...] No, of course what really matters
Is the blame. Someone you can blame. Fine, if that's the thing you enjoy, placing the blame.
If that's the aim, give me the blame’
In this show, the protagonists’ main flaw is that they are so tied to traditional narratives of storybook good-and-evil, the idea that every good action must be compensated with just reward, that they are stunned into inaction when required to take responsibility. Like in real life, the characters view their moral worth as inherently tied to their past actions. It’s all very Aristotlean really, this assumption that our actions and intent are intertwined to the point they cannot be separated.
But as the protagonists in this story come to realise, that’s not how the world works. The world is messy and brittle and there is very rarely a way to cleanly cut and divide our way through global issues. In a world where every one of our actions is over-analysed to the point that it constitutes our whole, I can understand why so many people surrender to the cool waters of ‘Whataboutism’, or resign to blame-pushing as a means to absolve themselves. Maybe so we don’t spend every day feeling brutally impotent, it is simply easier not to care at all.
Although I obviously know that billionaires and corporations must bear the brunt of any moral imperative to combat climate change, I refuse to believe this absolves us as individuals of all duty. Even though our means aren’t many, one simple glance at a history book detailing the impact of strike action or a news story about Starbucks’ recent desperate attempts to claw profit in wake of consumer boycotts will show you that our actions have power. And so when we resign ourselves to impotence just because ‘we shouldn’t have to act first’, I argue we waste time, our world, and our unique human goodness. Not that other animals aren’t capable of intentional kindness, but we can be more than kind - through our commitment to moral goodness, we actually have an ability to create wider impact in a global community.
It is this capacity for individual choice and influence I believe we should believe in and act by. To misquote Karl Marx, this means ‘from each according to [their] ability’. It doesn’t matter what others are or are not doing, you must act in line with moral duty insofar as your current circumstances allow. For example, protesting may not be a viable option for those who work with young and vulnerable people - a criminal record would completely bar them from doing that very important work. But that doesn’t mean those people can’t post, write, donate, discuss, or attend meetings and forums as shows of support. There are a multitude of ways to help fight injustice, so just because you can’t do everything doesn’t permit doing nothing at all.
Don’t get it twisted - I’m not perfect by any means. But I try as much as I can not to be a hypocrite. For example I say that I care about child labour, so I only buy from charity shops (note charity, not vintage - this is a bag of worms for another post) or ethical brands because I can. I also love animals and don't want to pay for their deaths, forced impregnations, and torture. I care about the mental health of people, usually extremely vulnerable people such as those in poverty or immigrants who can be easily exploited and disposed of by bosses, who must commit slaughter as their day jobs while I gorge guilt-free. So I’m vegan, because I can be. I care about the birth of new media, and about exposing oneself always to new art. So do I spend every night in seeking out new films and creators instead of just watching reruns of Doctor Who?
…
… Well as I said, no one is perfect.
But still.
We should try to live in a balanced manner. Balancing pressure with gentleness. Action with practicality. Morality with measure. Ultimately I can’t tell you how to live. But I would urge you to reflect on your own ethics and draw a line between that which is right and wrong for you. Then once that line has been drawn it is up to you to help any and all creatures that exist below it.
Where is your line right now? What more could you do, and why aren’t you doing it? What would you lose from doing more? Don’t let guilt factor in, just answer the question. Would there be a tangible impact on your life if you changed to way you acted? And how much would that impact cause you detriment? Whatever your answer is, sit with it. Then ask yourself: what are you doing? What can you be proud of? Why are you doing it, and what impact does that act have on how you feel about your own life? Now apply this logic to all the things you’re not doing.
This brings me to my final written words of 2023. As we go into next year and resolutions loom, I would urge you not to consider not what you have to lose by changing, but instead imagine what you could gain.
That’s all from me for another year. Sending all my love and festive wishes for another year gone. I’ll post more Japan updates soon but until then know I am sending all my stars,
Char xxx
Just because they're failing themselves it doesn't give you any right to do the same.
Screenshot credit to @thisiskayem
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