Some time ago, just under 4 billion years, relatively early in the planet’s existence, some bubbles gained certain unusual capacities involving the regulated shuffling of electrons and sustained frothiness. Distinct among the rocks and murky solutions, these things began to evolve, through chance, occasionally forming increasingly complex and stable systems.
At some point in this process, the clusters of bubbles-cum-cells developed sufficient complexity and internal connectedness to experience a sense of self. This self awareness, however simple it likely was, was the dawn of the individual, the first “me and other” moment. And apparently, it had advantages for these early organisms, because so much of animal life today bears indication that it, too, has a sense of where it ends and where the vast otherness begins.
Along the way, these early selves interacted and learned to sense each other, for purposes of reproduction and the food cycle most likely. Some things never change.
As life evolved, social systems became common in many forms of animal life, where typically (but not exclusively) single species networks of selves developed ways to communicate their needs, ideas, sense of play, and social structure. Human beings were highly adept and built civilizations upon civilizations, and rich and imaginative bodies of art, stories, fictions, and histories that bring together and divide large groups of selves.
These earlier instances of self to other-self interaction occurred in person, or in the case of recorded communications, through the thoughtful and somewhat time-consuming acts of writing and reading. In between acts of exchange, are interactions with the universe perceived as non-selves like making tools, and collecting useful rocks, the interactions between selves were less frequent than we experience with the immediacy of electronic communication systems.
Some chores, hunting and animal husbandry for example, fall into a somewhat nebulous area in the enumeration of encounters with other selves, and depend upon how open a given culture is to recognizing the self in other kinds creatures. In a pack of carnivores, are prey perceived as other kinds of selves? Perhaps this is not the question. Perhaps the questions is: which selves are included in the sphere of empathy?
More than an aside, this becomes a very important question, as it directly influences what we permit to consume our precious resources, what is a precious resource, and what threatens our precious resources. When wolves became dogs, for example, these lines were transversed by both wolves and humans. When a tribe, pack, or flock splits and initiates territorial behaviors, these lines are also transversed.
We use empathy and dispassion shape our experience in the world, and a healthy human mind can deliberately regulate its experience of these extensions or limitations of the self. We need not be slaves to reflexive empathy and antipathy.
To illustrate the plasticity of the empathy circuits: one of the differences in Autistic experience is in its regulation of these modes. Excessive empathy quickly leads to saturating overwhelm, often very early in development. The Autistic response in extreme instances is the implementation of a resolute indifference that is often referred to as ‘mind blindness.’ Successful early intervention (Early Start Denver Model, for instance) is both immersive, persistent, affirming and gentle. The method scrambles to recondition the developing mind to willingly recognize the presence and value of other selves, before the apparent safety of total dispassion becomes stubbornly writ upon the brain.
But this isn’t about Autism or wolves, other than from the point of illustration.
Let’s fast forward far to 21st century humanity. Digital media provides a barrage of selves, each competing for our attention. Many of these voices demand our allegiance, most are remarkably effective at drawing our attention, and often present a perilous sense of urgency. On top of this, in liberal democratic society, we are admirably taught to value others’ perspectives, and to listen to the ideas and feelings of other selves.
As an Autistic person, I know what this feels like from a very personal perspective. I believe we have opened ourselves up to other selves the point of meltdown, and we are now reflexively ‘canceling’ and hating, or alternately, losing ourselves in the noise and not giving a fuck (analogous to the door-slam that happens in Autistic people some at a tragically young age). Whether you’re riled up about the other political party, or openly weeping about the polar bear in that picture… You’ve lost control over that very critical boundary of empathy. It’s a terrible and humbling feeling to not have the strength to care for everything, to see things that you feel you should love, suffer. So much of the world is going to hell. And in the pandemic, the isolation we feel as selves who are unable to access others for whom empathize puts us in a state of chronic loneliness and ineffectual frustration. A Self without meaningful and effective associations with other selves is lonely. Indeed our Self, and its extension through empathy isn’t serving us particularly well in today’s culture at all. We are isolated, frustrated, angry, in pain, and lonely in the noise.
This plays into why I was driven back to monastic life. A good bit of the mental homework that I have done early in this process involves reworking what I apply empathy to. It isn’t easy work, and sometimes, I do still weep over the polar bears, and even the passenger pigeon, but, it is much better when I can truly feel empathy for those in my more immediate, more naturally extended sphere in which I, my Self, have influence and significance.
I believe that I first recognized what I needed to change after I happily accepted many facebook friendships with people from whom I had drifted decades ago. Over the course of a year, four of these digital friends died, and I went through a fairly significant grieving process for each. Grieving for them, their loved ones, and the times we didn’t share. It may sound callous, but it was an utterly synthetic grief. By natural right, these fine people no longer belonged in my sphere of empathy. The natural course of our interactions had passed. It was then (after unfriending a couple hundred folks- sorry if you’re reading this…), that I decided to cap my FB friendships to an arbitrary 100 and take a good look at who and what gets my costly empathy.
Now, I am relatively isolated. I have only a dozen or so humans who remain fully within in my empathy sphere, and I love them dearly. I have a handful of animals. I feel better. I can care better for my own Self, and my interactions with the few are of better quality. I have also somewhat more naturally been able to extend my empathy as an outgrowth to the individual wild selves in my forest: the birds, deer, and squirrels these days. In the fall, it was also the crickets, moths and other crawling and fluttering beings.
Where before this effort, my inner world was inundated with crushing social obligations to act upon and feel the larger tragedy of the world, now I have a choice in my application of self, and I can take time to savor tender acts like shuttling a spider outdoors to the warmth of the sawdust and sticks near the compost heap or singing my puppy to sleep with boastful songs about his imagined heroics. I can also more effectively leverage greater change from the secure footing for my Self within this more deeply rooted context of humanity and the larger world.