Ben Gook and Seán Cubitt
Charity, community, duty, and struggle are good – not only sanctified and rewarding but also good in themselves. And yet the evidence is that society at large is losing and devaluing commitment to others: we live in times diagnosed as consisting of social pathologies and a-pathologies – where, curiously, apathy is taken as a variant of, rather than existing in opposition to, pathology. Fascinated, for obvious reasons, with their diminishing share of trust, older print and broadcast news media have exhaustively analysed the rise of social media bubbles and echo chambers, trolls, and splenetic outbursts, discovering that the profitability of these emergent media forums depends on the speed and energy of their communications. Unsurprisingly, anger sells. Aggrieved fury would appear to be a dominant emotional state of our times. More reflective commentators, including William Davies in the UK and Joseph Vogl in Germany – both acknowledging the same condition where ‘knowledge becomes more valued for its speed and impact than for its cold objectivity, and emotive falsehood often travels faster than fact’ – observe that it can generate an emotional state in which ‘otherwise peaceful situations can come to feel dangerous, until eventually they really are’.
Apatheia
While we recognise the evils of perpetual rage and endless anxiety, we hope to contribute to this discussion of evil, a third outcome of current conditions, one that, fittingly enough, has not stirred the same attention but which is as great a social and personal evil as fury and nervousness: apathy. Wherever it’s used today, this term for being ‘without feeling’ aspires to capture some change in affect, behaviour, and cognition; it marks a reduction in feeling and activity, typically describing forms of indolence, diminished initiative, slowness, inertia, and generalised passivity. The comparator implicit in ‘change’ may be synchronic (norms and averages) or diachronic (biographical). Apathy describes both symptom and syndrome; people describe the symptomatology (‘hasn’t eaten in two days,’ ‘didn’t vote’) but also go hunting for causation (‘brain lesion,’ ‘feeling of powerlessness’).
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