Can I not get a witness?
A break from burnout: On the feeling that we must keep watching distant events, lest something terrible happen.
There’s a brief update on my book, The End of Burnout, at the end of this post.
I’m going to start with a sports anecdote, but stick with me; there’s a bigger point on the way.
On January 3, 1993, I did math homework and listened on the radio to a playoff game between my beloved Buffalo Bills and the Houston Oilers. Early in the second half, the Bills were losing by 32 points. No team had ever come back from that big a deficit. The game did not sell out, which meant (according to NFL’s bizarre broadcasting rules) that it could not be aired on local TV. No one at home in Buffalo could see the game. Fans started to leave the stadium to beat the traffic home.
Then the Bills started to rally. Their backup quarterback, Frank Reich, who had led the University of Maryland Terrapins to victory over the mighty Miami Hurricanes from 31 points down several years before, threw a touchdown pass, then another. The Oilers turned the ball over, and the Bills turned the possession into a touchdown. Some fans, glumly listening to the game on the radio, turned their cars around and tried to get back into the stadium. When they weren’t allowed back in, they started to climb the fences.
The Bills tied the game, then won in it overtime. It remains the biggest deficit an NFL team has overcome in victory. (The result of this game devastated the Oilers; it’s not a stretch to say that the loss contributed to the team leaving Houston for Tennessee a few years later.)
Accounts of the game by fans who were there are inherently untrustworthy; as with historical events like the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, many times more people say they were at the game and stayed till the end than could plausibly have been there.
But those who were there, whoever they are, belong to a saving remnant. They kept the faith, and so they witnessed a miracle.
Some years prior to this event, according to the Book of Exodus, the Israelites under the command of Jacob defeated the Amalekites in battle. The story goes that for as long as Moses held his arms up while observing the battle from a high hill, the Israelites had the upper hand. When his arms tired, the Amalekites started to win. So Aaron and Hur supported Moses’ arms, and Jacob eventually won the day.
In this story, those who can’t fight owe it to the fighters to watch faithfully. In doing so, they contribute to victory.
Today, there is war in Ukraine. There is broad sympathy in the United States for the Ukrainians’ cause in defense of their country against the Russian invasion. This sympathy is leading some people to identify strongly with the Ukrainians, despite the thousands of miles of distance between themselves and the battlefield. For example:
I have to admit: I think this is strange. Judging from the replies to Axelrod’s tweet, it seems that many others are having the same feeling. They’re like those Bills fans who never stopped believing, who perhaps imagined that their presence would help the team on the field beat the odds. Or they’re like Moses on the hilltop, willing the army to victory by virtue of their witness.
I am unsure whether to call this identification with the Ukrainian fighters a mass delusion or an aspect of human nature. Maybe those are the same thing.
We walk a narrow ridge when we try to empathize with others who are suffering. On the one side is indifference to them; on the other, a co-opting of their pain.
In U.S. history, this ridge has been a prominent feature of the discursive terrain around slavery. In her 1997 book, Scenes of Subjection, the historian Saidiya Hartman analyzes the letters of John Rankin, a white Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, to his slave-owning brother. In one letter, Rankin writes of imagining himself and his family being enslaved and suffering “bloody stripes” from the enslaver. Rankin wants to avoid indifference, but he may paradoxically end up falling into it regardless. Hartman writes:
Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin’s efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination is presumably designed to teach. Moreover, by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin’s empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body.
I find the ironic self-defeat of human ideals fascinating. You pursue a worthy goal, but the very act of pursuing it makes attaining it impossible. In fact, I think that’s what both of my books are about, now that I think of it.
Here’s Hartman again:
[E]mpathy is double-edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration.
Judging from articles and posts I’ve read recently, some Americans are making a similar move in their consumption of news from Ukraine. NPR posted a thread on Twitter of “5 ways to cope” with news of the war:
The other day, a Forbes contributor wrote about how to deal with burnout from hearing about the war. This is perhaps the most grotesque abuse of the term burnout I’ve come across, and I’ve come across some wild stuff. Here’s the writer’s final word of advice:
Make sure that you eat healthily, get enough sleep and engage in physical activities. Go for a walk, ride a bike, do Yoga, hit the gym, contact friends and family. Keep in mind that it's not just you. There's a vast amount of people around the world that are experiencing similar feelings.
Amazing. Here, “it’s not just you” means, “other people living in safety feel anxious, too,” and not, “your suffering pales in comparison to that of the people fleeing Russian artillery and living in subway stations.”
To think through moral issues about suffering and awareness, some have turned to W.H. Auden’s 1938 poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” (I recommend the poet Elisa Gabbert’s recent close reading of the poem.) The first two lines strike me as important now: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters.”
The Old Masters were not wrong. And the truth they were not wrong about is the fact that “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from” those who suffer. It’s just how things are. People, animals, and maybe even space aliens are enduring immense suffering this very moment, and I can never truly know it. It’s not even clear I can know the suffering of the person right next to me. (I think this was part of Elaine Scarry’s point in The Body in Pain, but I only read that superficially and long ago.) Their suffering goes unwitnessed except by God. We know it’s there, but we can’t comprehend all of it. It’s too much for us, so we have no choice but to turn away.
The unstated moral imperative of our time is to be aware of others’ suffering. It’s well-intentioned. We now have greater theoretical capacity to know of that suffering than any previous generation ever did. But our hearts are the same size as ever, and there still isn’t a whole lot we can do about the suffering of people far away. It’s no wonder we try to make their suffering our own; doing so makes us feel like we’re doing something about it. You can’t care for the Ukrainians, so you may as well care for yourself.1
Certainly, we should not be callous toward others’ suffering. But we should equally not pretend that by witnessing it, we are somehow in control of it. We aren’t God. We aren’t even Moses. The saving remnant of Bills fans were lucky to see what they did, but they didn’t bring about the result.
I don’t have a tidy conclusion to these thoughts. If you’d like to think about them more, I encourage you to read L.M. Sacasas’s latest Substack post on the posture of “standing sentinel” online over the catastrophe of history.
There isn’t a lot to say about The End of Burnout right now, other than I’m gratified that people are still buying copies of it. I seem to be moving from the heavy-podcasting phase of talking about the book to the workshop phase. I have several workshops and talks about burnout coming up. Three to be aware of:
March 19, 6:00 pm: Tables of Content, a gala to benefit SMU Libraries. My brilliant wife and I will be hosting a table discussion of the role of work in a good life. A bunch of awesome Dallas-area authors will be there.
March 20, 9:00 am: Dallas Literary Festival panel, African American Museum of Dallas, Texas.
March 31, 7:30 pm Aquinas Lecture, “Thomas Aquinas and the Demons of Work,” Saint Mary’s University, Notre Dame, Indiana, College Student Center, Rice Commons.
If you want to support my work, you can invite me to give a talk or workshop, rate and review the book (positively!) on Amazon, or share this newsletter with others. You can post it to social media like anything else — just click the “Share” button at the bottom of this message. I’m grateful for anything you can do.
I’m also grateful to those who have emailed me to express appreciation for my work and tell their stories of burning out and getting beyond burnout. I read all such messages, even if I haven’t been able to reply to all of them. They mean a lot to me. To those who have written recently: Thank you.
I am not really condemning this response! It is utterly inadequate, yet it seems like it’s not the worst thing one could do.