IN DEFENSE OF APATHY

Written as Alfred Chamberlain (1972)

{Reference: Jules Feiffer's “Little Murders”}

I do not really care for myself that apathy has been maligned, but for the sake of the unenlightened, I have chosen to speak out.

Apathy has been grossly misunderstood. It has found itself cast amongst such emotional catch-words as stagnation and death. It has been repulsed on first sight and decried as the eventual bane of all civilization. Men have turned their strongest forces of destruction, from propaganda to physical force, against apathy. And yet apathy, although scarred, remains entrenched, although snobbishly overlooked. Endurance, such as this, demands examination.

What is apathy? The word is of Greek origin, coming from a- (not) + pathos (suffering). Simply then, it means “not suffering.” Allow Noah Webster to finish the definition; “want of feeling; lack of passion, emotion, or excitement.” But that is all textbook and too highly academic; when does apathy overcome the average man on the street, on the campus? When he is about to get hurt or just after. And why? Simply because he does not want to suffer the hurt, a fully natural reaction.

In that elementary statement lies the clue to what apathy really is. Apathy is not the abandonment of emotion for mere dogma, but the shedding of the entanglement of emotion is for protection. In the interest of self-preservation, when being assaulted from all sides, one logical solution is obvious: remove some of the weapons from the hands of your enemies. The damage done is thus lessened to merely the level of the physical and kept away from the delicate region of the mental.

But apathy is not necessarily a fully selfish act. In the most rudimentary stages, apathy may be highly self-centered without a social conscience, but apathy in its highly developed stages is much more socially aware than the current garble of emotionalism. Emotionalism is prey to contradictory feelings about the same matter: one person loves vegetables and another hates them. But the apathist is not entangled by all of these contradictions, because he has removed himself from being motivated by emotions. The apathist is motivated by the facts which clearly point towards his goals, towards self-preservation in its crude forms and to such ideals as nonviolence in its sophisticated forms. The apathist, no longer suffering the forces of passion, is able to make clear-headed decisions on his actons. A man who does not feel the grief of the death of a friend will not feel the thirst for revenge; he will have patience for facts and due processes. The apathist is an impartial judge, a man free of prejudice, a man who can grasp the concepts of equality, freedom, and social responsibility. If the apathist wants something for himself, he wants it for everyone.

Do not confuse the apathist with a man who knows no joys. The apathist enjoy his activities as fully as anyone else, but he refuses to be blinded in their pursuit. He will yield his tempoarary amusements to achieve his goal even if that goal is just self-preservation. If his goal is nonviolence, then he will absorb a physical hurt before allowing somebody else to suffer it.

It is not the practice of apathy which can be questioned; rather it is the goals of the apathist. If an apathist chooses to be a successful businessman and lacks all scruples, then he can be destructive. But the apathetic businessman is no more destructive or deplorable than the emotionally motivated greedy businessman who seeks to trample on others to reach his pinnacle of success. A businessman of this sort may appear apathetic, but his emotions of greed and hatred for others expel him from the region of the apathist.

To a practical man, apathy may seem to be foolish martryism. Let the practical man think that if he wants, but apathy does not deserve all the discredit it has received. From its purest form as a reflex to its development of social conscience, apathy is clearly a justifiable solution to the confrontation of a problem. Seek rather to dispel the forces of disillusionment which lead men to apathy.