Caring about Acedia

As a writer, I would have to say that words are my bread and nuance is my butter, or is it nuance is my bread and words are my butter, or is it butter is my bread and....

Okay, I stole a bit of a joke from Woody Allen, but the point still sticks. As a writer, I love words, especially really poignant ones that have very unusual, nuanced meanings. The words "acedia" is one, in particular. It means to be extremely apathetic, to not care about anything to the point of not even caring about not caring. It was used in older days, but was eventually replaced when it was collapsed into "sloth" which took over as one of the deadly sins.

But we don't think about acedia that much these days, and it's not just because we don't know the word. We don't know the sense of its perspective.

I discovered this when I was teaching college students in the introductory class of political science. I used to assign a daily newspaper culling assignment where students were required to bring in one story from the news. What I discovered is how many lazy college students there are. They just don't seem to have the ability to do it. Of the ones that did actually do the assignment (which came after many days of prodding), I started to realize that very few of the students really cared what was going on in the world around them. I mean, they really didn't care.

And that seems to be the case in most circles. On some subjects, we tend to pay attention, but mostly we just don't care that much. International subjects are ignored, mainly because they involve people we don't know or ever intend to know. This is why when atrocities take place in some foreign land, there is a sense of "that's really sad" but very rarely does anyone want to get involved. The subject usually falls really fast on the interest level of most people.

Then we come to more local issues. A fire might cause someone to watch for the visual effect, but rarely because of concern. If you know someone in that fire, or close to it, then you might pay closer attention, but even that is on a case by case basis. Generally, we don't even care that much unless it seems exciting in some way.

Look at the news that gets played every day. I was watching responses to specific stories some time ago, and I noticed that people were concerned when the story involved celebrities they would never meet, but if some homeless person was killed in their area, the interest would be very lacking. In other words, if some movie star in Hollywood was going through a relationship crisis, people in Michigan might care, but if some vagrant was stabbed down the street from where they live, then the concern really wouldn't arise all that much.

I think this is why we can have a war go on for nearly a decade now, and no one really seems to care. Even though Americans have been dying, and many other people from those countries have been dying nonstop, we don't have much of a concern. Its a sidebar story that gets played right before the local weather and sports.

It also has to do with how the media covers the story as well. If I showed a personal interest story of someone suffering, people are going to pay attention. If I show you the same situation but explode it so that thousands are affected, and I use statistics to explain it, generally people aren't going to care. People can't wrap their emotions around statistics, which is why a lot of our national stories are so hard for us to wrap our heads around. We just don't care.

Which brings me back to my word of the day: Acedia. We just don't seem to care, but even worse, we don't care that we don't seem to care. Instead, we focus on minor, unimportant things while others are dealing with mortality issues on a daily basis.

Words can be interesting sometimes.

Stumble It!