Stop asking so many questions, I told her. But of course that’s her job. She’s thirteen, and I’m handing her the keys to a car called Earth. What’s this dent? she’s asking. Why is this broken? Is it safe?
*
She’s on two different kinds of anxiety medication, my daughter. She wasn’t on them when I started the book. She was an eleven-year-old girl still missing a tooth, who chewed her tongue to help her concentrate. But when childhood gave way to adolescence, something happened. That beast called anxiety crept in.
Last year I asked her, What’s going on? What are you so afraid of?
This is what she told me: she didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to think about the future. I tried to convince her that planning for the future is the only way she’ll have any control over it, but she was skeptical. We were in the middle of a global pandemic, after all.
Control, she had learned, is an illusion.
*
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
In the beginning was the land and the sea, the trees and fields and mountains. There was the sun and the moon, the flowers and the bees, the fish and the bears, and all of life’s wondrous gifts.
In the beginning there was Alaska, the Yukon Delta, and the Bering Sea. On the first Thursday in September, a private plane lands on a secluded runway just north of Allakaket. The land surrounding it—two hundred thousand acres—has been purchased the month prior by a reclusive billionaire who has since disappeared.
The nose stairs lower. Eight teenagers descend. It is a foggy morning. The temperature outside is sixty-five degrees. There are two sets of siblings, the rest of the kids are friends.
Two hundred thousand acres = 312.5 square miles. Walking at three miles per hour, it would take one hundred and four hours to leave what is now their property. The prefab housing will be delivered in a week, along with a rainwater collection system, a seed bank, and livestock. This is what a billionaire’s money can buy. A planned community for a few hundred people that will grow in time.
A prophecy has led them here. A quest, if you will. First they had to overcome their anxiety. Then they freed the kid in the cage. They rescued the dragon from the tower and vanquished the Witch and the Wizard. Now this land is their reward. Heaven on Earth.
Utopia.
Simon Oliver steps onto the grass. It has been sixty days since his last pill. His sixteenth birthday is tomorrow. He feels like Noah leaving his ark. Two by two they come. Left behind is a burning world, roiling with hatred.
For Claire, he thinks when he sees the aspen trees waving in the breeze.
*
Recently, I’ve been asking myself—are we as a species suffering from an empathy problem? And if so, is our dilemma that we aren’t feeling enough empathy? Or is empathy itself the problem?
Hear me out.
In 2019, the former first lady, Michelle Obama, gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention. She spoke about polarization and a surge of aggression in America.
“Empathy,” she said. “That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes; the recognition that someone else’s experience has value, too. Most of us practice this without a second thought. If we see someone suffering or struggling, we don’t stand in judgment. We reach out because, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ It is not a hard concept to grasp. It’s what we teach our children…
“But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.”
In her estimation, our biggest problem is a lack of empathy. Me for you and you for me. Her solution is to create more.
Paul Bloom, on the other hand, a moral philosopher, argues that empathy itself is a problem in human interaction, not a solution. He says empathy, “however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.”
Paul Slovic, another moral philosopher, agrees. He says empathy is a poor tool for improving the lives of others, because the human mind is bad at thinking about, and empathizing with, millions or billions of individuals.
“An individual life,” he says, “is very valued. We all go to great lengths to protect a single individual or to rescue someone in distress, but then as the numbers increase, we don’t respond proportionally to that.”