Within the past few months, plastic straw bans have become all the rage. Last July, Seattle lead the initiative becoming the first major U.S. city to ban plastic straws. Corporations like Starbucks are starting to follow suit as well. This seems to show a growing movement towards helping the environment. After all, plastic waste is one of the biggest threats to our environment right now. Research has predicted that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish (Sutter). Banning single use plastic straws seems like a logical step towards helping our earth, but it appears that might not be the case. This is just one of many small scale environmental “fixes” that is encouraged among society that actually doesn’t do enough to help. Not only that, but these short sighted solutions actually do a lot of damage to the disabled community as a whole.. Short-sighted, small scale environmental “fixes” that are placed on the consumer like straw bans are similar to the emphasis on empathy, especially empathy to animals, shown in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, emphasizing a sort of empathy that hurts society more than it actually helps.
There have been claims that Americans use 500 million straws per day, which seems to lead to a catastrophic amount of waste, but studies suggest that straws make a much smaller dent on our ecological footprint in the ocean than we think. Straws account for less than one percent of all the plastic waste in the ocean. When exaggerated numbers like this are presented, people result to quick, short sighted solutions and then don’t think about the consequences. Most people don’t realize that straws exist to help the disabled drink beverages, and having them available at all restaurants helps make their lives a lot easier and restaurants more accessible.
Small, simple solutions like ditching plastic straws have become extremely popular, not because they’re extremely impactful, but because of how easy they are to incorporate into everyday life and it becomes something to flaunt that shows how much someone cares about the environment. There are countless examples of this environmentalism-lite, between taking shorter showers, turning off lights and recycling. Though these all help, they aren’t impacting the environment as much as people think. What it’s mostly doing is making people feel good for helping out and then ignoring how it affects the disabled community.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a similar phenomenon of small scale empathy expectations is also placed onto society. All of the humans in this society follow a religion called “Mercerism” which follows the plight of Wilbur Mercer, a human that was persecuted while climbing a mountain. This religion was spread to help unite humanity, or what was left of humanity on Earth after World War Terminus. The main tenant of Mercerism is empathy. Humans are taught to be empathetic towards each other and the only separation between humans and the undesirable androids is a presence of empathy.
The odd thing about Mercerism is that the people of this book don’t seem to exhibit that much empathy. There is a huge focus on it, people constantly remind each other to be empathetic. None of the “regular” humans act empathetically out of their own free will, they only act empathetically to show off to their neighbors and look good to them. Rick Deckhart finds out that his neighbors horse is pregnant and says to him “for you to have two horses and me none, that violates the whole basic theological and moral structure of Mercerism” (Dick, 10). Deckhart is only playing this empathy card to try to get his neighbors horse. He’s extremely jealous of his neighbor, for he has no real animals to tend after. Deckhart has an electric sheep he looks after, but he despises it, constantly talking about how embarrassed he is of the sheep and how much shame it brings him. Yet he can’t get rid of the sheep because he knows “how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and anti-empathic.” (Dick, 13). The only reason he tends after an animal is to show his neighbors how empathetic he is. His only sign of empathy is a shame, a show, which is similar to how some people see straw bans and other environmental “fixes”.
This isn’t the only example of lost empathy in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. When the Earth was destroyed by World War Terminus, most humans left the earth because of radioactive dust that was left over from the war that had debilitating effects on humans. If someone was exposed to too much fog, they would become physically disabled, in that they couldn’t reproduce, or mentally disabled, becoming a “chickenhead”. The novel follows one of these “chickenheads”, John Isidore, and he is shown to be the most compassionate and empathetic character we see. He is empathetic towards animals, humans and androids alike, showing true, genuine empathy for all of them. Yet these “chickenheads” aren’t allowed to immigrate off of the destroyed Earth to the new colonies on Mars because of their afflictions from the dust.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dick is trying to say that empathy has lost its meaning, it is no longer a genuine emotion and become something done for show, often leading to short-sighted reactions that end up harming a portion of the population. It has become something to flaunt to you neighbor, remind them how much more empathetic than you are than them. In the novel Mercerism rose as a product to of World War terminus, and in real life environmentalism rose as a product of climate change. Both of these have good intentions, but end up short sighted and damaging. People become empathetic for show and don’t truly consider who they’re affecting. This point is more relevant now than even before. A University of Michigan study has show that current college students are 40 percent less empathetic than those who went to school twenty to thirty years ago (Grasgreen).
Humans are only doing these small fixes like straw bans and recycling because it helps them feel like they’re making a difference. It makes them look good. They’re not truly helping the environment and addressing the root of the issue. They’re content in doing tiny fixes for two reasons; the problem is extremely large and society doesn’t expect them to solve this issue. People choose to ignore the true stakes of the issue, just going for the most superficial part of it, making them seem more contentious, but not too much so that they would become overzealous. In modern society, empathy has become a balancing act, dancing between caring enough to make others admire you, but not too much as to make others uncomfortable. People never stop to think that these “solutions” hurt the disabled around them.
Similarly, the humans in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep look after an animal because society wants them to, but no one really acknowledges why they should look after animals. Animals initially became so coveted because most became extinct or endangered from the global war. The humans are the reason most animals are extinct and now that the war is over, they have to look after animals, but they just do it now to look empathetic to each other. They don’t do it to help recover the animal populations that were destroyed by war. Not only that, but restricting some of the population to Earth to create a “better” colony on Mars might seem good, so they can pass on “desirable” traits, but these limitations just hurt people who are already at a disadvantage. That’s extremely similar to a lot of these environmental quick fixes people do. We never think of why we recycle besides of the fact that it “saves the planet”. Most people don’t stop and think that we need to save the planet because of damages tracing back from before the industrial revolution, and they don’t stop to think that something drastic needs to be done to counteract the dire circumstances.
Part of the reason this is such a huge problem is because empathy can only be stretched so far. Empathy is a nice problem, but when it’s just for show, that’s a huge issue. Even if it isn’t just for show, empathy still isn’t extremely effective on its own. It’s suggested that empathy is only the first step in helping others, and it can be damaging if empathy is on its own. Empathy can be used as a step to make a desire to help others, but it can also create apathy or disgust when someone or something is too foreign (Recuber). It’s easiest to empathize with what we are similar to, but it’s extremely hard to try to empathize with an animal that’s so different from us, or from something so much bigger that it becomes abstract. That’s exactly what happens in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with the animals, especially the electric ones, and what happens in reality with humans trying to empathize with the health of our environment. This is what leads to caring about things for show.
People need to realize why we do things to help the environment and care more, instead of just caring for show and doing the small things that make us look good. Just like caring for an animal because society makes you, instead of caring for an animal because most animals are almost extinct. Society gets caught up in fixing some small symptoms of a bigger issue. It’s all about “reducing straw waste” instead of “reducing all waste” or “saving the manatees” instead of “stopping global warming”.
When empathy becomes expected of us, that’s when we need to question why we’re expected to feel empathetic. If society is forced to feel empathetic towards something, it’s important to question why we’re empathetic towards that thing. Why do the humans need to care for the animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They need to care because almost all animals have gone extinct through a world war. Caring is enforced in order to try to save the wildlife of Earth, and to try to help the human race maintain its humanity. In modern society, people are told to recycle and reject single use plastics because of a huge plastic waste issue on Earth that is endangering the health of the world.
This compassion is forced on the common people and that’s the real problem. It’s not their fault the animals are almost extinct. It’s not the fault of the consumer there is so much plastic waste. The plastic waste is forced on them with excessive packaging, a readiness of single use plastics and a bombardment of other ridiculous plastics that no one is asking for. In both of these instances, people are forced to act a certain way to fix certain problems and then are shamed if they don’t, yet these problems are not created by them. The ones that created the problem remain unaffected, still perpetuating the problem and not feeling bad at all. Making people empathize with small things helps blind them to the larger systemic issues. All the empathy is forced onto regular people by a larger force. It’s hard to focus on the big picture when you’re looking at a small detail.
Having expectations to care for something can be helpful, but the purpose might become lost, or the empathy may become too distilled. When someone is too focused on a small issue, they react quickly, and these reactions end up hurting others. It’s hard for people to focus on empathizing with the disabled when society has forgotten about them, actively silencing this community, and then leads attention towards another object to empathize with. Once the purpose is lost, too distilled, or even causing collateral damage, then the empathy becomes basically useless. At that point, why even bother.
Works Cited:
Seattle Becomes First Major U.S. City to Ban Straws – The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/07/01/seattle-becomes-first-major-u-s-city-to-ban-straws/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.923b6f3f83fe. Accessed 4 Oct. 2018.
CNN, John D. Sutter. “How to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction.” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/12/world/sutter-vanishing-help/index.html. Accessed 4 Oct. 2018.
Recuber, Tim. “What Becomes of Empathy?” Cyborgology, 20 July 2016, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/07/20/what-becomes-of-empathy/.
Grasgreen, Allie. “Empathizing 101” Inside Higher Ed, 24 November, 2010 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/24/empathizing-101
