Mattering for Dummies

“Mattering” can mean two things. Some things matter ultimately: love, life, security, God — the big stuff. Ultimate mattering is the realm of religion and philosophy. It rarely intrudes into our daily political discourse.

The other kind of mattering is a scale that we use to ration our attention at a given time. When things matter, we pay attention to them. We use our time, our intellectual energy, and our emotional reserves to deal with them and, if they are problems, to find solutions.

When somebody is being chased by a bear, the fact of the bear does a whole lot of mattering — and that mattering is not dependant on the innate value of bears as opposed to other things. It is the immediacy of the bear that makes it matter, not the existential nature of the threat. It is absolutely true that carbohydrates and cholesterol kill far more people in a given year than bears do. However, when there are bears, nobody shouts, “there is an angry bear running towards you and you really need to run, and, by the way, maybe go easy on the carbs.”

That said, you really should go easy on the carbs. And the cholesterol. Once you get away from the bear, these things are going to matter a lot. All health threats matter, and all lives matter. And in the ultimate sense, these things have equal importance. But that does not mean that they deserve an equal share of our…