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Mattering for Dummies

Michael Austin
5 min readAug 8, 2020

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“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 attention at every time. The health threat that matters the most is the one that is currently threatening my life. And the social threats that matter the most are the ones that post the greatest current risk to our society.

Here are a few things that I would propose as ground rules for mattering when the term is used in a social or political — as opposed to a theological — sense. Your rules may differ, but this is an attempt to get us started by creating a shared definition of what it means to matter. I will begin with what mattering is not:

  • Mattering is not an innate characteristic. It does not describe a fixed quality of something: a red car, a big house, a mattering person. Different things matter to all of us at different times, and we are adapted to give the highest priority in mattering to the things most immediate to our survival. When I am being chased by a bear, the mattering is quite specific. “All bears matter” in a very…

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Michael Austin
Michael Austin

Written by Michael Austin

Michael Austin is a former English professor and current academic administrator. He is the author of We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America’s Civic Tradition

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