On Sunday, my friend Steve stood up in our Quaker meeting and gave his troubled testimony about the killings in Gaza and the West Bank. He expressed his bewilderment, particularly as he is of Jewish heritage.

His testimony shouted to my condition. I have been struggling with this for decades-notably concerning Israel. Though this one nation’s crimes barely register in the world’s history of inhumanity. I spoke about my visit with Ellie to Oradour sur Glâne, back when she was 8 or 9 years old. I’ve told this story time and again; the root of it is that the massacre that day in 1944 wasn’t just about Nazis, or Germans, or even men. It was a fundamental failure of one group of human beings to value the humanity of another group of human beings. The question that keeps coming back to me about caring. In his last book, The Rose Field, Philip Pullman attributes the malaise in the ‘other’ world, and also in Lyra’s, to a decline in caring – what he calls ‘alkahest’, the universal alchemical solvent that undoes everything.

But is ‘caring’ innate? Is it a recent phenomenon? Is it an outlier emotion? Is it a response triggered by particular circumstances, requiring, say, an acknowledged affinity with the subject of one’s care? Does the same care for one’s fellow human beings apply to other living beings, to less animate, more abstract subjects such as nature?

Another theme of Pullman’s writing is the role and power of imagination. Is it possible to care without an imaginative connection to the subject of one’s care? How does care differ from empathy? Are they synonymous or complementary?

On the other side of this, I want to explore what it is that stops us from caring. Zigi Shipper described the death march from Auschwitz, and of a journey in a truck, where the crushed mass of humanity was only survivable if you fought to the surface and avoided suffocation below. When he was being prompted to end his talk and leave the stage, he insisted on giving us this last message: “Don’t hate. Love.” Coming from this man, after his experiences, this was powerful. But does “not caring” equate to “hating” or is it a point between “loving” and “hating?”

I remember a conversation with my friend Jonathan Kemp, around the time of my transition, in 2010. We were talking about all the troubles in the world: Jonathan said that he felt overwhelmed by them. We asked ourselves if it was possible to care about everything, or if we had to set limits on it, focus our care on a manageable range of subjects.

As things stand today, I have reached a point where I have to close my eyes and ears to many of the troubles in the world, or risk self-annihilation. I feel numb at times in the face of so much suffering.

Something else comes to mind: when one travels at rush hour on public transport, one is forced to encounter a mass of humanity so intimately that the usual sensibilities – personal space, for example – have to be suspended. As well as that, it is tempting not to care if someone nearby looks tired, in greater need of a seat, as one would never get to sit down. I’ve long thought that the great thing about London, that no one cares who you are or who you love, is also the worst thing, that people in cities may not care for one another. I suspect that this is a misreading of London, as there are many communities, both geographical and affinity-based, where people care for one another. It is probably more the case that the commuters, people who live in smaller, apparently more caring places, are the ones who don’t have the time for the suffering of those around them.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in this; at the heart of what I’ve written is a simple question: what does it mean to care?