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THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS A blog by Barry Edelson CRUEL JOKE 5:Evil Can Be EradicatedANTAGONĒ You seem rather sad today. QUERIOUS I just came from visiting a sick friend. ANTAGONĒ Is it serious? QUERIOUS I'm afraid so. ANTAGONĒ I'm sorry to hear it. That will put one out of sorts. QUERIOUS For a while, anyway. That's the trouble with unhappiness. It doesn't stay with you. ANTAGONĒ Do you think it would be better if it did? What would be the use of everyone being miserable all the time? QUERIOUS I'm not sure we would actually be miserable, as you put it, if we viewed misfortune in a different way. ANTAGONĒ I don't follow you. QUERIOUS If we believe that the only object of existence is the gratification of desire — as most of us seem to do — then the only way to respond to the realities of illness, hunger, pain, death and so on is to put them out of our minds as quickly as possible. When we're in the midst of suffering, or witnessing someone else's suffering, the rest of the world's concerns tend to fade into insignificance. How often do we hear people say things like, "That doesn't seem very important compared to what my friend so-and-so is going through at the moment." But the feeling doesn't last. Before long, the crisis passes and we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by all the petty nuisances of life that we had just professed to be objectively meaningless. We forget entirely how horrible we felt until we happen to be confronted again with some other awful situation. ANTAGONĒ Isn't that just a way of surviving? We couldn't live very well if we dwelled incessantly on misery. QUERIOUS Why not? ANTAGONĒ Because we're not saints. We ordinary mortals just aren't that selfless. QUERIOUS But shouldn't we be? That's what good people are supposed to do. ANTAGONĒ According to whom? QUERIOUS According to every model of society known to man. Surrendering oneself to the greater good is the ideal that everyone is supposed to live up to, but virtually no one does, except maybe a handful of Albert Schweitzers. Why is it that we go on and on wasting ourselves by dealing with an endless barrage of pointless concerns, as though tragedy weren't unfolding all around us all the time? What would happen if this feeling I have right now didn't fade away as it usually does, but stayed with me day after day for the rest of my life? ANTAGONĒ You would go out of your mind. QUERIOUS Or I would just have a different state of mind. Don't you think that people who experience a terrible misfortune — I don't mean just an accident or a frightening incident, though that would suffice if it were serious enough, but a long-term, life-altering trauma like living through a war or losing a child — don't you think such people view life in a different way afterwards? ANTAGONĒ I'm not so sure. But even if they do, how do they have an advantage over the rest of us? QUERIOUS Because their expectations of life are different. ANTAGONĒ Yes, they're a lot lower. I hardly think you can argue that that's a superior state of being. QUERIOUS Maybe their expectations aren't lower, just realistic. Maybe it's the rest of us who are fooling ourselves. ANTAGONĒ Well, we are, of course. The pursuit of happiness depends on our sustaining the illusion that life can be perfected, but it's a very useful illusion. You seem to think that life would be better if all of us ceased to look out for our own welfare and never lost sight of the abyss. But I don't think you realize what an unmitigated horror life would be if that were actually to happen. QUERIOUS You are missing my point. The only reason that human suffering looks so horrible to us is that nature conspires to make us think only of ourselves. And society institutionalizes selfishness by building structures that encourage us to indulge ourselves while absolving us of the responsibility to care for one another. Do you want to accumulate an obscene amount of wealth? The state will let you do that, and write the laws so you can protect what you own from other people who are trying to do the same thing, and even makes you pay a little income tax — but not too much — so you can feel you've been a good citizen. Are you then worried about your mortality and what you face on the judgment day? That's okay, the church will give you a few simple rules to live by and let you put off the final reckoning until, well, forever, just pay the man at the cash register on the way out. We want just enough subjugation of our own will so we don't feel left out, but not so much that we feel we have to deny ourselves anything. Are these the ingredients of a happy existence? Is that what we're here for, to think only of our own material well being unless we're forced by circumstance or experience to do otherwise? ANTAGONĒ First of all, we're not here for any reason whatsoever. We are the sum of our proclivities and experiences, and we could not survive one day on this planet if we didn't think about ourselves and what was in our best interest. But that doesn't mean we have to think only of ourselves; they are not mutually exclusive ideas. If forgetfulness sets in after a traumatic episode, or whatever you call it, then nature has a reason. I remember having this feeling of yours at the end of seeing the "The Killing Fields." When I first walked out of the movie theater, after watching two hours of the most horrific and unremitting inhumanity, I felt as though mankind was beyond redemption. But that feeling gave way very quickly to another. I felt that I should be grateful that I was able to walk across the parking lot of this shopping mall where people could spend their time and their money on utter trivialities, that all the children of the world should be so lucky as to grow up spoiled and safe and able to indulge their trivial desires. Do you really believe that we wouldn't be better off if no one on the planet ever lived through another war or another holocaust? We simply cannot go on living with our heads stuck in the oven. QUERIOUS But that is exactly my point. We wouldn't wring our hands in despair over every insignificant irritation if we accepted and confronted genuine misfortune instead of trying to sanitize our lives. I know you don't believe there is any object to human existence, but I refuse to accept that there is no possibility of living a better and more satisfying life if only we tried to live in the way we profess to believe is the ideal way: for the benefit of others. What is a moral existence if not one in which we truly subjugate our needs for those of others? It's not enough just to try our best to not hurt anyone. The gentle, passive individual is often held up as a model for others. People say, "Oh, he wouldn't hurt a fly." That's not my definition of a good person. A truly moral person actively tries to help other people; he doesn't stand by while others are being slaughtered. What better definition is there of evil than thinking more of ourselves than we think of others? ANTAGONĒ Perhaps we should care for others more than we care for ourselves, but not to the exclusion of ourselves. You overlook one vital consideration in your noble sentiments: even if we go so far as to say that taking an oath of self-abnegation is the highest calling to which a man can aspire, what makes you think other people's needs are so much more worthy than your own? Why should you subjugate yourself for other people who are more likely to take advantage of you for your generosity than to thank you? QUERIOUS What difference does that make? Either you give up being selfish because it's the right thing to do, or you don't. Worrying about what other people will do is the worst possible reason for not doing what we should. In every situation life presents us, we never fail to ask, "What's in it for me?" Even our system of government enshrines self-interest as a part of human nature that has to be accepted and indulged. ANTAGONĒ Would you prefer a government that forced you to subjugate your will for the benefit of Ñ what? The state? The dictator of the moment? That's how most people have lived through most of history, without the liberty even to contemplate the ideas we're talking about. That's how the Cambodians under the Khmer Rouges were forced to live, to give a fairly recent and thoroughly horrid example. You conveniently ignore the fact that our system also enshrines rights and protections and employs things like the armed forces and the police to enable us to prosper without living in continuous fear of either social collapse or wholesale repression. That's no small accomplishment. QUERIOUS But you're only talking about the way we are governed, not how we ought to live. If we had a sense of moral duty and honor, if we felt some degree of humility in the face of life's horrors and were able to learn from other people's misfortunes instead of waiting to become victims ourselves, we wouldn't need so many laws and neither would we be so vulnerable to social chaos. If we have truly achieved this wondrous balance of unfettered greed and community spirit, as you seem to think we have, then we should have the luxury of advancing to a higher plane — to a society in which grasping for material advantage takes a back seat to helping each other. ANTAGONĒ It's only because you're upset about your friend that I don't tell you what a load of sentimental rubbish you're spouting. QUERIOUS Please, don't spare my feelings. ANTAGONĒ I will accept your premise that the essence of immorality is deliberately hurting others, or allowing them to be hurt, in order to protect or satisfy ourselves. But the sad reality, like it or not, is that every last one of us — all of the so-called saints included — is born with a will to survive, and that will makes selfish animals of us all. There's no value judgment in this assertion, it's a simple statement of biology. Are we able to conceive of a greater notion of human interaction than brutal self-interest? Certainly. And are we capable of overcoming that impulse for the greater good? Yes, at times, but only at times. We cannot become something we are not. Both the will to survive and the predilection for compassion reside in all of us, which means that evil and goodness reside in all of us, and that is why the problem is far more complex than you imagine. There are no perfectly good people like Billy Budd in this world, any more than there are entirely evil people like Claggart. As Captain Vere says, the one is as unnatural in his goodness as the other is in his evil. If you want to argue that we are the sum of our actions, and that the person who performs no end of evil acts can be proclaimed to be evil, and the person who is a paragon of moral virtue similarly can be deemed to be good, then so be it. But this definition is entirely theoretical, because for the overwhelming majority of us humans who are neither unmitigatingly good nor unendurably evil, the question is one of balance. QUERIOUS You are dismissing out of hand the idea that we can be better than we are. ANTAGONĒ We can indeed behave better, but we cannot be better. If you insist on sainthood as the only pathway to happiness, then I am certain that your way will fail to produce any greater fulfillment for the whole of humankind than the rotten mix we have at present. QUERIOUS You yourself admitted that our system of government has produced a better life than ever before. ANTAGONĒ Yes, but by acknowledging the realities of human nature and not denying them. I think we must be grateful for the supremacy of the pragmatic and cynical Hamiltonian view, because the Jeffersonian conception of mankind, while certainly nobler and more appealing to our lofty image of ourselves, is based on the belief in the perfectibility of man. As long as the pursuit of happiness remains an individualized dream it serves its purpose, but, beginning with the French Revolution of which Mr. Jefferson was so enamored, every attempt in the last 200 years or so to achieve such perfection through the reorganization of human society has produced the worst tyrannies ever known on this earth. QUERIOUS All that proves is that governments cannot improve people, and I agree. But that doesn't mean that people can't improve themselves, or, if you insist, at least improve their behavior. We don't even attempt to model ourselves after our own moral heroes. We are simply not taught to pursue a life of self-sacrifice. We are ingrained from the earliest days of consciousness that each of us is here on this earth to get his own. ANTAGONĒ You still won't recognize that a life of true self-sacrifice either leaves oneself open to gross exploitation or is a parasitic existence, feeding off the benevolence of the allegedly unenlightened. Where do you think all of the TV preachers are getting the money for their televised chicanery? From the pockets of naive fools who think they are making a meaningful sacrifice for the benefit of all creation. QUERIOUS And you won't recognize that it just doesn't matter. If a man begs me for money for food and he takes the dollar I give him and bets it on a horse instead, you would call me a soft-hearted fool. But even if I knew what he had done, it wouldn't stop me from giving a dollar to the next person who asked me. I'm not accountable for what others do, I'm only accountable for my own actions. And if you truly believe that your own fulfillment depends utterly on not caring too much about what happens to you, then it literally doesn't matter what happens to you, including whether you get your pocket picked by someone posing as a beggar. ANTAGONĒ You've stated a paradox. You claim that this (as yet undefined) life of self-sacrifice is going to lead to fulfillment, but why would a person who cares nothing for himself care about fulfillment? If you subscribe to the Jeffersonian view, then you acknowledge that personal happiness is a goal worth pursuing. Otherwise, you are perilously close to advocating not morality, buy self-righteousness. QUERIOUS Then I'll put it another way. A person who genuinely cared more for others than for himself, and sought neither gratitude nor solicitude in return, could not possibly suffer the common unhappiness of the material man whose expectations are dependent upon a shallow conception of existence. ANTAGONĒ Then you define unhappiness merely as a manifestation of unfulfilled expectations? QUERIOUS Why do you say "merely"? If a man is unhappy, it is because he has made the foolish mistake of elevating self-gratification to the status of a moral virtue, and is continually let down when the promised rewards are not produced as advertised. ANTAGONĒ Doesn't it occur to you that a man can be unhappy because the world is a dangerous and cruel place in which there is a great deal of suffering? QUERIOUS You've already refuted your own logic. If man possesses an unwavering ability to remove unpleasantness from his consciousness, then his unhappiness must derive from some other source. And I am convinced that if man did not expect fulfillment in a manner which was impossible to attain, then he would not be unhappy. ANTAGONĒ You feel that way today because your friend is dying and you are immersed in morbidity. QUERIOUS Then I hope I stay this way. ANTAGONĒ The triumph of hope over experience. QUERIOUS I refuse to believe that the balance between self-interest and self-sacrifice can't be shifted from the former to the latter. ANTAGONĒ You're sounding more reasonable already. QUERIOUS Perish the thought. ANTAGONĒ You won't feel so strongly about this tomorrow. That will be the disproof of your own argument. QUERIOUS It's not tomorrow yet. ANTAGONĒ Wait. posted October 2007 Return to home page • Send an e-mail All writings on this site are copyrighted by Barry Edelson. Reprinting by permission only. |