ON SAVING THE WORLD, HOW SILLY

In newfound despair, Eric said this to Will yesterday: "The idea of changing the world is pretentious and naive. I'm talking to myself mostly here. Sure, it may be noble to commit yourself to such a cause, even if it is possible that doing so is within your means and capacities. But making that kind of promise is weird, because to whom are you making the promise, really? "The world?" The poor? The toucans? Hm. No one tangible. This wouldn't be too problematic if promising to change the world prevents you from promising to be a good man otherwise. I keep going back to the main choice here: Save the World or Be an Awesome Husband, Family Man and Community Member? The promise to do the former is a kind of Stepping Forward, a kind of "I'LL do it! Give ME your tired, your pour, your huddled masses...". Doing the latter is just fulfilling a promise already imposed upon you by living. None of us asked to be born in the first place, and none of us asked for responsibility, but we have it nonetheless, and more than enough of it as it is. So why do we go and voluntarily take the world off of Atlas' shoulders?

"All the stories of reluctant heroes: Odysseus, Aeneas, William Wallace, Eric Hartman: these are good men because they were afflicted with neglecting their homes and hearts to fight elsewhere. I say until we feel duty-bound to save something greater (like, for instance, when the English nobility kill our woman, or the Trojans steal a pretty girl from our town), we shouldn't go looking for it."

Eric said to himself today: "On the other hand: WHAT responsibilities am I talking about? We're all recent graduates who come from big towns with very tenuous residues of "community" still lingering. We don't have a home or a place to commit our hearts yet. The modern world is designed to push bright eyed kids like us OUT THERE (The final speeches of college graduation can be summarized thus: 'Go forth and kick ass'), and our fixation for saving the world is precisely because we've realized how badly it needs to be saved. We HAVE been called to arms, by mere education and world experience. Ecuador. Indonesia. Guatemala. Frat lords. The world is our home, because we have no other, and it is under attack. What choice do we have but to entertain the idea of saving the world?

"To be a part of this newfangled global community, and to fight for it when it needs to be fought for, is by mere fact of scale a quixotic quest. The problems in our own backyards now are just the problems that have been simmering in poorly reported corners of the world for decades. I spoke of Odysseus, Eric Hartman, William Wallace. They fought to preserve the places and people they cared about, and to do so they had to neglect them, leave them and fight the good fight elsewhere. They say, "Think Globally, Act Locally." But it appears that to Live Locally, sometimes you have to Act Globally.

"But how to do this in a losing battle? How to feel like you've saved anything when annual rates of forest loss are increasing, 90 million people are added kicking and screaming to our global population a year, and land conversion and population both will not get better until they get significantly worse over the next 40 years? How can we expect to make a difference when the vast majority of the people don't WANT us to? In Mexcico City Will has noticed that people don't care whether their problems get fixed. People don't want to be made whole again, students don't really want to learn, and everywhere moral myopia is embraced as bliss rather than sickness.

"In an earlier post, Will wrote: "I am interested in what works." As for myself, I have been interested in what Fixes. Now I see the naivety of my ways. We are to the point at which what fixes is not necessarily what works, and maybe the best thing we can do is go down with this ship willingly, but pass out as many life preservers as possible before it is too late. In which case, the blind idealists and social entrepreneurs out there have it right, and my focus on effective crisis management has been just as myopic as the morality with which we have governed ourselves since the dawn of time. Shall we throw up our hands, accept that it is too late to reverse the Ratchet of Progress, and focus now on losing together and with compassion?

"We live in a time of Odyssean tragedy, Faustian choices and Darwinian reckoning. How, then, shall we Lose?"