Sunday 3 December 2006

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the anime Negima?

If we all improve...

A wiser man than I, Leo Tolstoy, beat me to this by decades: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." Now and then people discover this anew, one here and another there. One of the most unexpected places I found it was in this song (and not a very impressive song, in my opinion) prefacing a Japanese anime (TV cartoon). "If we all improve, the world will change dramatically" says the running girl. This seems like a good bet. We're probably not going to see it in my lifetime, though, although I wouldn't say no thanks to living that long.

Social engineering has become very advanced in the liberal countries, for leftist values of liberty. Social democracies and similar. Like the all-out Communism and Socialism that partly inspired them, they have a view of human behavior that is entirely materialist, and more than that, financial. Good and evil are just primitive terms, to them, for economic conditions. In order to discourage crime, we should not tell people that they must be more moral; instead, we should give them money so they can live a respectable life.

The disturbing part is that it works, to some degree. It certainly works better than the American way of preventing crime, which consists in taking revenge after the fact. While some people just enjoy cruelty or have no limit to their greed, there really are a lot of people who just want to be respected by their peers. When they have stuff, and a family of sort, they don't want to risk losing it by messing up big style. So changing the world by social engineering does have some success.

***

But a civilization based on equality has drawbacks as well. There are limits to how far people advance along the ethical scale when their motivation is simply to protect the good life. This will never get people to go the second mile. And it is those who go the second mile who stretch our concepts of what it means to be good. It is they who move the markers, it is they who claim new land. People who go beyond the call of duty, and beyond what is needed to be respected. In fact, people who are disrespected, suspected and reviled for not following the rules. If everyone sold their property and gave the money to the poor, the economy would collapse and civilization would come to a halt. But it is necessary that some people do things like that, that it actually happens from time to time, to wake up those who thought that not murdering or raping anyone was enough to be a saint.

Some people are very moral and yet they do not inspire others. They may earn respect, but somehow they fail to earn love. But there are others, who some may think crazy, but there is something about them. They set fire to the spirit of some they meet. People see their lives and think: There is more to life than I imagined! And those who see, wake up, and they begin to stretch their willpower and struggle against the bonds of convention that seemed generously loose before.

And I think if there were enough of these people, those who truly care, then the world would change in a different way. In a way that no economic incentive could manage. But I realize that I am not going to be one of those who make it happen. All I can do is make people think; I cannot make them love.