There is a cascade of questions: how can I live a good life? What is the value of goodness? What is the essence of value? We might assess our lives as either good or bad. We might say that good is better than bad, and that we should be good because being bad is the only alternative. But surely being neither good nor bad is an option. It must be possible to observe without assessing. This is what I want. I want to leave nothing in the world.
Some will say that neutrality is simply in the bad category, and that we must want to live positive lives. Let them say so, and let them condemn me if I live a life of non-participation. I have no interest in politics or society. I have no interest in justice or the common good. To some, saying this is the same as saying that I'm bad or that I'm at best contributing to the bad. Is appeasing critics to be my sole motivation for engaging with this evaluating system?
Perhaps I should want to make the world better. But I don't believe that "better" is very meaningful in a broad-context discussion about society. Like "worse," "better" is a value that waxes and wanes. Almost everyone is forgotten. So few contributions will last. There is no such thing as posterity. Forward motion is never so simple as a step, and it is often only achieved in conjunction with motion in the other direction. What I see when I regard the world I inhabit is no deliberate improvement. I see people pushing each other in the mud, clamoring for an escape from each other. Their condemnations sink and vanish with their commendations. I see a world that is older than any of our concerns, even the greatest ones, and that has seen death on a scale that we, for all our righteous horror at the things we do to each other, can only discuss academically. In other words, I am happiest as part of a world that's bigger than people.
But it's difficult to separate. The Little World wants you in it. It wants your voice that it may shout you down, your ambition that it may humiliate you, and your creativity that it may abandon you. Even the best and the most beautiful, even the wisest and all they do to drag the Little World toward a future less horrible, become nothing on a long enough timeline. That timeline is all I see, and I'm baffled that others don't see it. When people cry doom for all mankind because their political candidate lost, I feel confused that they don't see how even the worst atrocities roll by like wind on the meadow. When I see the terrible ways we treat each other, I process them as part of something that keeps going even when we stop.
I want the meadow. Leave me there. Let others judge me how they will. Their decrees are gone the minute they issue them, gone into space we can't hope to fill, dead as the Cambrian no matter how they may impact me. Good and bad, life and death, triumph and tragedy are dispassionately part of everything. And so am I for better, for worse, or for neither.
Some will say that neutrality is simply in the bad category, and that we must want to live positive lives. Let them say so, and let them condemn me if I live a life of non-participation. I have no interest in politics or society. I have no interest in justice or the common good. To some, saying this is the same as saying that I'm bad or that I'm at best contributing to the bad. Is appeasing critics to be my sole motivation for engaging with this evaluating system?
Perhaps I should want to make the world better. But I don't believe that "better" is very meaningful in a broad-context discussion about society. Like "worse," "better" is a value that waxes and wanes. Almost everyone is forgotten. So few contributions will last. There is no such thing as posterity. Forward motion is never so simple as a step, and it is often only achieved in conjunction with motion in the other direction. What I see when I regard the world I inhabit is no deliberate improvement. I see people pushing each other in the mud, clamoring for an escape from each other. Their condemnations sink and vanish with their commendations. I see a world that is older than any of our concerns, even the greatest ones, and that has seen death on a scale that we, for all our righteous horror at the things we do to each other, can only discuss academically. In other words, I am happiest as part of a world that's bigger than people.
But it's difficult to separate. The Little World wants you in it. It wants your voice that it may shout you down, your ambition that it may humiliate you, and your creativity that it may abandon you. Even the best and the most beautiful, even the wisest and all they do to drag the Little World toward a future less horrible, become nothing on a long enough timeline. That timeline is all I see, and I'm baffled that others don't see it. When people cry doom for all mankind because their political candidate lost, I feel confused that they don't see how even the worst atrocities roll by like wind on the meadow. When I see the terrible ways we treat each other, I process them as part of something that keeps going even when we stop.
I want the meadow. Leave me there. Let others judge me how they will. Their decrees are gone the minute they issue them, gone into space we can't hope to fill, dead as the Cambrian no matter how they may impact me. Good and bad, life and death, triumph and tragedy are dispassionately part of everything. And so am I for better, for worse, or for neither.
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