Peace and goodwill to all
Taking the season's greetings and applying them on a full-time basis might just make the world a better place.
If the expression "ordinary person" applied to anyone - and assuredly, except in the most reductive of statistical senses, it does not: the rule everywhere is individuality, and wonderfully so - you could get few gamblers to bet against a world-wide poll showing a massive majority in favour of the following (very meaningful) abstractions: peace, stability, justice. Why, then, is there so little of any of these things in so many parts of the world?
The question is only partly rhetorical. The part that is rhetorical recognises that there are many reasons why these abstractions remain so, and alas a lot of them are not just down to the activities of competing state-or-economy-controlling power elites (though they are the ones with the money and the biggest guns, and therefore are the major cause), but from lack of knowledge about other people and other ways, and the resulting possibilities for suspicion, fear and hostility on the part of enough "ordinary people" who otherwise wish that those abstractions would become concrete.
It's a mess: it means that in regard to what most of us most want, we are ourselves parties to ensuring we are least likely to get it.
Lip service is paid to these abstractions at this time of year, in parts of the world where a seasonal reminder occurs that they are meant to be our best goals. Of course it is a good thing that for a couple of weeks people send one another cards and greet one another in the street with professions of hope that goodwill and peace on earth will reign, whatever the basis of the hope: which for a humanist consists in taking very seriously indeed the obvious fact of the difference in people's lives between suffering and joy, deprivation and opportunity, captive minds and open hearts; conjoined with a profound desire to see everyone everywhere liberated into the rich possibilities that being human can bring. But how much better still if we sent each other cards and said these things all year round.
"Real people" rather than "ordinary people": that among other things is what a sense of the individuality of individuals means, and it should at very least give anyone pause who thought about the consequences of big political and economic decisions, like going to war or failing to control industrial pollution. In particular, it is where thoughts of the near-universal desiderata of peace, stability and justice typically obtrude, because they are essential parts of the framework that help to make individual good lives possible.
That suggests the other aspect to be addressed: the individual responsibility to stop thinking of others as bearers of singular identities differentiated only by generic characteristics: "Jew, black, this, that" - these are always a potential source of horrors. And people who think of themselves under the rubric of a singular identity ("I am an X") do themselves a disservice as well as those upon whom they place the distorting demand to treat them just in that one light. In an ideal world - the one where peace, stability and justice are the norm and their breakdown a terrible aberration - individual human beings would encounter one another first and foremost as exactly that: individual human beings, and whatever else they are (women, men, Christians, atheists, tennis players, Labour supporters, lovers of film, Stones fans, regular holidayers in Turkey, and so on for the many other things any one person could be) would be additional to that, and they would merit (or sometimes not) friendship and respect on the basis of their personal qualities, and only secondarily for some of their major choices about beliefs, politics and the rest. You might disagree with someone's views on a number of topics, but if he is kind, thoughtful and honourable that will trump much, which shows what really matters here.
In that ideal situation, seasonal hopes about goodwill and peace would be a lot less a matter of mere hope than they are now. But that is no reason for not continuing to hope. So I wish peace and goodwill to you all, and a happy new year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/25/peaceandgoodwilltoall
It's a mess: it means that in regard to what most of us most want, we are ourselves parties to ensuring we are least likely to get it.
Lip service is paid to these abstractions at this time of year, in parts of the world where a seasonal reminder occurs that they are meant to be our best goals. Of course it is a good thing that for a couple of weeks people send one another cards and greet one another in the street with professions of hope that goodwill and peace on earth will reign, whatever the basis of the hope: which for a humanist consists in taking very seriously indeed the obvious fact of the difference in people's lives between suffering and joy, deprivation and opportunity, captive minds and open hearts; conjoined with a profound desire to see everyone everywhere liberated into the rich possibilities that being human can bring. But how much better still if we sent each other cards and said these things all year round.
The task is an essential combination of the political and (take the word in a strictly secular sense to denote the fulfilment of the needs, aspirations and potentialities of heart and mind) spiritual. While there is poverty and conflict, millions are condemned to the loss of possibility that, as a result, makes "village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons" of them. What chiefly stands in their way is the fact that they are regarded as nothing but instruments (and at other times as obstacles) to the wealth and power of the few. The fact that things have ever been thus is no excuse, although surprisingly this is a premise of all conservatisms; there are precious few institutions of any kind which are not, just in virtue of being institutions, conservative in some way or degree.
Immanuel Kant argued that the arena of moral endeavour should be regarded as a "kingdom of ends". That everyone should always be treated as an end in himself or herself, never as a means to anything else. Think what it would mean if everyone actually thought this way. And this, incidentally, is the least of it: I would include all animals in this domain, as "moral patients" although they are not moral agents - that is, as worthy of moral regard. But the immediate task is to prevent people being too often and too reflexively thought of in the mass, individually indistinguishable, as numbers and statistics, treated as units for employment in industry or war, or for marketing purposes, or as percentages of votes.
When thinking about future housing and infrastructure, and estimating demographic effects on school and hospital provision, planners have to think in the lump, of course; just as they must when organising aid for refugees. But good planning gets down to particularities sooner rather than later. When the result includes such details as (say) toilets that have twice as many water closets in the ladies' as in the gents' you get the approving feeling that someone succeeded in planning for real people at last."Real people" rather than "ordinary people": that among other things is what a sense of the individuality of individuals means, and it should at very least give anyone pause who thought about the consequences of big political and economic decisions, like going to war or failing to control industrial pollution. In particular, it is where thoughts of the near-universal desiderata of peace, stability and justice typically obtrude, because they are essential parts of the framework that help to make individual good lives possible.
That suggests the other aspect to be addressed: the individual responsibility to stop thinking of others as bearers of singular identities differentiated only by generic characteristics: "Jew, black, this, that" - these are always a potential source of horrors. And people who think of themselves under the rubric of a singular identity ("I am an X") do themselves a disservice as well as those upon whom they place the distorting demand to treat them just in that one light. In an ideal world - the one where peace, stability and justice are the norm and their breakdown a terrible aberration - individual human beings would encounter one another first and foremost as exactly that: individual human beings, and whatever else they are (women, men, Christians, atheists, tennis players, Labour supporters, lovers of film, Stones fans, regular holidayers in Turkey, and so on for the many other things any one person could be) would be additional to that, and they would merit (or sometimes not) friendship and respect on the basis of their personal qualities, and only secondarily for some of their major choices about beliefs, politics and the rest. You might disagree with someone's views on a number of topics, but if he is kind, thoughtful and honourable that will trump much, which shows what really matters here.
In that ideal situation, seasonal hopes about goodwill and peace would be a lot less a matter of mere hope than they are now. But that is no reason for not continuing to hope. So I wish peace and goodwill to you all, and a happy new year.
Mark, thanks for the kind words to my Sunday Reflection post. Regards, Dan Cooksey, Corrales, NM USA
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