When you turn on your television to sift through the evening news after sitting on the couch with a glass of chardonnay which you have convinced yourself will be the only one tonight (because you need to ‘decompress’), you cannot help but sigh as you sink deep into the couch: “The world is on fire and it is only getting worse.”
This could easily have been a manifesto on why that is a loaded statement or how it would be better for everyone involved if you keep the bottle of chardonnay out of your arm’s reach. Though the sentiment is not erroneous either. There is so much absurdity happening all over the globe
with much of it providing a reasonable explanation for despair, ethical quandaries, and mental disorders that plague an entire generation.
Trauma has become generational, and each younger generation is inheriting a borrowed world where there seems to be a constant and consistent erosion of authentic values and morals. Of course, one can also argue the essentiality of the doctrines of relativism on ‘no absolute truth’, which emphatically suggest that the power vested in perceiving something in relation to another and proclaiming it right or wrong is firmly rooted in the context attributed to it and influenced by motivators of convictions, conventions, and abstraction from a form of a vantage point.
You might feel that society is on a decline and there are tidings of it getting much worse. Or perhaps you are tired and blue because even if you try to remain a good person, you have experiences every day that make you lose faith in humanity. Maybe you do not see any merit in trying because nobody else seems to care about it.
It is also conceivable that you do not feel that there is any meaning to the life or existence of a deity and you do not have the religious crutch of fear-mongering to force you into acts of conceived selflessness. Chances are you are just sick of it all and each passing day edges you firmly into an attitude of dismissal. It has become difficult to care.
Why do good then? Why be a good person? Why bother to attempt goodness when there is no scoring system in place that rewards you for it? Why make the effort in the face of convenience and blissful ignorance? An answer to that, if this writer be so bold to eschew is that for better or worse, “We live in a society.”, and that perhaps should promulgate an attitude simpler to understand than “It is the right thing to do.”
As the popular saying goes, you can take a horse to the lake but you cannot make it drink water. Contrary to what is propagated in several forms of media these days, there is some merit in thinking that a person will be a good person, and actively care about being good when they want to be good, rather than them being told they should be good. We are a species of everlasting wonder that way. And it is difficult to care when you are
disillusioned.
A contractualist point of view is eschewed by T. M. Scanlon in his book What We Owe Each Other, a fascinating exploration of morality, ethics, and how they are justifiable while giving strong arguments to the titular aphorism. Scanlon believes in the plurality of moral and non-moral values. His theories suggest that the fairness of a moral decision and motives can be well understood by a system of mutual justification and criticism. Simply put, if what you do is justifiable to all the others involved, right or wrong, it should not be an issue.
So how does it all come together then? We live in a world full of diversity in its human populace in all ways conceivable. Some of us are misanthropes, some religious. Some anarchists or liberals or fascists or socialists. Some have no time to formulate an opinion and some cannot resist making one. The differences in our basic biology to the differences in our upbringings. There are more distinguishers and demarcations than this writer can mention, and yet there is still a common denominator that threads every single one of us into a group. The human condition. We are all in this together, this condition of existence.
And the simple fact of the matter is, all of it becomes so much easier to bear when you try to be good. Because as a species of carbon-based bipedalists evolutionarily gifted with intelligence, it is what we owe to each other. A discussion of what constitutes moral or not proves an interesting leeway for many of us to skirt responsibility, an attitude that has been on a rise for the last couple of decades. It has allowed us to bring up walls of comfort around our lives and stay ignorant of the realities of how our actions affect those around us because they do.
While a more robust discussion of the merits and demerits of relativism and contractualism is beyond the scope of this article, it is the hope of this writer that whatever your stance is on morality and responsibility in society, you see the need for more kindness in this world. The human condition unites us, and with a system of mutual goodness, it instills some meaning into the mundane, making life bearable. A little empathy goes a long way. A random act of kindness might just bring a smile to somebody’s face.
A character in The Good Place, a show that captures the zeitgeist of this chief philosophy and one of the finest pieces of media to emerge in this century makes a very valid point about the same (it has an entire episode dedicated to themes of Scanlon’s book too!): “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”
Being good is not about being a goody-two-shoes or that annoying positive character in sitcoms who’s happy even when the world is falling apart around them (though do you really envy that?). Being good is not about being perfect. We might have the best intentions, and the relativists among you might just smile here, but we might still end up making a mess.
We are a flawed species, something that makes us even more endearing, along with the fact that we are capable of accomplishing unimaginable wonders when we actually do make an effort. Especially when there are more reasons not to.
Being good is about giving a shit. Might be a far reach or a coping mechanism, but being good, and spreading kindness? That might just make the pains of existence sweeter.