A Bear – Poles Apart

Who’s responsible for what happens to the world? When nature acts on its own, no one can be blamed, but most of time the human world is run by humans. Who runs it? Presidents and ministers make decisions that affect us all, but is it really their decisions or do they mostly react to inevitable circumstances outside of anyone’s control?

The virus spreads and people react to it, and that again alters the spread and provokes further reactions.  No one can control it, and the leaders can wash their hands as innocent vehicles for what must come. No one is really responsible.

Why is it that all countries have reacted differently to the virus? More or less rational officials sit down and deliberate in their capital cities, and reach a more or less rational conclusion about their plan of action, is that so? Somehow one view will come to dominate, and the debate will be drawn in a certain direction, and when a decision is made it seems to follow naturally from what was said. But who said it? Who did it? No one in particular. No one is responsible.

Politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible depends on what is given. No one, not even the mightiest king, makes a decree out of a context and it’s always possible to hide behind the seemingly inevitable.

No one is ever responsible, is that the conclusion then? Not at all. The very opposite is also true: We are all responsible all the time. Our actions have consequences and who knows what chain of events might get started by a trivial move.

The virus spreads by itself, and we spread it. Events happen, and we take part in the events. The full responsibility cannot be traced, but to plead innocence is irresponsible.

Your Daily Word Prompt – #Responsible – #YDWordPrompt June 12, 2020

Let’s honor the man of courage. Let’s sing his praise, extol his deeds as he stood the ground in face of danger, recount the story of battle and fearless resistance, how he dared to kill without getting killed, risking his life to take life.

The soldier is brave; the paramount example of a hero; the man of violence is a man of virtue.

A thirst for blood and a war to fight. Fearless is thoughtless, a killing machine without mercy. Bravery is a brutal force with no concern for oneself or others. How virtuous!

Yet courage is indeed an ancient virtue. The Greek philosophers were not in doubt: A good man must be brave.

Yes, he must. He must be brave, alright, but that is not enough. Courage alone is nothing and worse than nothing. The one who fights but not for justice, is a rogue. The one who hastens without prudence, is a fool. And without self-control he becomes a reckless berserk.

Should we honor the individual of courage? Should we really praise that person? Yes, if the courage is true; if the courage is courage.

The ancient cardinal virtues are four in number: Courage, justice, prudence and temperance. One cannot exist without the others.

Who are the brave soldiers? Who deserves the medals? Did they fight for a good cause? Did they make wise decisions or did they follow orders? If they did, they were not soldiers. A soldier cannot be brave.

Courage is to face the danger – the danger that is worth facing.

What has worth in life but life? The courageous fight for life.

How? Where? When? In life.

The world is a dangerous place. Every day is a risk. Run and hide and avoid it or stand and fight and do some good.

Let’s be brave.

Your Daily Word Prompt – #Courage – #YDWordPrompt June 11, 2020

Society consists of free-willed humans, so what happens to it must be caused by human decisions. We can’t control the weather and natural disasters may occur, but other than that all events happen because humans make it happen. Often, though, it is as if we are just following an automatic process, but fact remains that all human affairs originate in previous conscious acts.

We know it came about that way, but very often it’s nearly impossible to trace the original decisions that made the present. Individual decisions disappear in the vast sea of causation and the actual scope of alternatives appear to be small.

We could theoretically decide to do something completely different today than we have ever done before, but we are more likely to follow in the existing path. The same is true for those who make the big decisions in society. Politicians are indeed responsible for the direction the community is taking, but they usually operate within a quite narrow range of what appears to be possible. Only rarely does a politician radically break out of what is to be expected, and in such cases, there is a revolutionary situation.

There’s something soothing about the feeling that no radical change is going to be decided upon. That gives us the impression that the fallible human affairs are somehow imitating nature so that nothing happens that wasn’t in a way meant to happen. We can’t blame anyone for a devastating earthquake and if the economy is going down and times are getting harder, it is easier to accept it if it is perceived as largely the work of a nature that no one can control.

Still we are taught to believe that we can influence our society and that change is a good thing. If only there is change for the better…

It is scary to think that sometimes one decision made by one person has changed history. Napoleon, Hitler, Mao; men who didn’t fear power and can’t have worried much about the inevitable bad consequences of even their best decisions. They sure were extraordinarily self-confident. The world never became anything like what they envisioned, but today it is different from what it would have been if these individuals had never existed. How would they have felt if they had known what we now have? Would they have regretted anything? Would they have blamed themselves for the, in their view, unfortunate outcome? Probably not. They must have seen it every day: nothing went exactly according to plan and in this process, people would randomly die around them as unpredictable collateral damage. They were ok with that and must have had a sense of being almost divine masters of destiny when crushing people with their thumb and sending millions into an unknown fate.

Since I don’t believe that these erratic characters were gods, this is particularly disturbing. History has known its ebbs and flows, grand shifts and movements of people and cultures. It’s as if there was an invisible hand regulating it all, as inevitable and impersonal as the one governing the market. There is no one to blame; it happened, and one feels it had to happen. Impersonal history is like nature: it can’t be bad. Earthquakes and floods are not evil since they are not caused by man. History of mankind, the continuous string of tragedy, may be caused by humans, but mostly by no one in particular, so it’s a neutral fact.

Mankind consists of individuals, and individuals disappear in mankind. Both are true, and both are somehow comforting. But when an individual stands out, when a Napoleon among us grabs the scepter and decides destiny, we become subject to arbitrary power and there’s no natural justice anymore.

Change is bad. Every interruption in our habits makes it more difficult to perform our tasks, and if the entire society changes, there will be stress and mental disturbance everywhere. But even if we acknowledge that as a fact, nothing has been said about the level of disturbance and our capacity to handle it. Change is bad, but no change may be worse.

There are clearly psychological differences between people. Some are more and some are less averse to getting their habits disrupted. Some even enjoy it, but even they will differ in what kind of change they tolerate. They will find certain alterations exiting but others completely pointless.

Given our reluctance to change we must feel there is a point to it to support it. That is, something must actually get better. What therefore determines our approval is what we evaluate as good or bad, better or worse. Now, it may seem obvious that better health care, more effective public transportation and an end to homelessness would count as unambiguous improvements (at least it does to me), but everything comes at a cost. For the inherently conservative mind, no change can justify disruptions in the social organism, except maybe the kind of change that may be necessary to save this very organism.

Whatever is, is good, firstly because the fact that it exists proves that it works, but maybe even more importantly, because it belongs to a tradition. Everything that is not a result of a sudden innovation harks back to the past, and if there has been no change at all, the past is fully alive in the present. The past has some emotional value for most of us, but when this value overrules all possible practical values, we are dealing with a staunch conservative. Nothing much can be argued then; the reply will always be: No change, please!

A revolution is a brutal intervention in history. Whether it is good or bad, a new spring or an utter disaster, it interferes with what might be called the natural course of events. There is something psychologically disturbing about the active and conscious interference with nature.

Of course, we humans do that all the time and history of mankind is exactly about this interference, but it’s somewhat comforting to think about history as a sequence of rather inevitable events. Sure, it’s about human beings and this species has a peculiar tendency to act willfully and not at all according to pre-programmed instincts. Still, we fall into habits, and on a large scale, groups of people acquire modes of behavior that even extend over generations; that’s what is called a custom.

Customs ensure that we don’t have to think through everything we do and constantly invent new solutions for how we organize society. It’s a substitute for the animal instincts that free will has taken from us. The ants of an ant hill always know what to do; we have created customary ways of behaving that make society, if not an ant hill then at least something that looks like an organic whole.

Then sometimes revolutions occur; the hill receives a kick and the ants swarm out in orphaned confusion. Obviously, the destruction of society, or of anything else for that matter, could never be good in itself. And what is more, unlike ants we wouldn’t immediately resume our activity and build a new structure in the image of the old one.

Any revolution would seem like a break with nature. In fact, every time social decisions are made that don’t appear to follow smoothly from what we are already doing, a somewhat uncomfortable break with our social organism occurs.

Conservatives dread this. They think all our customs are worth preserving. Are they?