Sort of political Monday

Political religion
Walter Russell Mead wraps up a three piece series on the failure of Al Gore with some questions:

The serial rise and fall of these vacuous civil society movements and the peculiar grip they exercise over the minds of some otherwise intelligent people is an important subject: why do so many people who want to help solve global problems waste so much time and money and, sometimes, do so much harm?  Is there some way to harness that energy and idealism to causes and strategies that might do more good?  What does the repeated rise and fall of clueless but well educated and well placed enthusiasts teach us about the state of our civilization and the human condition?

I'm not sure I can answer any of those questions but I'm pretty sure that most human activity is vanity and  that nothing will change that. I don't think we can change that but I do think we could be considerably more self aware about it.

Ottawa had its "Run for the Cure" a little while ago and walking along the route afterwards I was reading some of the inspirational stuff people had written to help the runners keep going. The one that really jumped out at me was this:

You are making a  difference!

It jumped out at me because, in all honesty, no you aren't making a difference. There is very little you can do about breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, ALS, poverty or the climate. I'm sorry but you are deluding yourself. You can do particular things but these big things you can't do much about.

Yeah, someday, someone might find a cure for cancer and it may even turn out that that person who finds the cure was working on a project funded by a run for the cure but pick any woman randomly out of the Run for the Cure crowd and she is not making a difference. (And it may be that cancer is incurable. Poverty certainly seems to be.)

And it ought to trouble us a lot more than it does that we dress up what are really self-indulgences as making a difference. Charity balls, charity golf tournaments, charity runs ... it's odd how we keep dressing up things we really want to do anyway so we can pass them off as "making a difference". If someone ever finds a way to frame binging on junk food or masturbation as making a difference the entire economy will come to a great grinding halt.

A lot of politics consists of creating and nurturing problems that can be solved so as to satisfy our vanity that we are making a difference. An awful lot of what we praise as the opposite of selfishness is the very height of selfishness.

On the other hand, the most generous, caring people in our world work at jobs to make money. Then they take this money and invest it, or build homes with it, or buy stuff with it. They do all this so they can take care of the people they love. And yet we often delude ourselves into thinking them selfish.

I'm not saying don't play golf or run for charity. Pick your charities well and go ahead and do it. But remember that these are things you do after you finish doing the really important things. And you can do as much by quietly writing a cheque and handing it over with the request that your donation remain anonymous, thereby avoiding some (but not all) of the temptations of vanity.

And we should always remember that these are things that don't make a lot of difference in this world. The world will be what it is no matter what you do. There will be poverty, war and disease and not even the most powerful people on the planet can change that.

Write the words "You are lying to yourself" on a piece of paper and pin it up somewhere so you can go and read it any time you get swept up in the vanity of thinking that you and others really are making a difference. Then to your spouse or some other person you love and do something nice for them. That won't make a difference. It will just be the right thing to do.

Happy independence day! Our God-given rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness really are the things that matter most.