This post is rated P (for preachy)

 recently read an article touting an efficient way to cut carbon emissions from raising and eating beef. It had to do with reducing the overall amount of meat eaten by Americans, but in an innovative way: the report noted that the amounts of beef eaten by individuals varied significantly, and the 20% of the population that ate the most beef actually accounted for half of its consumption. 

The article reasoned that by targeting this group for behavior modification (by whatever method you try), you’d effect a reduction in total beef consumption with significantly less effort than if you applied this effort to the entire population. 

This seemed like a great idea to me, at first. It just makes sense—why spend any effort trying to convince near-vegetarians to eat less beef? But then I thought more about what made the concept so attractive to me, and I soon realized what it was: I’m pretty sure I’m not in that high-beef-eating bracket, so this approach doesn’t require me to change my own behavior at all. Clearly, the best way to solve the problem is to make someone else change their lifestyle!

Admit it, you thought the same thing too, didn’t you? Why is it that we are never so ready to adopt measures that call for sacrifices for the greater good as when that sacrifice is borne by someone else?

Do we need a new power plant, or landfill, or half-way house? That’s fine, but don’t build it near my back yard—build it way over there, those folks won’t mind it.

Not enough jobs to go around? Let’s just make it so some people can’t get those jobs, so there are are more for us. They’re foreigners anyway, so it matters less if they are jobless.

Fossil fuel burning destroying the planet? Don’t reduce my ability to travel whereever and whenever I want to, but rather provide me with newer and cleaner alternatives to driving or flying. And if producing those alternatives pollutes some other part of the world, or if buying those alternatives is out of reach for some people here, well, we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good, don’t we?

We all see this, and do this, every day, in matters large and small. It’s part of the tendency to distinguish between “us” and “them”, sometimes referred to as “othering“. It’s a quintessentially human reaction, but if one isn’t careful it can also be as insidious a human reaction as rage, envy, hatred, or indifference.

One of my favorite books is The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso. My sister Lona gave it to me about 30 years ago, and I still haven’t finished it, or really understood the parts I have read. I love it because it’s so incomprehensible to me. It seems to be about the evolution of culture and society from pre-history to the present, especially the replacement of divine-right rule with various types of “-ocracies” that have taken place over the last three or four hundred years. A central theme of the book, I think (did I mention that I found it incompre­hensible?), is the universal human desire to effect good results for ourselves by ritual human sacrifice. The person being sacrificed represents us symbolically, but isn’t us, not really. His or her sacrifice won’t bother us much personally, but we’re hoping the gods will mistake him or her for one of us, and reward our “sacrifice”.

And one doesn’t need to believe in any gods to believe in the wisdom of sacrificing someone else’s time, or resources, or peace of mind for the good of our own. Somewhere during my Second Age—my work life—I learned a jingle that provides a good rule of thumb for how politicians and the public want to handle issues of revenue: 

This poem is attributed (with variations) to Russell B. Long, a colorful Democratic politician and United States Senator from Louisiana from 1948 until 1987. One of Russell B. Long’s claims to fame is that he is the son of that famous politician Huey Long, who is thought to be the inspiration for Willie Stark, the central character in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Kings Men. I never read it, but I saw the 1949 Oscar-winning movie starring Broderick Crawford.

What a harrowing movie! In the story, Willie Stark rises from corruption-fighting activist to powerful politician and wildly popular demagogue, along the way becoming just as corrupt himself, and at the same time corrupting his supporters and apologists.

Stark did this by promising his power base that their problems were someone else’s fault, and their solutions rested in making these other people change, or quit the scene.

Robert Penn Warren said at the time that the Willie Stark character was not really based on Huey Long, and it certainly wasn’t based on any politicians in power today. But the lesson of the corrupting influence of political and popular power seems just as true now as it ever was.

We are hot into the presidential campaign season, and many of the leading candidates of both parties find willing audiences for their claims that today’s ills will all be cured by imposing on other people—the poor, the rich, immigrants, the uneducated, the boomers, the millenials, the progressives, the prejudiced, the snowflakes, the deplorables.

I’d ask that as you work through all the claims and promises being slung around this year, take a moment to recognize the part of you that wants to see the sacrifice needed to tackle today’s problems borne by somebody other than you and yours. This recognition won’t let others off the hook, but it will help your conscience make more informed and objective decisions, and differentiate what’s good for all from what just feels good for you.

And yes, I am talking to you, gentle reader, not just to those hard-headed guys behind the tree who can’t see how wrong they are and how right we are! The country and the world have enough problems to go around, that’s sure, and different problems effect each of us more or less severely. But to tackle them, our country and our world are going to have to get more united than we have been. I don’t think that can happen as long as every faction is working hard so to believe some other faction to blame.

This random poster popped up on my screen the other day (well, probably not really random, the Zuck knows all my (and your) thoughts). To me, it says in under a dozen words what I’ve been fumbling for this whole post:

Gimme an amen!

Thanks for your patience,
Dorn
2/28/2020