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This morning Pistachio decided to jump up on the table and pose a grand question to the world. My immediate reaction was, what are we talking about? To which she responded, anything you want.
When I think of the question – what does one person “do” about all the evils in the world? – I immediately think of this:
“The dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.”
That’s the money line from a longer quote from C.S. Lewis’ Why I Am Not a Pacifist.
“It may be asked whether, faint as the hope is of abolishing war by Pacifism, there is any other hope. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries must be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so. Hence the fanatacism of the Marxists, Freudians, Eugenists, Spiritualists, Douglasites, Federal Unionists, Vegetarians, and all the rest. But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.”
I am not interested in bringing Pacifism into this particular discussion. But there are some points that are immediately applicable.
- We are not all the star heroes of the narratives in which we find ourselves.
- Superhero cowboys with Grand Schemes are overrated.
- Do good where you can.
- Think specifically.
- Think specifically.