Tag Archives: good

The popular apocalypse

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     Western culture today—-traditionally and in the popular sense—-is rife with apocalyptic narratives. Our fascination with end-times is, on one hand, couched in a history of Manichean religious conviction, and on the other, a new symptom of our growing disillusionment with modernity. Democracy, capitalism, globalization, science, and technology—-the many arms of the project of progress—-have failed to rid the world of evil as we imagined they would. Fairness, equality, standing, mastery over nature, control over our destinies—-all were promised, but delivered only piecemeal if at all.
     Now we begin to taste the bitter fruit: that “modern” social orders are no more immune to the undesirable aspects of human nature than those of our “ancient” counterparts. Modernity has, in many ways, served only to amplify the human capacity for evil and to exacerbate the very problems we sought modernization to remedy.
     In our disillusionment with modernity we revert to an older faith—-a religious solidarity grounded not in messy reality, but in the irrational belief that beneath the chaos of nature there exists a greater universal order to which human beings are specially attuned, giving us status above and above the rest of the natural world—-that it rests upon our shoulders to change the course of history.
     The grand scheme to bring paradise to all, while successful in privileging a few with enormous wealth, has meant and continues to mean poverty and geo-political subjugation for many—-many of whom reside in the third world or global south and never stood to benefit from modernization in the first place. The immediate social impacts of economic exploitation in tandem with the long-term environmental effects of resource extraction, including local pollution and non-local consequences such as climate change and all that climate change entails for sea-level, food production, and habitability, amounts to a paradox of sorts: our pursuit of progress—-our forward-looking idealism—-has condemned the very future we sought to enrich to lives of hardship.
     And so in our shock, in our dissatisfaction, we reflex to eschatology. We foretell and therein help to ensure a prophesy of inevitable conflict. A great war between Good and Evil to accomplish through violence what progress could not. The apocalyptic genre is popular not arbitrarily, but because we sense, and in some sadistic cases, likely expect, that something of the sort will play out because we believe that without a dramatic purifying event—-an epic triumphant narrative—-history is destined to repeat itself without any hope of breaking free from our Sisyphean condition. The truth is that the former is far more likely than than the latter. Good will never triumph over Evil because both are essential to what it means to be human. Both are a matter of perspective and construction, culture and habit, perception and preconception, all of which further ensures the longevity of both ideas so long as humans are around.
     The fate of the world does not rest on human shoulders. Life will continue long after the human animal is gone, regardless of our footprint. Albeit, we may render the planet entirely inhospitable to ourselves and other sensitive creatures, but life will go on in some form. To suppose that life on Earth somehow depends on the human struggle between Good and Evil is simply an irrational and self-aggrandizing exercise of humanistic narcissism. While we may view our role in nature through dichotomous lenses, one side destined to win out over the other, in reality ours is but one of many animal cycles that will culminate not in glorious victory, but in gradual speciation and extinction.

Non-arbitrary v. arbitrary – axiologically speaking

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I was asked for an explanation of what I mean by “arbitrary,” so I’ll make the distinction again below. I’ve also touched on this distinction in The problems of society, The roots of oppression, and Is electricity a non-arbitrary need?

Here’s another quick explanation:

When we confront and answer the normative question (what should we do?) we make a value judgment about what’s worth doing. To put it another way, we judge what end is good enough to be worth our time. Some of those judgments are arbitrary, some of them are non-arbitrary. Non-arbitrary value judgments are rooted in human ontology, which, to me, means that if the good you decide to pursue is necessary to survive or to fulfill a biological precondition, then the value of that good is non-arbitrary. An “arbitrary” value judgment, on the other hand, is made when the value of a good you decide to pursue is nonessential to survival or fulfilling biological precondition. “Arbitrary” is a sort of catch-all for values that don’t pertain to necessity — an “everything other than, until proven otherwise” set. For example, the judgment that decorating is good and the subsequent decision to decorate in a particular way are arbitrary. You would be perfectly fine if you did otherwise, so decorating is arbitrarily valuable. If you could prove that decorating in a particular way is ontologically necessary, then perhaps it could be considered non-arbitrary, but I think decorating is a good example because it’s so heavily based on personal preference. On the other hand, the judgment that eating is good and the subsequent decision to eat are non-arbitrary. Eventually you’ll die if you decide otherwise, so eating is non-arbitrarily valuable. I would also argue that the life-enabling environmental conditions of the Earth are non-arbitrarily valuable.

JMK