From Essays After Montaigne
...let every man sound his owne conscience, hee shall finde that our inward desires are for the most part nourished and bred in us by the losse and hurt of others; which when I considered, I began to thinke how Nature doth not gainesay herselfe in this, concerning her generall policie: for Physitians hold that the birth, increase, and augmentation of everything, is the alteration and corruption of another.
In another essay, I mentioned in passing the notion, common to all Abrahamic religions, that "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." Brad expanded upon this very nicely:
Often I believe people try to analyze facts in a way that is suitable to them. No rich man believes that he (for the sake of readability I will say he but women fall prey to this as well) has done anything wrong to get where he is. Often the real fact is though, that people often climb the backs of others to achieve their ends. Rather than acknowledge this they create mental constructs of how the world works to bring a kind of comfort in regards to their mistreatment of others.
I don't think I could be accused of climbing over the backs of others, or similar sorts of ambition, but I have been successful. By any measure that makes sense on a global scale (if not on the scale of my building or my neighborhood), I'm a rich man. There are things (some of which have become valuable in our current context) that I'm better at than most people, but I haven't worked particularly hard for what I have. And my having it means that no one else can have it--my profit is someone else's damage. I'm painfully aware that the money I've recently spent on hardcover editions of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or The Complete Works of Plato could feed a family for a week. Admittedly, this isn't quite the same as purchasing every material comfort imaginable, then relying on the charity of others to finance those purchases, but I would nonetheless hate to be called upon to defend the morality of my spending decisions.
And as below, so above. As a nation, the U.S. consumes a disproportionate share of just about any of the world's valuable resources. Each of our personal decisions, from paper or plastic to buying an SUV, contributes to our depletion of this planet. It's true that some of those decisions have a greater impact than others, but they are all of the same moral weight. We should each be mindful of the effect upon others of even our most seemingly personal decisions.
8:07:26 AM 
|
|
