For many years I was convinced that the most important aspect of life was the fact that it was doomed - from individuals, to our civilization, perhaps even to life itself. All as a result of human behaviour that we can't seem to bring under control.
I still believe that to be the case, but it's no longer the most important aspect of life. Living is.
My desire is to make the best of each moment – whatever the idea of “best” means to me at the time. Right now that desire requires of me a full awareness and acceptance of what has happened, is happening and may soon happen to the world of which I am an indivisible part. It requires being aware of the myriad of social, psychological, historical and physical contributors. It requires me to assemble a personal worldview that is as explanatory as I can make it, within the bounds of my own personality and my moment-to-moment definition of truth.
I have come to realize that the key ingredients in my worldview must be kindness, courage and compassion. “Objective truth” plays its role of course, but that notion seems to me a far slipperier concept than softer, less absolute qualities like kindness and compassion.
So now I get an enormous lift out of hearing people like O'Malley and the Pope make definitive statements on the imprtance of fighting the ecological battle that is in front of us.
My inner landscape has shifted. I’m beginning to understand that, whether there are "solutions" or not, such ideas are stations on the path of right action. There’s a fine line between seeing something as a forlorn hope and realizing that whether or not it is forlorn is beside the point. Yes, human beings are at least quasi-deterministic products of evolution, environment and history, but we are hardly standard products of that process, if you take my meaning.
The flag-bearers of collective determinism (Guilty as charged, yer Honour!) may be called by their worldview to discount the influence of concepts like personal conscience and nobility. However, that does not mean that those who hold down the other side of the yin-yang circle must follow their lead; quite the contrary, in fact. And for those lucky few who have one foot in the shadow and the other in the light, the poignant awareness of probable failure only adds to the liberating joy of doing it anyway.
This is why I'm so encouraged by O'Malley's platform and the Pope's encyclical. Certainly, changes to our personal consciousness and behaviour in response to such a clarion call may be seen as a forlorn hope in the face of the unfolding global ecological catastrophe. However, making such changes despite that awareness speaks to a fundamental goodness lurking in our nature.
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