Morality

This week I have been told by one of my children what a bad person I am. More worryingly, I've been told by an adult who I have been trying to assist sort out her affairs for just over a year, what a bad person I am.

So I have been thinking, quite a bit, on what I think about the nature of good and evil, and what makes a person 'bad', or not. I'm not really interested in discussing whether Trump, for example, is the new evil, whether physical violence is wrong, but more in the banal everyday acts where people we might think of as 'good' contribute to clearly bad things.

The archetype of this is the average citizen of Nazi Germany. I have recently been reading a book on women journalists and writers who worked in Germany from 1900-1950, and the one I found most fascinating was the literature reviewer who wrote the New York Times, and in an underspoken way worked around the Third Reich, reviewing writers who were banned and talking to her American audience about a Germany that was being demolished before her wavering eyes. She certainly seems to me to be skirting around that line of allowing evil to happen, despite an apparent commitment to the pre-Reich days and writers, not drawing attention to the exceptional nature of the Nazi regime, pretending it wasn't really there.

I feel that there's a lot of this around today, that it is hard not to be part of it. We all know that there is really no such thing as cheap clothes, that someone somewhere pays the cost, and it is the cost of wasted lives attached to sewing machines in shoddy warehouses that might collapse or burn, the cost of cotton grown in fields and harvested by slave labour, and conditions of environmental degradation. We all know this. And yet, it is so easy to go and buy a cheap t-shirt, to buy a cheap t-shirt over the more expensive.

And even if we buy the more expensive t-shirt, is that doing the right thing? Are we being deceived by fair trade labels or taking jobs away from those most in need, and giving them to comparatively privileged Western factory workers?

Vegetarians are criticised, because they are taking food from poor farmers and inadvertently killing intelligent mice; vegans are culturally insensitive. And making ethical purchasing choices is the purview of privilege, and makes no difference so WHY BOTHER?

Some of these, particularly the last, are valid criticisms of trying to live ethically in a world that values money and consumption above all else, but I think they are important facets of trying to change that world starting with ourselves.

But changing our individual consumption patterns isn't going to make real changes to the planet unless we work on social changes too, on changing and re-imagining the world we live in, the world we share together.

And here I'm kind of stumped. I know how to get involved in big things, I can write letters and sign petitions and visit politicians, but none of that seems to get to the heart of the problem, which is imagining a better world and sharing and building that vision in the communities in which we live.

I'm currently exploring other people's ideas on this, from a local co-op that I'm part of (with the family) to reading and listening to new ideas. But I'd like to build something that will appeal to my (literal) neighbours, to my family and friends, and not just those who already recognise that this world isn't working.

So this is an invitation to the conversation, and perhaps a hope that it will help me learn more about how to be a better person.