On good fortune

I have had occasion recently to survey my good fortune. I have a home, a job, well-adjusted children, a congenial extended family, good health, friends, enough to eat, two cats who allow me to live with them, health, a good education, an extensive paper-book library, access to extensive information (and idiocy) on the internet, a stable and safe country and other fabulous advantages that I can't think of at the moment. I am an extremely fortunate person.

I could easily have been born to a poor peasant family in a war-torn part of the world. I was recently asked, "What if you had been a Hutu/Tutsi in Rwanda?"

I can't answer that. I have no idea how I might behave in circumstances I have a hard time imagining. It is smugly easy to imagine that I might have been in some way heroic in the circumstances and behaved better than those "benighted African folks". It is also easy, although without the smugness, to imagine being terrified beyond belief and doing whatever is necessary to survive.

Both of these responses are insulting to the unfortunate people who actually faced these conditions, and trivialize the issues. Unless you were there, you have no idea how you would respond, imagination or wishful thinking notwithstanding. In either case, one could under- or overestimate the resolve or the character of those involved.

To reduce all experience to a simple survival equation is to trivialize the total of human existence. We are in and of the world, but we have the capacity to imagine a future, plan for potential events and learn from past experience, including historical records. We have biological and evolutionary urges but we also have intelligence and imagination.

...
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ulysses

With a will, there is hope for the future if everyone learns from experience and with empathy. The greatest danger to humanity appears to be sectarianism and selfishness. These have been essentially the same dangers humanity has faced since we learned about fire and weapons. It seems that if we don't kill each other we will poison the earth to the extent that we will emperil our survival.

We should be past that by now. Follow knowledge.