Something Good

Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, UK, 2004

Something Good

"Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good," sang Maria to Captain von Trapp to account for their newfound love. It isn't hard to see that this principle loops back on itself, that good action is the result of love as well as its source. However, it raises a question. What does it mean to do good? After some years of thought, the best answer I can give is this: an action is good if its object is the welfare of the community. That always means a particular community. So good things may look not so good viewed from a different community. If there were an absolute good, it could only exist within a community of everything.

What follows is an instance of ethical relativism that suggests we need to enlarge the community within which we strive for goodness. 

Efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic are clearly good from the human perspective. We are more than human. We are also members of the biosphere, the stability of which is threatened by the proliferation of the human species. In the long term, the system cannot survive if humanity is out of control. When off balance the system adjusts to rebalance by methods that humanity may not appreciate. Too many people living too closely are ideal hosts for viruses. As the human population approaches eight billion, lions and whales and bees and milkweed, if they understood, would be cheering for the virus. We who do not celebrate the virus must find other ways to do good within that larger community.

If God is love,
it is a bigger love than we imagine,
much bigger than us. 

We are sapiens,
who would be masters of microbes
rather than victims quarantined behind glass.
But see
our thermostats programmed for comfort
while the Earth sweats oil
to fuel endless streams of trucks 
bringing potatoes from the east
and salmon from the west
and lemons from the sunny south
and two-ply tissue from the clear-cut north
to dry the eyes of those who mourn their dead.

We are sapiens,
lamenting that the vaccine came too late,
yet heedless that the Earth
grows sick of our self-serving strategies
and tired of privileged whining.

We are sapiens, 
working home alone,
streaming love songs to ease the ennui
while the planet grows feverish
beneath a blanket of uncaring cleverness.

And being sapiens we have a choice:
to make an end
or fall in love with a World that works.