Most likely the outcome of eighteen years of formal education, early September has always seemed much more to me like the beginning of a new year than January 1st does. While January 1st is just as dark and cold as December 31st was, by early September we are beginning to see evidence of a physical as well as emotional change on the horizon as the warm, light, languid days of summer turn cooler, darker, and more hectic. That is why I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss New Year’s resolutions and get a four month jump on the competition.
Near the end of his wonderful story of transformation and redemption, Charles Dickens in his Christmas Carol (a wonderful novel and great family read) has the Ghost of Christmas Future warn Scrooge about the two waifs who cling to him for protection. They were a boy and a girl, identified as Ignorance and Want. Dickens’ warning remains every bit as powerful in 2021 as it was when he wrote it in 1843.
Consider the role Ignorance and Want play in our lives today: more subtle and less dramatic in our personal and family lives but becoming more dramatic as you expand your view out into your very own town. Their presence is more dramatic still when you consider large metropolitan areas and even greater still when you extend to include entire continents, such as Africa, and much of India and South and Central America.
An interesting thing is that when you think about it, human beings have survived and thrived primarily because of their enormous capacity to cooperate with each other. We are a gregarious and cooperative species. Our earliest ancestors learned that by banding together they could hunt and protect themselves from predators more successfully. And this cooperative spirit spread from one generation to the next: information was passed on about which animals to hunt when, which animals to avoid, which plants produced nutritious fruits when and which were toxic.
Imagine if you will, all the cooperative energy it took to make the computer I am writing this on: generations of engineers and scientists building upon previous work, obtaining the raw materials, manufacturing them into components, shipping these components and the finished product, etc. Even the simple shirt I am wearing incorporates materials and labor from halfway around the world, a marvelous feat of cooperation.
How is it then, with 10,000 years of cooperation behind us that we find ourselves living in a world ripe with strife, anxiety, despair, and misfortune on a tragic scale? The answer is Ignorance and Want. In their most subtle forms, these twins may show themselves in the way we push our children to succeed and achieve out of some fear that their lives will be ruined unless they have mastered the ability of coming out on top. The spirit of cooperation and focus upon the communal good is sorely missing in mainstream attitudes toward academic, career or athletic success.
Most adults bow to the necessity of doing more work, more efficiently, more of the time, the idea being that the more we have, the better off we will be, to the point where the concept of quality personal or family time is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. In ways both subtle and stark we are driven today by the ideals of competition rather than cooperation, even though cooperation has demonstrated its value to us for almost a hundred centuries.
Our bottom line has become Am I going to make a buck out of this and can I cash in sooner and to a greater degree than the next guy? It is a type of mania that has become so inculcated in our culture and our daily lives that we hardly even notice it. Madison Avenue and the folks inside the White House have not failed to recognize the power of these concepts and employ them to mold and shape our thinking, attitudes, and behavior every day. Stories of an unselfish concern for the wellbeing of others, of altruism, are so much the exception to the rule that they make news headlines, the new “man bites dog.”
So the question for each of us becomes: how much am I driven by Ignorance (Fear) or Want (Greed)? Had we been driven only by a fraction of these concepts in our archeological past, we may never have evolved into the dominant species on the planet. Now that we are the dominant species, isn’t it time we took a longer look at how we are faring in that capacity? Imagine our mass consternation when some extraterrestrial intelligent life arrives on earth, looks around and says 10,000 years on top and all you have managed to do was introduce the Big Mac to 119 different nation states and market a $200 pair of sneakers?
The thing I love most about A Christmas Carol is how, granted a second chance, Scrooge jumps immediately upon the opportunity and becomes less fear and greed driven and more concerned for the well-being of those around him. Defying a lifelong history of scrupulous self-interest, avarice, loneliness, and pain, he comes to recognize the value and intrinsic joy of cooperation and sharing. And in so doing he becomes a role model for those around him. Perhaps we all will too, the day those extraterrestrials do show up and we quickly realize how much as human beings we really do all have in common.