Puzzle: You’ve just inherited 20 hectares of land and have just two choices:
- Build 500 houses, make 25 million profit
- Plant a forest, make zero profit
Rules:
You can’t mix options. It has to be one or the other.
You can’t reinvest profits elsewhere. They’re for your personal use only.
Which do you choose?
Think for a minute about it, then see my answer below…
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OK, I lied. There isn’t a ‘correct’ answer to this – at least not an answer of the format: “You should do X”. But hear me out because the answer, I believe, is the question itself.
First let’s break it down. If you choose option 1, you’ll make a ton of money but destroy habitat; if you choose option 2 you’ll create wonderful habitat but make no money. Now, you might feel good for choosing option 2, but would that ‘good feeling’ be as life-changing as 25 million dollars? Probably not.
In the real world, I think most people would either choose option 1 or a mix of 1 & 2. Though some might choose option 2 only, I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest that they are probably a tiny minority compared to the 1-ers and mix-ers.
So what’s the point? The point is that this question is a figurative analogy of the choices that we are all making every day to greater or lesser degrees: “Should I self-maximize, or should I do what’s best for the greater good?” And the problem here is simple: The incentive to do what’s best for you almost always overwhelms the incentive to do what’s best for all.
So, the question here is not really ‘which option should I choose?’ The question is: how the fuck does such a question even come to exist? This choice shouldn’t even exist in our minds. To even vaguely ponder that the greater good is not important is a truly shocking failure of our culture. And the reality is that as long as our culture is based around wealth and privation, this is never going to get better. The incentives to create capital value are just too strong, and dead things are worth more than living things. Worse still: many living things are even a drain on the capital machine.
And when we finally bring the living world to the brink of our own extinction, it will already be too late to hope to keep the world we have known and loved for the last 200,000 years.
So what’s the answer?
Well first, here’s what I know the answer isn’t: It’s never, ever going to appear on a spreadsheet. There’s no way to enumerate or align the natural world with selfish human interests. Every bean counted is a move in the wrong direction. Life is not a bean-counting exercise. We need to grow the fuck up, put down our adding machines and look around.
And here’s what I think the answer is. After years of meditating on this topic, there’s only one thing to me that remotely presents as a solution, and it might shock you:
Religion.
Now I know that many reading this will be ready to sharpen their knives on the shortcomings of whatever religious orders they love to hate – and they’re hard to dispute – but, there’s a but.
Every religion I can think of has two features in common, without exception: 1) a code of values or conduct, and 2) a belief in something greater than ourselves.
Secular society doesn’t have these, and it really shows. Instead we’ve made money, individuation and contemporary culture our religion, and the results speak for themselves. As a species, we’ve become deranged by a giant slot machine, and are too busy feverishly pushing buttons to notice the decay building around us.
We literally don’t know how to behave, because there’s nothing about secular society that shows us the optimal moral path. Responsibility and the greater good are but pesky obstacles in the great arcade game of human life.
Now I don’t know what we can call it, but something quasi-religious needs to happen now. A mass epiphany and rejection of normal that coalesces into a fervent belief of something bigger, better and more important than ourselves, something worth fighting for, something that gives us a strong reason to clear a moral path and follow it, then teach it with every fibre of our being – as if our lives depend on it.
Because our lives depend on it.
Hi Colin.
I found your article thought-provoking, thanks. Not least because in my earlier life, I was a religious Christian. In this now latter life of mine, I think I can say that I am glad to no longer be religious. In my own journey, I have come to find religion to be objectionable along many axes. And if I were to momentarily introspect, I think my present irreligious self is better than my former religious self. Anyway, enough of me and my history…
I studied your article, thanks. I think in some ways, I find myself disagreeing with you. Most crucially, I disagree with you about religion being the answer (or, antidote) to our impulse to “self-maximise” at the expense of a “greater good,” as you put it. I suppose my main difficulty with religion being the answer or antidote is that, perhaps ironically, most religions that I am aware of tend to _centralise the self, promoting ego_. In contrast, science tends to _decentralise the self, demoting ego_. I think this is religion’s critical weakness. I’ll send you a short essay I wrote which expands on this.
Furthermore, in religion, I find there to be a tension between two presumed imperatives, namely, _egalitarianism_ and _exclusivism_. I’ll happily judge the former to be good, favouring your hypothesis, and the latter not good. (Of course, it depends what we mean by “religion.”)
Does the historical record show religion offering us a signal _above_ the cultural noise for the former imperative? Nope. And does the record show religion offering a signal _below_ the noise for the latter? Again, nope. Six years ago, I took a long hard look at religion’s imputed moral legitimacy. What I learned made me sad. I wrote this:
“On Religion and Moral Legitimacy”
https://secularmonk.org.za/human/religion-and-moral-legitimacy.html
I think the three most pressing issues in the world today are:
1. Species extinction.
2. Destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems.
3. Sentient suffering.
The only mainstream religion I am aware which offers any substantive and compelling ethical injunctions on these issues is _Jainism_. I learned about Jainism’s ethical principle of _ahimsa_ (Non-violence to all creatures). My former Christianity, in particular, is deafeningly silent on the above three issues. See here:
“On Hinduism”
https://secularmonk.org.za/human/on-hinduism.html
To restate, which pulpits instruct us to be concerned about species extinction (Issue 1), about natural habitats and ecosystems (Issue 2), and about the widespread suffering of animals (Issue 3)? Not one, except perhaps for Jain pulpits.
May I propose two alternative ideological pathways which nudge us towards the greater good—pathways which are ostensibly secular:
1. Scientific Pantheism.
2. The Ideal of Sufficiency.
On Pathway 1, Scientific Pantheism at once offers us a “something greater than ourselves,” as you put it, and of which we are a part. And it acknowledges the role that scientific inquiry plays in shaping our values, _based on real data_, not on speculation. Herewith, I contemplate Pantheism in a somewhat poetic style:
“Rethinking Divinity”
https://secularmonk.org.za/human/rethinking-divinity.html
On Pathway 2, my hunch is that generosity and egalitarianism scale with peoples’ sense of sufficiency. But to be sure, I haven’t studied this quantitatively yet.