Saving the world
I'm not sure how serious some people are, but the dream of saving the world seems to be a pretty common sentiment nowadays. I don't personally know if people in ages past had similar dreams, but I figure that if anyone did they were pretty rare. The idea that souls might need saving seems old enough, as old as the idea that our souls are in trouble I suppose. But the idea that the world itself might need saving, well that would seem to require the much more recent idea that the world itself is in trouble.
Because I'm doing a MA in philosophy I often get asked what I plan to do with it once I've finished, or more generally what I want to do with my life. I've taken to suggesting that I would rather like to save the world. This is actually a serious decision about what I want to spend my life doing. Given some of the reactions, I'm left wondering whether deciding to do something like that with your life really isn't as entirely insane as it sounds?
5 comments:
Save the world eh... What exactly do you mean? Compared to the old "save the sinners' souls", your statement doesn't really seem to be very specific.
If you mean you want to save the environment then wouldn't "save the planet" be better? I guess that you include the environment in your world, but is there anything else that you also include in it?
Is there a particular list that could be given, or is it just something like "rid the world of bad things (for your notion of bad)"? But surely that seems rather consequentialist...
This may be slightly different, but presumably people have long sought to improve the world, at least. Does talk of "saving" it add something to this (besides the disturbing echo of fundamentalism)?
I'm guessing the idea here is that our current world is corrupt or "fallen" in some fundamental respect, so that merely "making it a better place" is not good enough. Is that it? Though there were revolutionaries in the past, too -- perhaps globalization is the new ingredient in this mix?
d5f...:
I guess personally I have in mind something along the lines of stopping our current trajectory towards wiping ourselves permanently off the face of the planet. (more on this in the response to Richard)
rik:
I think of it as a progression from wanting to improve the world to wanting to save it. However, there is a fairly significant step from thinking in terms of improving and thinking in terms of saving. Here is a little history of our civilization:
In our current experiment in living we have encountered a few problems. Warfare was invented, and with it the political machinery necessary to organize people into armies to compete for resources. Then along comes crime, and with it legal systems to regulate us. Following this we see political rebellion and revolutions beginning to occur. Famine, plagues, and slavery all begin to make appearances. Cue religions promising salvation from the fundamentally flawed human condition that they thought they found themselves. We begin to see more of all the above, just bigger, better and more often. The salvationist religions go global in tow with the expansion our civilization. We get the industrial revolution and with it mental illness, worker exploitation, market collapses, better prisons and better punishment for criminals, etc. We begin to notice we're wiping many other species off the face of the planet, at an increasing rate. We see in short succession the two most horrific wars in the history of our planet, we drop an atom bomb and evaporate an entire city. Drugs become a world trade.. school kids shoot school kids, people jumping off tall things. Well you get the idea.
From this we can see that as our civilization builds momentum the problems begin to add up. At first it makes sense to suggest things need improving, of course they do. But when you get to a certain point when the number of things that need improving is getting pretty big, you begin to wonder if maybe the entire enterprise is fundamentally doomed.
I think that nothing more is wrong with the modern world than with the world of the farmers or neanderthals - there has always been "crime" - apes steal the best bananas from each other, I'm sure - and with crime comes war - it's just the rise of technology that makes the bad things in life - as well as the good things - that much closer to hand. If Edward III could have dropped a bomb on the Scots, making himself King of Scotland, but killing many Scottish people, and creating a small wasteland, I'm sure he would have - afterall, that would be no different to what he did try to do, aside from the instantaneous thing.
Even things like world poverty can be blamed on technology - if we didn't have the ability to access so many places in the world so quickly, it would be that much harder for things like capitalism to occur (on a side note, the Roman merchants would have loved the sound of capitalism, and even got involved with it themselves, kind of - think grain production in North Africa, Black Sea etc).
OOOOhhhhhh I feel like a Luddite today!
"Instead, whats wrong is something to more funamental, to do with the system"
It's funny, because I don't think there's anything substantive here that I actually disagree with. (Dunno if you've read my blog for a while, but I also tend to focus on the institutional level, as what needs to be improved.) Perhaps the difference here is purely rhetorical?
Post a Comment