A story people sometimes tell is a Garden of Eden sort of story: things were good, then somebody fucked it up, and now things are bad. Who fucked it up and how varies—was it Eve eating the apple, capitalism unleashing human greed, agriculture forcing toil?--but the basic attitude is one of resentment / debt. We have to struggle now to get back to where we ‘should’ be, if that’s even possible.
This has basically not been my sense of the world or of history. To me, it seems much more like “first there was nothing, then there was something and it sucked, and then it sucked a little less, over and over until now.” I am way wealthier than fictional Adam was, and even more so if you consider the actual historical Adam. When it sucked less, it’s normally because of something else fixing it, and giving the fix to you. The basic attitude is something like grateful inheritance.
Like, in a basic physical sense, there was a time before the sun existed, and now it exists, and basically all the material components of my life only exist in the form they do because of stars that existed in the past. In a social sense, I’m living in buildings that I didn’t build, using a language that I didn’t make, using tools that I didn’t invent, under a political system that I didn’t put into place. “Somebody else built that.”
And it’s not just that I found some abandoned ruins, or whatever; the people who built this wealth (often) wanted me to have it. Some of it I’ve exchanged for, but the vast majority of ‘my wealth’ is inherited. If there’s a principle behind this sort of saving up for the future / sweating so that progress happens, it seems like agape, and so the love that I have towards civilization is easy to backpropagate towards its source.
Now, Adam Smith might point out that it’s not the benevolence of the baker that I expect my dinner from, and one of the ways I frame things is capitalism as a way to direct civilization towards generative behavior (by tying it to consumption and status), in a way that leads to more creativity, which makes creative love more common and easier to see.
Anyway, this helped me understand my Christian parents better; I would talk with them sometimes about how I thought a lot about what the world would look like if God were in it, and what the world would look like if God weren’t in it, and how this world looked a lot like the second. They were confused by this, and thought the world looked a lot like the first; but when you think about a world with agape as a powerful force/motivator vs. a world without powerful agape, I think this world looks much more like the first world than the second world. Of course, that doesn’t imply Christianity is true, but makes it clearly part of the ‘intellectual heritage of humankind’, or something; we start off with cyclical religions, then we get religions of change, then we get a religion of progress through generous love.
A story people sometimes tell is a Garden of Eden sort of story: things were good, then somebody fucked it up, and now things are bad. Who fucked it up and how varies—was it Eve eating the apple, capitalism unleashing human greed, agriculture forcing toil?--but the basic attitude is one of resentment / debt. We have to struggle now to get back to where we ‘should’ be, if that’s even possible.
This has basically not been my sense of the world or of history. To me, it seems much more like “first there was nothing, then there was something and it sucked, and then it sucked a little less, over and over until now.” I am way wealthier than fictional Adam was, and even more so if you consider the actual historical Adam. When it sucked less, it’s normally because of something else fixing it, and giving the fix to you. The basic attitude is something like grateful inheritance.
Like, in a basic physical sense, there was a time before the sun existed, and now it exists, and basically all the material components of my life only exist in the form they do because of stars that existed in the past. In a social sense, I’m living in buildings that I didn’t build, using a language that I didn’t make, using tools that I didn’t invent, under a political system that I didn’t put into place. “Somebody else built that.”
And it’s not just that I found some abandoned ruins, or whatever; the people who built this wealth (often) wanted me to have it. Some of it I’ve exchanged for, but the vast majority of ‘my wealth’ is inherited. If there’s a principle behind this sort of saving up for the future / sweating so that progress happens, it seems like agape, and so the love that I have towards civilization is easy to backpropagate towards its source.
Now, Adam Smith might point out that it’s not the benevolence of the baker that I expect my dinner from, and one of the ways I frame things is capitalism as a way to direct civilization towards generative behavior (by tying it to consumption and status), in a way that leads to more creativity, which makes creative love more common and easier to see.
Anyway, this helped me understand my Christian parents better; I would talk with them sometimes about how I thought a lot about what the world would look like if God were in it, and what the world would look like if God weren’t in it, and how this world looked a lot like the second. They were confused by this, and thought the world looked a lot like the first; but when you think about a world with agape as a powerful force/motivator vs. a world without powerful agape, I think this world looks much more like the first world than the second world. Of course, that doesn’t imply Christianity is true, but makes it clearly part of the ‘intellectual heritage of humankind’, or something; we start off with cyclical religions, then we get religions of change, then we get a religion of progress through generous love.