I agree that “goodness” is luxury; only people who do not have serious problems (at least for the given moment) can afford it; or those who have cultivated it in the past and now they keep it by the power of habit. On the other hand, I believe that it is universal in the sense that if a culture can afford it, sooner or later some forms of “goodness” will appear in that culture. There will be a lot of intertia, so if a culture gains a lot of resources today, they will not change their behavior immediately. The culture may even have some destructive mechanisms that will cause it to waste the resources before the “goodness” has a chance to develop.
Sorry for not being more specific here, but I have a feeling that we are talking about something that exists only in a few lucky places, but keeps reappearing in different places at different times. It is not universal as in “everyone has it”, but as in “everyone has a potential to have it under the right circumstances”.
Not just surplus, there are empirical records of poor people in rich soceties donating more to charity than rich people in rich soceties. I think there is also something going on with the whole of society as such, not just people’s personal feelings of surplus or not.
I agree that “goodness” is luxury; only people who do not have serious problems (at least for the given moment) can afford it; or those who have cultivated it in the past and now they keep it by the power of habit. On the other hand, I believe that it is universal in the sense that if a culture can afford it, sooner or later some forms of “goodness” will appear in that culture. There will be a lot of intertia, so if a culture gains a lot of resources today, they will not change their behavior immediately. The culture may even have some destructive mechanisms that will cause it to waste the resources before the “goodness” has a chance to develop.
Sorry for not being more specific here, but I have a feeling that we are talking about something that exists only in a few lucky places, but keeps reappearing in different places at different times. It is not universal as in “everyone has it”, but as in “everyone has a potential to have it under the right circumstances”.
Not just surplus, there are empirical records of poor people in rich soceties donating more to charity than rich people in rich soceties. I think there is also something going on with the whole of society as such, not just people’s personal feelings of surplus or not.