Earth Day

My freshman year in high school to commemorate Earth day http://www.earthday.org/2012 and to fight against air pollution I rode a bike to school.  Ordinarily I would walk but instead spent the entire day on my bike to make a difference.

My guess is that kids today are keenly aware of the modern environmental movement but whether or not they take part remains to be seen. From talking with a young set, some things are the same—they are bursting with ideas, are refreshingly un-cynical and their hip service ethos is setting the moral tone for the age.  I also find in groups some social entrepreneurs that think they can evade politics. They have little faith in the political process and believe that real change happens on the ground beneath it.

That’s delusion. If there is no rule of law your achievement won’t add up to much. Important issues always spark disagreement. Unless there’s a healthy political process to resolve disputes, everything will be destroyed. There’s little social progress without political progress. Unfortunately, today’s activists are good at thinking locally and globally but do they think nationally?

I rarely hear social entrepreneurs talk about honest courts or standards of behavior; it’s more uplifting to talk about sustainable agriculture. Are they missing something?  You bet. To fill in the gap I recommend reading the novels of Dashiell Hammett http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell_Hammett 

The noir heroes like Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon served as a model for a generation of Americans, and they put the focus on disorder and corruption and how one behaves in the face of it. Spade has a layered personality and hardens himself on the outside in order to protect his finer inner attributes. He makes no social class distinction and is not self-righteous; he is motivated by a disillusioned sense of honor. Under his mask, there is a basic sense of good and order where the bad should be corrected and crimes punished. He knows he’s not going to change the world but he does his job—and doggedly plows ahead.

While today’s kids might not wear trench coats or fedoras they can learn a lesson here. Moral realism would be an original supplement to today’s prevailing ethos. It would put the focus back on core issues; order and the rule of law. And while that may not seem like much, it is necessary and just might work against self-dealing and self-deception.