AncienTrails

Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, is a thoughtful conservative.  So is D.J. Tice, editorial writer for the Star-Tribune, though Tice often sets my kettle to boil.  Both had interesting pieces in their respective papers today, Douthat on individualism and the millennials, Tice on entitlement reform and the baby boom.

Tice writes as a baby boomer and asks us for another shot at society wide influence by seeking and seeing implemented reforms to both Social Security and Medicare.  I agree with him.  We need to solve this issue now, as the largest cohort to enter the python is only a fraction of the way in.  It is our responsibility to demand sensible changes and that our representatives in congress and the White House enact them.

What are they?  I don’t know the arguments right now well enough to recommend, but I know such arguments exist and I would stand with the fiscally responsible ones.  Tice and I agree this time.  I also appreciate his writing as a baby boomer and as one who calls for action.

Douthat read this Pew report on the millennials and concluded (though you have to read between his weasel words) that civilization as we know it is doomed.  This is a favorite conservative argument when societal trends point toward things they don’t like, in this instance, more individualism.

I don’t agree with Douthat.  Conservatives like to place individualism as an ethos over against communitarianism, the former eroding the latter until we’re all small, armed, loosely affiliated gangs.  The reality is much more complicated.  Individualism does not go over against communitarianism.

As an existentialist I believe we are each in this world alone, that our individuality is inescapable and incapable of being increased by any sort of belief or action.  Individualism is a definition of what it means to be human.  As an existentialist, I also know that we can recognize the remarkable affinity we share with others of our species.  And more, with a land ethic like Aldo Leopolds, we can recognize and act on the remarkable affinity we share with all of the natural world, animate and inanimate.  We are, after all, stardust.

Thus, the signal act of the aware universe (that is, you and me), is to bridge the abyss between the depths of one person and that of others, to acknowledge our solidarity as a creature aware of its own death.  We are all, as Camus said, in the river rushing toward our end, and we are in the river together.  It is this common bond we share that makes us compassionate toward the other and makes us want to ease their burdens in this one lifetime.

Now, here’s what’s really interesting in both of these columnist’s pieces today.  Both invoke a future disaster, one fiscal and the other communitarian, but both leave out the certain calamity that requires our action now, our action as a global community: mitigation and adaptation to climate change.  They both speak for the future, yet it is the heat and the storms and the floods and the rising oceans that reach from that future with the most destructive force.

Granted we have to multi-task, communities and nations can do that, though it’s very difficult for individuals.  But to bemoan the future without acknowledging the carbon in our atmosphere (so to speak) will only ensure a time in which individuals and poor old people will burn.