The Global and the Local
Our lives are shot through with tensions between the global and the local, the personal and the general.
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The Global and the Local
Bharath Vallabha
A few days ago my family and I went out to eat at a local Mexican restaurant we like. It cost $50. It’s great to have a local joint we love, and to see my 5 year old delight in ordering her favorite dish. It was a lot of fun.
At the restaurant they had CNN on the TV and there was footage of the war in the Ukraine. I felt a rumble of unsettlement - as if there was an earthquake under the surface wholesomeness I was enjoying. The $50 I was spending in two hours might have been more impactful if I donated it to families struggling in the Ukraine. Or to help others in my own city. Were my family and I enjoying a well deserved night out, or were we being self indulgent? The question lingered in the back of my mind as I cut my daughter’s cheese quesadilla for her, and I had my shrimp fajitas.
The contemporary philosopher Peter Singer proposed a famous thought experiment in his 1971 essay, “Affluence, Famine and Morality.” Imagine a person is walking by a shallow pond and he sees a small child drowning. The person can easily save the child without any physical harm to himself - the only cost to him would be the designer shoes he is wearing would be ruined. Singer suggested the person would be morally wrong to value his shoes over the child’s life. I think pretty much everyone would agree.
Then Singer raised the key question: if the child is dying across the world from me and not in front of me, does that make a difference morally? Just because a child isn’t dying in front of me, does that let me off the hook? Singer wrote the article during a famine in Bangladesh, and he concluded distance is not morally absolving. He thought people who could afford to give some money but didn’t prioritize the millions of people affected by the famine were as wrong as the person prioritizing his shoes over saving the child.
Singer’s thought experiment is conceptually and rhetorically powerful. Does one really need the latest iPhone? Or to see the fifth installment of Iron Man? Once we see daily choices through the lens of the pond example, it’s hard to unsee it.
It seems extreme, however, to see every choice through the lens of morality. I might buy a new guitar because I am passionate about music and being creative. I might save up for a family vacation because it will be a bonding experience and widen my children’s horizons. Can the multiplicity of human goods be reduced to the calculations of morality? Should Beethoven have focused on helping the poor instead of writing the 9th symphony?
Our lives are shot through with tensions between the global and the local, the personal and the general. While Singer’s focus on morality highlights the tensions in one way, there are other ways we experience them as well. Not just in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of what gives our lives meaning.
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When I felt unsettled in the restaurant, it wasn’t because - or only because - I worried I might be a bad person for spending a night out. Spending quality time with my family feels like the best thing I can do.
I was unsettled, rather, because the contrast between my good fortune and others’ misfortune made me feel torn and at tension with myself. As if the various goals in my life like time with family and helping the broader world didn’t line up in a harmonious way. When I was just enjoying the meal with my family, it felt like the goodness of the event was somehow baked into the universe itself - as if the world itself was good. But seeing the news was a reminder this was hardly the case. The universe seemed indifferent to human happiness, as clearly there were many people struggling in the very moment when I was happy. The unsettlement I felt was the dim awareness that happiness in any moment could be fleeting and that I wasn’t entitled to it.
How then can I enjoy the good things in life without feeling entitled to them? How do I reconcile my life projects with the broader forces in society? Are the different goals in my life bound to be in tension, or is there a way to relate them in a better way?
Pranay Sanklecha
In his famous 1946 essay “Existentialism is a Humanism”, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre tells of a dilemma one of his students faced during World War II. The student’s older brother was killed in the war with Germany, and the student wanted to join the French resistance. But the student’s mother was distraught at her older son’s loss and might not survive if left alone, and so the student also wanted to stay at home to take care of his mother. Sartre vividly captures the student’s dilemma: “He found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual [his mother]; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity... He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose?”
Singer argues that morality and the sense of the greater good should guide us in our choices. In contrast, as an existentialist, Sartre argues that even morality is grounded simply in our freedom to choose - and facing up to that freedom is fundamental. As Sartre puts it: “In coming to me, the student knew what advice I should give him, and I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world.”
Life is filled with such complex, identity defining choices, whether in war time Paris or in a peaceful suburban restaurant. We are constantly faced with tending to the multiple dimensions of our lives, from the most personal to the most general.
What does it feel like to make such choices? What can guide us as we choose? Can religion, morality or politics provide the answers? Or are we left confronting the brute reality of our individual freedom?
We will explore these questions in the course “The Global and the Local.”
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