The Last Refuge of the Incompetent

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Once you set out to articulate your personal code of life, you soon discover why so many people choose to let someone else do it.  All the world’s great faith communities, governments, political parties, and most social and fraternal organizations have codified their beliefs in a “good book” or a series of laws, regulations, best practices, symbols, handshakes, what have you.  The problem, of course, is that as those codifying documents and rituals proliferate, it becomes relatively easy to find bits and pieces that contradict each other. This allows the various adherents to that particular “good book" to cherry pick which elements of “the truth” they intend to claim.  This tends to lead to bloody schisms as folks following one subset of beliefs decide that they must confront - often violently - those other folks who have foolishly chosen another subset of beliefs to guide them.

 

However, when the document you begin to examine for contradictions is one you yourself have created, you often find yourself deep in heartfelt arguments with, well, yourself.  It would be nice to blame someone else for those discordant inconsistencies. It would be nice, but not terribly productive, and more than a touch schizophrenic 

Distilled Harmony would, at first glance, appear relatively free from ideological contradictions. I mean, after all there are only four tenets: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. Pretty simple right? Only at first glance.  Maybe I put Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm at opposite ends of the mantra so it wouldn’t be so obvious that they are in direct contradiction.  Foster Harmony clearly has its roots in philosophies similar to Isaac Asimov’s assertion that "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King come to mind as significant, relatively recent adherents to that non-violent creed. But then you open your morning news emails and read about the latest atrocities committed by one group or another in order to enforce their notion of “truth” upon innocent others, and you wonder at what point one needs to move past Fostering Harmony to a remedy based in Opposing Harm.

These days the media, both corporate and social; as well as coffeehouse conversations ring with the strum und drang of contemporary geopolitics marred by much volume and little reflection. The dominant theme is discord, angst, and variations on “my way or the highway!”  The truly ironic element in these parrying pontifications is that they are often voiced by people who, like me, have no power to implement the changes they advocate so strongly. Truthfully now - what role do I have in determining who occupies the White House in DC, or the Governor’s Mansion here in Raleigh? Oh, don’t get me wrong - I vote, I click and contribute my $3.00 or 5 dollars - several times - to the candidates whose positions are most harmonic with mine. I sign online petitions that support issues that seem to express a harmonious interaction among people and the fragile earth upon which we live, and on which depend.  Yet, I am not content to accept the notion that my single digital data point among millions in our internet driven “mentally of the herd” world is “the best I can do.” 

So, while realizing the minimal impact I have upon the globe, at the moment I am content to let “real personal impact” be my guide.  Political scientists and economists have, for decades, discussed “spheres of influence”. These are, to the best of my knowledge, the geopolitical areas whose policies and practices are guided by the most dominant nation  in the region.  The cold war was a tug of war between the US and the USSR to maintain and/or expand their “spheres of influence."

What, realistically, I ask myself, is my sphere of influence? What is the reach of my behavior? How can I maximize Harmony and reduce discord by Opposing Harm? If I restrict my “area of angst” to events and individuals that I can actually influence, the contradiction between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm becomes less intense.  I have no real influence over the “haters” of the world.  To directly thwart ISIS, to move our government out of contentious gridlock, to reaffirm the value of higher education in the nation - these are goals beyond my meager efforts. But I may be able to exert a gentle influence over others - my students, my friends, those of you who encounter these ramblings on one screen or another. In those areas I will still give Foster Harmony precedence, I will still attempt to champion Harmony whenever possible. To Foster Harmony, through individual harmonious acts, is analogous to tossing a pebble into a pond. The harmonious act spreads out across the surface of the pond, replicating ripples that gently, eventually, fill the surface. It is chaos theory, with the wings of the jungle butterfly spawning cooling rains across parched deserts continents away.  This may be the nature of my "sphere of influence”, largely invisible to me, but of possible value to others.

Comforting as this conclusion may be, it does not entirely still my fear of leaving Oppose Harm a place among the four major tenets of Distilled Harmony.  The danger is that the haters of the world have often pried their violent manifesto from some minor passage in their “good book” and elevated it to a mandate for evil.  It would be foolish to deny that evil exists in the world. Stalin and Hitler in the history I studied; ISIS, and other terrorists - both foreign and domestic - in the world that unfolds around me today. These evidences of evil should not go unopposed. But that opposition must not subvert the moral dominance of Harmony, allowing some evil, violent, social contrariness to parade as “the real truth” around which moral discord may rally. 

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