The impotence of beang earnest

I t's almost Earth Day, and the environmental outlook is
not good. Fuel consumption continues at an unchecked
rate, pollution is simply beyond belief in many major cities, and hardly anyone cares.The environment has been fighting a losing battle ever since the Industrial Revolution, unlikely to change without a major political upheaval (read: violation of the U.S. Constitution). What's the use in gently rocking a leaky boat?

The writer William Gass said of his profession, "The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that."

Perhaps he is satisfied, but most of us aren't. It's one thing to do something you love for no good reason, quite another to spend time recycling, waiting for a bus, or writing angry letters to CEOs that only end up being recycled anyway, all the while knowing that you're hardly staving off the inevitable decline of civilization. After a breathless rush of college idealism, most people settle into a comfortable torpor, figuring that as long as they're okay, everything else is as well. That kind of logic got Ronald Reagan elected president, but some wouldn't consider that a criticism.

Ultimately, it doesn't make much difference. After all, when the sun engulfs the Earth in a few billion years, it won't matter whether we ran out of fossil fuels in 2100 or 2500. But if you earnestly do your homework every night in preparation for a serene job juggling numbers, you might as well wage the environmental war. It's certainly no less meaningless, and if you have any sympathy for it, it's probably even more meaningful.

I respect those who boldly lead others in the hope that one day they'll wake up and the world will suddenly be okay. But coming from a non-religious background, self-delusion has never been one of my strengths. That leaves the options of either reckless hedonism, which I don't have the stomach or the looks for, or little projects for noble but hopeless ends. And in some solipsistic world inside my head, I make enough of a difference.

The difference between this sort of insignificance and being a martyr is that the outside world ceases to have meaning. The most bitter radicals sacrifice themselves in a display of exhibitionistic self-immolation, only to be soon forgotten. Those that are more aware realize their insignificance and continue on anyway, relevant only to themselves--which may or may not be enough, but it's all we'll ever get. Gass makes the mistake of saying that any cause can be advanced. There's no qualitative difference between green-haired punks screaming about Republicans and Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, except in how long-winded they are. Both are sermons to the converted, and both are negligible to all but their creators and their audiences.

But no cause is more hopeless than that of the YCC. Besides organizing the requisite Spring Fling and allocating a fair amount of cash, it only seems to serve as an indicator of the Yale Corporation's apathy. In a Gogol-like scene of humiliation, it went before the board earlier this year to ask for two-ply tissue in bathrooms.

Grovelling for toilet paper is only the most obvious evidence that the YCC does not exist for any practical purpose other than to wield the short stick of futility. It failed to grasp this fact in its spineless performance on the red meat/redneck carnivores issue. Poor Matthew Teicher, TD '00, failed to grasp this when he campaigned to "compromise and earn the respect of the administration" for the YCC. The beautiful thing about impotence is that there's never any reason to renege on your principles--even if you did, it wouldn't make any difference. Compromising the YCC is like plagiarizing a Herald column--it's so pointless it doesn't make any sense. If the YCC abandons its principles, it won't have anything left but some overinflated party balloon egos.

No, the point is to remain stalwart and protest to no effect whatsoever, and still not care. It's better to hold to a futile principle that has no material effect than violate it, because the latter means surrendering to a criteria that no one can possibly measure up to. Just as the YCC shall keep fighting for our two-plies, I'll keep on with my environmental efforts in Green Corps. If nothing else, I'll have the comfort of knowing that even if it makes no difference, I've at least forsaken an indifferent world for activities that I actually care about.

Writing columns, for example.

Back to Opinion...