Ask any morally righteous person what they would like to achieve out of life and you will invariably get the answer that they "want to make the world a better place".
It sounds wonderful and gives you warm fuzzy feelings inside. Doesn't it?
But think about it for a moment. What does it mean? A better place for whom? Does that mean that the world is currently a bad place?
And the more you think about it, the more vague the virtuous ideal of making the world a better place becomes.
Personally, I'd like to think that if there was some kind of quantifiable way of measuring goodness, kind of like a pH scale with good at the top end of the scale and bad down at the bottom, you would just want to make sure that you improved the world's measure from the time of your birth until your death. This pG scale (the G stands for goodness) would hopefully see a continual improvement as more and more people jumped on the bandwagon.
I think Catherine Ryan Hyde had the right idea in her book 'Pay It Forward'. For those unfamiliar with the book, subsequent movie or concept, it involves doing something really good for three people. If they ask you how they can pay you back, the answer is to pay it forward and do the same for three more people. And so and so forth. Within a short space of time, according to the concept, this feel good pyramid scheme evolves into something on a global scale. It's kind of a self-perpetuating global betterment idea and I think it is a good one.
You can Google 'Pay It Forward' or go to Catherine Ryan Hyde's foundation page at http://www.payitforwardfoundation.org/home.html if you want to know more.
That there is no such thing as a pG scale is, in my view, very sad. The proxies that we tend to use, things like GDP, life expectancy, infant mortality and so on, are merely aspects of betterment. But it does beg the question. If you had everything you could ever want and could live forever, would you really be happy? Perhaps for a while, but I think you need to introduce some measure of quality in the equation.
GDP does try to introduce some measure of quality by arguing that if people have greater wealth, then they will have more income to spend and live a better quality of life. Partly true, but the problems I have with GDP as a proxy for my pG scale are:
- it assumes infinite resources and encourages wastefulness. For a manufacturing company to succeed, it needs to grow. That means make more, sell more, employ more, produce a bigger bottom line and grow its share price and level of dividend payments. Products aren't made to last much longer than their warranty period because if the product lasted forever, then people would never need to buy another one. As well as planned obsolescence, packaging and the product itself changes to appear slightly different so that you aren't satisfied with the one you have. This encourages you to buy more, which in turn means you work to buy more and the whole system is self perpetuating.
Re-using, recycling or repairing items is not in the spirit of things. Take a DVD player for instance. Yes, it is a quantum leap from the old days of the VCR, but you are still watching the same movie. I remember seeing Star Wars at a drive-in in the 1970s and was blown away. Watching it on DVD now, yes, it is clearer and the sound system is awesome, but the technological advances also serve to highlight the somewhat dodgy special effects. The DVD player costs less than $100, but if it breaks, it will cost $2-$300 to repair. Why? Because it is built cheaply to slot into a market that is constantly changing and is not built to be repaired. The whole thing is discarded and none of the components is re-used. That seems very wasteful to me.
- a country's total or per capita wealth is not a true reflection of the quality of life for the average person in that country. The United States tops the rankings in both, with the People's Republic of China not far behind, followed by Japan, India, Germany and the United Kingdom. There is no arguing that the United States is the standard bearer when it comes perceptions of quality of life. Yet eighty-five percent of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of less than ten percent of its population, while the bottom forty percent of the population only have around 0.2 percent of total wealth. To my mind, that means that there are a lot of people doing it tough there.
In China, the situation is much the same, though the social problems arising out of overcrowded and polluted cities and the one child policy, an attempt to manage that population pressures, mean that more than half of China's population sits below the poverty line. In every industrialized country it is the same, an increasing trend of concentrating wealth in the hands of a very small proportion of the population. So that while the total country's situation is improving, it is improving at a much higher rate for those with the greatest wealth and serving to widen the gap between rich and poor. You don't need a detailed grasp of history to understand that it is important not to widen this gap too much. People tend to become a little fed up with such inequity and will often take matters into their own hands.
Life expectancy is a decent measure, the thinking here is that if people are living longer, the society in which they live is doing the right thing by them. There are decent health systems, suitable safety measures are in place in work areas, no civil war or similar social unrest, people are happy and as we all know, happy people tend to live longer. According to the 2007 CIA Factbook, if life expectancy at birth is an indicator, then Andorra is the place to be. This little principality, nestled high in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, relies on tourism for its wealth. It is notable that its isolation has tended to insulate it against the major world conflicts and perhaps that is part of the reason for its high life expectancy. The average Andorran is expected to live to around 83.5 years of age, more than a full year more than No. 2 on the list, Macau. The United States, numero uno on all the measures of wealth, doesn't do so well here, slotting in at number 29. That average Andorran has more than double the life expectancy at birth than a citizen of Swaziland, at the other end of the scale, who will struggle to see his/her 40th birthday. Very sad.
So one could argue that if we help the average population to live longer, then we will have made the world a better place. A dubious argument, particularly if you have ever walked into a palliative care ward, as it doesn't take into account quality of life. I also know plenty of people who have died young and lived fuller and happier lives than people who have been oppressed or lived in the most adverse of emotional or physical circumstances, yet somehow managed to survive into their 90s. It is difficult to assign a qualitative element to a raw life expectancy figure. Incorporating some sort of mix of the two would probably yield a more realistic result, but would it really measure how much 'better' the world is between two different times.
Personally, I believe that making the world a better place is all about happiness. According to Martin Seligman, the author of 'Authentic Happiness', happiness is a two-fold concept involving positive emotions and positive activities. Emotions are further categorized into past, present and future. That happiness is a combination of positive emotions relating to satisfaction, pride, contentment and serenity (past); pleasures and gratifications (present); and optimism, hope and trust (future). Positive activities are those that create those positive emotions and the most profound sense of happiness is achieved by going beyond your own happiness and creating happiness for others. For those who remember Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs from their university days (or through any leadership/motivational psychology training), this kind of equates to the Self Actualization need.
I think the main message is going beyond your own self. If you can improve the lot of others around you, preferably by increasing their level of happiness as outlined by Seligman, then I really think you can't go wrong. Increasing the happiness of those around you is probably the only way you can make the world a better place and, funnily enough, that doesn't seem to have much to do with either GDP or life expectancy.
Oh yes, and make sure to pay it forward...