To Do or Not to Do.

I finished watching the film Into the Wild tonight, about the trek to personal freedom undertaken by Christopher McCandless until his premature death resulted from a case of botanical mistaken identity.

There are a lot of good messages in that story, and yet the one that occurred to me most forcibly wasn’t even overtly expressed. It concerns the doing of good.

I’ve heard it said that doing good is pointless because the material world is essentially flawed, always will be, and maybe is even meant to be in order to act as a proving ground. The argument has it that whatever wrongs we right, they will simply crop up elsewhere or in a different form, or will be replaced by other wrongs. That’s a big subject in itself, and I have some sympathy with certain parts of the reasoning. (I heard it pointed out recently, for example, that for all the laudable efforts of the abolitionists, there is more slavery in the world now than there was at the time of the great European slave trade.) Where I differ, however, is in the final position.

I currently hold the view (and this might change) that doing good without desire of reward is a good thing to do because it connects us with a positive aspect of spirit. In other words, it isn’t the external achievement that really matters, but the good we do ourselves in the process.

This is a complex subject, and one that I need to consider further.