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Michelle Scorziello's avatar

Baird, your article about when saints walk among us is one of my favourites and I think of it a lot. And of course I've been thinking of Alexei Navalny today and what causes a person to stand up for what is right despite the dangers involved. He was a brave man, the bravest, braver than I know I would be. But we can be brave and stand up for what is right in the small things in life. Often it is the small things that presage and give free rein to large things, large erosions of freedom and erosions of behaviour that exists to keep us safe.

I recall a time in a school I worked in and a staff meeting where one of the management was making jokes about the children and many of the staff were laughing. I looked around at them and realised that this person making the jokes was putting us all in an unprofessional and therefore dangerous position. I did not laugh. I was horrified. I went to the head right after the meeting and told her how I felt. Long story short, the person was eventually dismissed. Her 'grooming' of the staff was just one in a litany of inappropriate behaviour. Of course, if I had been really brave I would have spoken up in the meeting, but I was aware that I had at least registered that what she was doing was wrong and I refused to go along with it.

Alexei Navalny reminds to hold fast to our beliefs and defend them when required.

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Michael's avatar

Wise and wonderful essay as you so often gift us with.

Are we we good by nature or are we bad? I've come to the belief that a property true of a set is not necessarily true of all elements of a set and if you look at an individual as the collective set of all the time slices of the individual's life then the property of being good or bad of the whole is not shared by all the time slices of that individual.

But that is all being excessively reductionist. I don't think Putin is always bad, but as an average, he is definitely such. As for Humanity, the jury is out, we don't have enough data points..we may get better we may get worse. On the whole, I would be hesitant to make a judgement other than to say that the trend line is that we are neither good nor bad, but that we are definitely harmful- to ourselves, to other species, to the environment.

The appropriate moral response to the trend line is to reduce the harm by voluntarily reducing our numbers, even if it means reducing the numbers of saints walking the earth.

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