Making the World a Better Place.

One thing Jesus doesn’t do is send his disciples out “to make the world a better place.”  They are to follow him and keep his commandments.  That will make the world a better place.  But making the world a better place is secondary and derivative; it is a result and consequence of discipleship, not its motivation.

Sadly, almost everyone who sets out to make the world a better place doesn’t.  Usually they end up making the world a far worse place.

Most of the atrocities of history were committed by people trying to make the world a better place.  Nazis, for heaven’s sake, were trying to make the world a better place.  So were the Communists who managed the Gulags.  And Capitalists.  Read the writings of American slave-owners; they convinced themselves that slavery was a good thing for all concerned.  We used atomic weapons against the Japanese to make the world a better place.  Those doing the waterboarding of prisoners in Guantanamo?  It was to make the world a better place.  Israelis stealing Palestinian land?  The Chinese putting the Uighurs in concentration camps?  Petrochemical companies fracking the landscape?  All to make the world a better place.

The people who set up the Indian Schools in the 19th century thought they were making the world a better place.  Forcing Indian children to adapt to advanced, progressive white American culture was considered the most humane and liberal option at the time.  (Conservatives wanted to simply exterminate them.  To make the world a better place.)     

Human consciousness is so shot through with self-interest that we can convince ourselves that anything, literally anything from death camps to nuclear annihilation, can be rationalized as “making the world a better place” if it means a better place for us.  For we easily reason that if it were a better place for us, then surely it would be a better place for everyone.

All we need to do is get rid of those “bad people.”  That would really make the world a better place.  Then only us good people would be left, and we could live together in peace and prosperity.  Wouldn’t that be great?  Every Reign of Terror and Holocaust we have endured has been an attempt to get rid of the “bad people.”  It hasn’t worked.  Because to do that is to become bad people ourselves.

The problem with making the world a better place is that we are trying to do it before making ourselves into better people.  Bad people can’t make the world a better place.  They will try to make the world a better place for themselves, and do immeasurable harm to others — and eventually to themselves, usually — in the process.  When someone tells me they are trying to make the world a better place, it usually doesn’t take much effort to locate the ones paying the cost and bearing the consequences of that effort.  

I think we try to make the world a better place because that is easier and more immediately gratifying than what is really important, which is making ourselves into better people.  Making ourselves into better people is extremely difficult and painful.  It involves change so profound that most people who have embarked on this task say it is analogous to dying.  

That’s what Jesus says, for instance.  He says we have to give up our life, “take up a cross,” and follow him instead of our own egocentric self-interest.  

Who does that?  It is way more satisfying to force someone else to change than to change ourselves.

But until we realize that we are the ones that have to change, and that this change is a kind of death, we will continue to try to make the world a better place and in fact continue to make the world much worse until we kill the planet.

And we are running out of time because we are well on our way to doing that.  

Here’s the thing:

WE CANNOT MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE!

God already made the world and declared it very good.  It’s already very good.  Everything is.  It doesn’t need to be made better.

We do.  

Maybe if we stop trying to make the world a better place and instead focus on making ourselves better people, we will stop destroying the world and others, and allow the world’s created goodness, and ours, to emerge.

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