The only time Billy Pilgrim cried was when he realized how much the horses were suffering. Then he was arrested and it is likely the horses died or were slaughtered for food.
How much should we care about the world? Large birds are eating smaller birds and rodents everywhere all the time. Large fish, small fish. Pumas deer.
By all rights, I should be a vegetarian. But I was a vegetarian once, and it was one of the most unpleasant periods of my life. A Tibetan Buddhist text I read screams that I will live in hell a long time for eating meat. But is it not functionally equivalent to a Baptist preacher screaming I will go to hell for fornicating or homosexuality? Do not even people who are exemplary in other ways not sometimes make mistakes? Who, what, can we trust?
I’m reasonably sure I could accustom myself to killing cows and lamb and goats and skinning and eating them. Certainly, if the health and well being of me and my family seemed to depend on it.
Would a just God make it so that, even though biologically we are in most cases healthier eating some meat, that we are not supposed to eat dead animals?
And how about people? No, not eating them: although cannibalism is apparently a popular theme among some, with the Hannibal show apparently taking it about as far as it can be made to go.
How much should we care about people? There is suffering everywhere. In India, they have by and large seemed to learn to overlook it, particular when suffered by non-persons like the Dalits. It took Mother Teresa, a Christian, to do anything about the people dying on the streets of Calcutta. Everyone else was “me and mine and fuck everyone else.” That’s how the government operated for a long time, too, which was why India remained poor.
There has to be a limit. There has to be a stopping point. There has to be a way of not suffering daily from a preoccupation with other human suffering, yet also not becoming blind to it. Perhaps it is engaging only with what is in front of us, and no more. Jettison the abstract caring.
And there have to be times when we ourselves are ALL we worry about. After all, if everyone else took care of themselves, then in short order most human misery would be gone.
As with anything else, perhaps cycles are the best answer. Care some times. Don’t care others. Transit the middle.
If there are heavens and hells, as I believe, we are all in a continual project of negotiation, of reconciliation with what is really real within us, with what cannot be left behind.
It is not my job to make anyone do anything. And it is particularly not my job if its something they could do for themselves.
But, I say to myself, people are ill. I know this from my own experience. You should care, I say to myself.
And so it goes. I have no firm answer, and most likely there isn’t one. Other than I don’t feel the need or the right to tell you how much you should care about anything, and feel the same should apply on your side. Care all you want. But don’t care about my caring.
If any of us base our peace of mind on the cessation of suffering, then we will never have peace of mind. Not, in any event, for a very, very long time, and quite often the worst suffering comes from the inability to find peace.
Perhaps each of us is destined to do our best, most useful work, the moment we stop trying to do anything at all. That would certainly be a Taoist sentiment.