Nowadays, "the world's troubles are your troubles" is something like Dartmouth's unofficial motto. To encourage students in their efforts to shoulder this burden of moral responsibility, President Jim Yong Kim recently added, "there is nothing wrong in the world that human beings can't fix" ("Students share, reflect at annual global forum," Jan. 18), to his repertoire of optimistic aphorisms. And here I thought that "Quixotism" was just the theme of this term's Dartmouth Film Society series.
Just as Don Quixote's chivalric fantasy was not without a certain nobility, Kim's vision of a few thousand Dartmouth students ending poverty, disease, prejudice, war and pollution has a certain power to inspire. Even the realistic but often cynical Sancho Panza got caught up in the Don's flights of fancy every now and again. But good intentions are not the same as good ideas, and even the most well-intended efforts can have unintended consequences. That is why it is vital to maintain a critical skepticism, scrutinize our programs of social transformation and resist the lure of utopianism.
Though the notion that "the world's troubles are our troubles" may resonate with our moral intuitions, closer examination reveals the egotism of this position. The problem with this formulation of our moral responsibility toward "the world" is that it provides no clear definition of "the world's troubles." What constitutes a "trouble" depends on who you talk to. It's a question that is rooted in our values and presuppositions, and the answers are necessarily subjective and culturally conditioned. So really, when you say, "the world's troubles are your troubles," you mean one of two things. You either mean, "you are responsible for the world's troubles, as I see them," or you mean, "you are responsible for the world's troubles, as you see them."
But by projecting onto "the world" your own definition of troubles, or inviting others to do so, you are disregarding any possible diversity of opinion, including fundamental disagreements about what is wrong with the world and how it got that way. Even the things that seem most basically good or important to individuals in our society may be considered irrelevant or harmful to others. "But," you might say, "surely everyone can agree that poverty, disease and hunger are bad?" First of all, probably not. While no one likes being poor, sick or hungry themselves, not every culture is animated by a Rawlsian inclination toward universal goodwill and some might conclude that the poverty, sickness or hunger of competitors is acceptable or even desirable. At any rate, there are certainly differences in how we rank various "troubles" relative to one another. When values come into conflict, these different hierarchies will yield different outcomes.
Even supposing there was a universal consensus on certain problems, you will find no such agreement when you turn to consider possible solutions. I think it's safe to conclude that even though they may agree that unemployment is a problem, Paul Krugman and Glenn Beck have radically different ideas of what a healthy society looks like and how to achieve it. If either succeeded in implementing his vision, the other would be extremely discontented. That is why any efforts to transform our society become the subjects of such intense debate. Whether you're spreading democracy or modern medicine, you're promoting if not imposing a set of values and practices that not everyone shares, often including those whose "troubles" you were trying to solve. Social change is never value-free and never culture-neutral.
The existence of fundamental disagreements about the nature of the world's troubles and how to solve them is a problem if you choose to think of it that way which human beings cannot solve. I'm not saying that we should surrender all of our beliefs to cultural relativism or cease advocating for those causes that we hold dear. I'm saying that we should acknowledge that none of us possesses a unique privilege to define the world's problems in absolute terms. We might consider a return to our official motto, "Vox Clamantis in Deserto," which acknowledges our place as voices of reason and hope in the wilderness of a troubled world, not as its saviors and Lords.
