Given that, as mortals, we humans can only give so much time and other resources to legitimately important causes and advocacies, and that for our sanity it is consequently prudent to consciously limit and focus our caring, the question that follows is: what then should we care about?
It is something for us to answer as individuals, taking into consideration our individual circumstances. Many do not even have the bandwidth for society-at-large concerns because they are tied up and struggling to make ends meet, for their families or even just for themselves.
(Family before society: it is ordo amoris again, that theological concept of the proper ordering of love, which I touched upon before while writing about subsidiarity. A further side note: I have since found out that the recent discussions about it might even have been using the incorrect term, confusing it for ordo caritatis, about which apparently there are fewer writings and references available online. I did find an intriguing essay, The Ordo Caritatis and Giving to the Poor: Yet Another Example of How Political Ideology Distorts the Gospel, from an old and defunct blog, The Well At The World’s End. It provides an extensive analysis applying ordo caritatis to the age-old question of whether it is right to give alms to panhandlers.)
If one is so privileged in time or finances (or choose to devote themselves despite a scarcity of these) as to be able to contribute to big-picture, societal concerns, then there are two paths, one of which follows the logic of optimization. If we limit the choices of concerns to charitable donations, that is, if the question “What should we care about?” becomes “To which charity should I give money to?,” it seems like there can be easy answers, because organizations like GiveWell have carried out the hard work of researching which organizations out there will produce the most results for every dollar of your donations.
But if we are talking about a more general set of causes and concerns, the set that falls under C. West Churchman’s concept of wicked problems, then it is harder to arrive at ready-made answers. Wicked problems are those that are hard or impossible to define, to solve, and to evaluate because of their staggering complexity, rendering the usual techniques of optimization ineffective or even infeasible. These are the problems we think of first when we think about national issues, things like poverty alleviation and environmental conservation. These concerns are interrelated, and trying to solve one requires solving another, and the objectives are not even clear or cannot be agreed upon. (For example: is zero poverty possible, and if not, what level of poverty should be the acceptable target?) Basically, trying to solve these problems is tantamount to trying to fix a country, or the world; formulated this way, the intractability of the problems becomes evident.
We often have our usual suspects, our pet answers, when asked which ones of these notorious issues are of paramount importance. A common answer is government corruption, and it is telling that many do recognize that the problem of corruption is equivalent to the problem of evil: something not in our power to totally eliminate from this world, and which we can only struggle against continuously for as long as human civilization exists.
For me, and for a while now, there are two particular issues I have been very concerned with in the Philippines: education and infrastructure. The former because our top economists have been pointing out again and again that solving the education crisis is a prerequisite to achieving any of our long-term national goals: if we do not address the disheartening levels of ‘learning poverty’ in our youth today, we might be condemning entire generations to material, economic poverty; in other words, the educational crisis might be the biggest one among our national wicked problems. Even if all of those problems are interrelated, prioritizing education might be the optimal choice, it might reap the most rewards and have the most impact in moving forward all of the other areas. Infrastructure, on the other hand, is something top-of-mind for me out of personal experience, because of the difficulties I have suffered and continue to suffer when moving around even just across short distances in the city—an admittedly selfish perspective, though one that is also shared by millions of other citizens in this metropolis where I live.
Being the wicked problems that they are, solutions do not come easy for both these areas. Even in a theoretical, paradisiacal scenario where government is free of corruption, it is not just a matter of pouring in funds to build schools, hire teachers, and construct railways. In our schools, it turns out that even if the classrooms are well-provisioned and the teachers well-trained, many students still cannot learn effectively because of malnutrition and consequent deficiencies in brain development; the education problem extends into a food security and public health problem. In building much-needed railways across our cities and regions, even the availability of advanced foreign technical assistance and financing can do nothing to expedite the tedious right-of-way acquisitions, something that citizen-landowners actively resist for understandable reasons. The infrastructure problem extends into a land rights problem.
If all this difficulty sounds deflating, then there is always that other path, which is to let go of the relentless, brutal logic of optimization and solutionism. To refuse, to whatever extent possible, to participate in what the philosopher Jacques Ellul called ‘la technique’. This means leaving the comprehensive analysis and planning and policy-making to government, research organizations and civil society groups (unless, perhaps, if you choose to volunteer for these yourself!), and, in a kind of hopeful surrender, just choose a cause to toil for without much deliberation. It does not have to be the optimal choice; it does not even have to be a permanent choice anyway. Simply do what you can, for a while, given the limited resources that you have. For the rest that you cannot do, and will never get to do—as the Stoics have been telling us since antiquity: just accept them. Make peace with them, leave them to providence, and be content with what you have done yourself.