When goodness isn't good enough.

FOR MANY YEARS NOW I have thought of myself as a collector of good people. Whenever I find such rare individuals who shine from within, who see beyond their selfish interests and devote themselves to improving the world, I try not to lose touch with them. By now I have quite a collection. Some are people with whom I grew up, some I met in college, and others I've met on the job, at my Unitarian church, or through friends of friends. They're scattered all over the country, and the amount of money I end up spending each year on plane trips and phone calls to keep in touch is a little bit frightening. You probably haven't heard of any of these good people. They aren't saints, and none of them is in line for a Nobel Peace Prize. They're just good people trying to live their lives as well as they can.

I've been observing many of them for a long time now. Over the years I've seen their worldviews, careers, relationships, and children mature. And eventually I started witnessing something else too. I started seeing them suffer.

I didn't notice it right away because I'd been trained not to. According to just about everyone who had a significant hand in helping to shape my worldview, the life of a good person is deeply and uniquely satisfying. Good people may not make a lot of money or become famous or even have better luck than the rest of us, but they know an inner joy far beyond their more tangibly blessed compatriots. And so I saw mainly the wonderful aspects of the lives of my good people. Their misfortunes seemed like random fluctuations, things that--painful as they might be--were inconsequential in the long run.

Even after I began noticing their suffering, I didn't immediately recognize a pattern. One such person might have a career problem--what of it? The economy is changing and careers are harder to maintain. Others found their lives being dominated by medical issues, either their own or those of their immediate family--it happens. Some suffered over politics, the state of the planet, or the various illnesses of our materialistic consumer society--not with the generic sense of concern everyone feels but with an obsessive and debilitating conviction that things have gone seriously wrong.

The pattern, however, was there: virtually all of them were overcommitted, overstressed, and under rested. Their significant relationships were slowly deteriorating because there seemed to be no time to maintain them. Many were building up reservoirs of bitterness, anger, and depression. When they took a step back to look at their lives, they alternated between denial and mystification; either they claimed that things were fine or they had no idea what they had done wrong.

I knew things weren't fine, but for a long time I also had no idea why. Over time, though, I've come to some disturbing conclusions. One big problem lies behind the many apparently random problems. It isn't my bad judgment in designating these people as particularly good, and the problem can't be solved by making them into better people. It isn't that our culture or society or government is evil. It isn't even that there aren't enough good people in the world. The problem is in goodness itself. Or rather, the problem is the vision of goodness by which my collection of people--and many of the rest of us--have tried to live.

This vision of goodness has developed from the accumulated experience and folk wisdom of many centuries. Unfortunately, across all of those centuries the vision differs from that of today in certain key ways, and current ideas about what it means to be good are severely out of date. We may not have realized it yet, but many of our best people suffer because of it.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD PERSON GOOD?

Goodness is difficult to capture in words. Philosophers throughout the ages have argued over what characteristics define the good life and whether it can even be defined by limited characteristics. But goodness is much simpler to determine when we review specific cases and start thinking about individual people we know well. I'm sure you can picture your own collection of good people--such a list is not hard to construct.

When I try to identify the qualities that make my collection of people rise above the general run of humanity, two in particular stand out: first, good people care and, second, they act. When others are suffering, they don't ask, "Why is that my problem?" And they don't wring their hands helplessly and say, "Someone should do something" They understand that if you have to look around and wonder who that someone is, it should probably be you.

A third quality is responsibility. When good people undertake an important project, they don't just check the boxes and mail in the form. Their actions aren't self-serving or to protect themselves from criticism. Good people are committed to solving a problem or achieving a goal. "Oh well, at least we tried" is not a response they accept.

Sounds inspiring, doesn't it? It's hard to read a description like that and not think, "Yes, that's how I want to be." The people in my collection really are that way. But in the modern world, they suffer.

WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT THE WORLD TODAY?

The modern world is networked, specialized, and filled with impersonal organizations whose goals are open-ended. Combined, these factors expose us to demands our ancestors never could have imagined.

Centuries ago most of my ancestors lived in Europe. When there was a plague in Asia or a famine in Africa, they didn't even hear about it much less consider it their business. Events a few villages down the road were the stuff of rumors, not crises that demanded a response. But today one of my friends is more than a thousand miles from home, helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina rebuild. Many others dug deep into their pockets after the deadly tsunami hit Southeast Asia in 2004. In a networked world, it seemed like the least they could do.

In a specialized world, the organizations we can join and the roles we might play in them are virtually limitless. Our ancestors belonged to their families, their local communities, and maybe a professional guild. Most participated in larger governments only involuntarily, through taxes or conscription. Their calendars and mailboxes weren't stuffed with the competing claims of single-issue groups.

The "organizations" our ancestors belonged to had finite goals. The limit of ambition of those running a barbershop was to cut the hair of everyone in town--not to build a national barbershop franchise, manufacture a line of hair care products, and then springboard into a general retailing empire. A church or charity used to try to feed the hungry in its neighborhood. But the modern nonprofit organization has no limits to its possible goals; it can span the world to build schools and hospitals, plant forests, cure diseases, or respond to disasters of any magnitude. Try to imagine a circumstance in which any nonprofit--a university, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Red Cross--might consider its job to be finished, even temporarily.

A specialized organization with open-ended goals--one that competes for resources with other specialized groups--cannot afford to recognize the personal limits of its members. The open-ended organization is never doing well enough and it can never back off from its demands. It could always accomplish more if only it could get more time, more money, and more effort out of its members. A local leader who ignores these considerations and attempts to limit demands (beyond the limitations that the members force through negotiation, refusal, or breakdown) isn't doing the job effectively and may be reprimanded or replaced. To the extent that the organization itself is relaxed in its demands, it will be punished by its competitive environment. If it is too relaxed, it will be driven to extinction by more effective enterprises.

This rising chorus of demands affects not only our organizations but also our personal roles. Our ancestors thought they were good parents if their children were fed and clothed and out of immediate danger, but modern parenthood means providing for a child's total physical, psychological, and spiritual development. Once it was simply a fact of life that not all children would survive to adulthood, but in today's age of car seats and bicycle helmets only an irresponsible parent exposes a child to even the slightest avoidable risk. Marriage was once a simple household partnership, but now a spouse is expected to minister to any number of personal, social, and psychological needs.

Once people could consider themselves among the good if they fulfilled the demands of their roles. Who can do that today?

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT THE GOOD PERSON?

Of course, no one is holding a gun to our heads. The demands of the modern world are easily ignored--particularly if we don't care about anyone else, or if we aren't in the habit of acting on our concerns. But what if a person does care and is acting? If you are the kind of individual who doesn't make half-hearted commitments, someone who lives by that Old Testament motto, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might"--what then?

Then you may find yourself committed to any number of open-ended agendas. The modern individual belongs to a variety of groups and holds many different roles, each of which attempts to absorb all the energy he or she can muster. Your job, your spouse, your child, your child's school or sports team or drama club, your aging parents, your alma mater, your community with all of its local politics, the organizations that confront the particular obstacles affecting people of your race, gender, physical disability, sexual orientation, or other special characteristic--they all want more out of you. And those are (in some sense) just your self-interests. What about the larger world? What about such issues as terrorism, environmental degradation, poverty, disease?

No one person can do them all justice. And in the presence of multiple well-articulated demands that you are unable to satisfy, any unconscious or unarticulated needs you have will go begging. Any personal scrap of time or energy that you have has already been allocated two or three times. Those activities without deadlines that receive a low priority because they could happen at any time--restorative walks on the beach, undirected conversations with a spouse or friend, moments of self-expression in poetry or music or art--in fact don't happen because there is no time.

In the twenty-first century anyone who tries to fulfill some previous century's vision of goodness experiences a constant sense of inadequacy and lives in the presence of many poorly articulated (and hence unmet) personal needs. Feeling trapped or helpless, such people may redirect their frustration or anger inward as depression or outward onto others or even onto a whole culture in the form of bitterness. What kind of world do we live in, after all, if a life of compassionate commitment yields nothing more than this?

There are several tricks we can employ to avoid the dissonance resulting from the mismatch between our vision of goodness and the world we live in. We may put on blinders and refuse to recognize the unmet needs within ourselves, in our loved ones, and in the world at large. We may refuse to acknowledge the open-endedness of our commitments and imagine that, with only a little more effort or a small increase in efficiency, we could meet the expectations that we have allowed to be thrust upon us. We may go from one therapeutic fad to the next, each time believing that we are about to grasp the key to limitless energy. We may attribute the dissonance to some temporary emergency, soon to be followed by some other temporary emergency. And we may keep ourselves so chronically run down and sleepless that we remain incapable of seeing through these deceptions.

"Learn," wrote Isaiah, "to do good" So many voices exhort us simply to do (and then do more), skipping over learn. Learning, I find, is a surprisingly difficult step because it requires the humility to admit what I don't already know. But as I surveyed the unenviable lives of the people I most admired, humility started rising of its own accord. I didn't know how to do good. I thought I did but I didn't. I needed to learn how.

But learn what? For starters, I learned to accept the philosophy "no one can serve two masters." A single life has room for at most one open-ended commitment--one blank check. Maybe that check goes to family, to career, to a local community, to personal growth or healing, or to a social or political agenda. Maybe at some point down the road my check will be filled in and cashed, opening the opportunity for me to write another. I may make different open-ended commitments at different stages of life. But I can't get around the fact that a satisfying life can contain at most one such commitment at a time.

Every other part of life has to live on a commitment budget--sometimes one pitifully small. In some parts of my life I'm going to have to do less than a fair share and make less than an average contribution even if no one else steps into the breach. In a world of unbounded needs and opportunities, many good and worthwhile deeds will go undone. In a world awash in information, I will know about many of them but I won't address them. I can't. I'm only human and I can only write one blank check at a time.

Somehow that has to be okay. The modern world has broken the limits on the needs to which I can respond. It has broken the limits on the demands that can be made upon me. But it hasn't broken the limits on my time and my energy. I need to find a way to live within those limits--shamelessly, guiltlessly, with a sense of well being and self-worth.

"Know yourself," the Greek sage Solon wrote on the wall at Delphi. Maybe he meant: know your limits; know that you are human.

And so I find myself working with a new vision of the good life. It's a vision in which each person finds her or his own special passion, makes that the center of a single open-ended commitment, and says to all other good causes: "This far and no farther." I don't know whether the good people in my collection will find that vision persuasive or inspiring. I'm well aware that a world full of such people won't be able to right all the wrongs and achieve all worthwhile goals. But I think they might do what is humanly possible. And maybe they would achieve that deep sense of satisfaction that ought to accompany a life well lived.

Doug Muder's articles have appeared in "UU World" and "Religious Humanism". He writes the blog "Free and Responsible Search" at freeandresponsible.blogspot.com.