“World
of Good” Social-Impact Report 2006, http://www.worldofgood.com/impact/index.shtml
A
“social-impact report”? We
have heard of “environmental-impact report”;
for example, one has to be filed with regard to the disposition of
our Montebello Hills before a decision be made about the hills.
A social-impact report would talk about the probable and possible
social consequences of a planned or existing activity.
What would happen if we
took a message of hope out of a harangue or homily?
That sounds odd, but an article has appeared this summer which makes
me wonder what the social impact would be in a society without hope.
Obama,
Shaman
by Michael Knox Beran,
summer, 2008, City Journal, http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_obama.html
...The
country, or much of it, has longed for such a figure, a man from the
once-oppressed race whose rise to power will atone for the sins of slavery
and racial stigmatization. But Obama’s rhetoric encompasses more than a
promise of racial healing. He is not the first politician to argue that
politics can redeem us, but in posing as the Adonis who will turn winter
into spring, he revives one of the more pernicious political swindles: the
belief that a charismatic leader can ordain a civic happy hour and give a
people a sense of community that will make them feel less bad. ...
It
is a sign of growing maturity in a people when, laying aside these beliefs,
it acknowledges that suffering is an element of life that sympathetic magic
cannot eradicate, and recognizes a residue of pain in existence that even
the application of technical knowledge cannot assuage. Advances in knowledge
may end particular kinds of suffering, but these give way to new forms of
hurt—milder, perhaps (one would rather be depressed than famished), yet
not without their sting. We do not draw closer to a painless world. ...
Unlike
the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards
suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be
corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements.
Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal
continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it. ...
September 4, 2008