6.2 Moral victory
Day and night, as we broadcast TV and radio programs into our homes, we’re also beaming them into outer space, where they go traveling at the speed of light in all directions. Maybe they’ll sail on into oblivion never noticed by anyone.
But what if one day on a distant planet, denizens of another civilization are able to pull in those programs and decode them? What might they think of us as they watch our goofball sitcoms, our trashy celebrity gossip, our mean–spirited political battles, the hellish stories of our wars, and the relentless, grinding exploitation of humans by humans?
That would be so embarrassing, but what can we do? It’s too late to hide the truth. Our dirty laundry is out there for all the universe to see.
At the same time, I wonder if those faraway folks might have problems of their own. Maybe they, too, are struggling with evil, so…
Maybe they’d understand us.
Sometimes I want to give a pep talk to the world…
“Let’s get our act together. Here in our final days let’s make peace happen everywhere. And justice, the prerequisite for peace. Let’s go out showing the best in us.”
But there’s no way we’re going to pull that off, so how about a smaller wish?
“How about if we blanket our airwaves with programs that show our fierce longing to be so much better than we are.”
If we did this one last act of advocacy for ourselves, maybe those kindly denizens would see how much we wanted love to win despite the odds evolution set against us. Maybe they’d see how we suffered on the cross of human nature. Maybe they’d feel for us. Maybe they’d tuck us into some small corner of their affection. Maybe that would be our memorial. And maybe we’d be known somewhere out there halfway to eternity for the love in our hearts just a little bit more than for the evil in our lives.
But then I take a breath and come back down to earth. I don’t want to wait until light years in the future…
And I don’t want to outsource.
I want us to take a stand for ourselves…
I want us to hold ourselves tenderly in our own hearts right now.
Especially now when hope is in such terrible jeopardy.
In common parlance, “moral victory” means you actually lost, but you get credit, because, say in a game of basketball…
You played your best right up to the last moment.
Or…
The odds were against you but you came close to winning.
Or say in a political contest…
You lost the final vote, but in the organizing you did leading up to that vote you brought five hundred new people into your cause.
But now let’s look at evolution’s game and what it means for the fate of humanity. Evolution is going to defeat us. So in that sense we’re going to be losers.
But in the meantime, those of us who have taken up the cause of upgrading love have been playing our own game by our own rules. And…
It’s a moral game.
It’s in service of deep, primal, inclusive nurturance. It’s a trans-tribal game in direct and determined opposition to the tribal fundamentalism that evolution gave us which is now killing us.
We’ve been playing a moral game while evolution has been playing an amoral game. So in moral terms, it’s no contest…
We win!
And this is a moral victory in two senses.
First, because…
In upgrading love, we’re upgrading human morality as well.
And we deserve credit for that.
Second, because, for me, this moral game is more important than the survival game. The way I see it…
Who I am matters more to me than my fate.
Which means just being in the upgrade game is a victory.
And I wish my species felt this way about itself, and acted on that feeling, and joined in this game en masse.
But given that there’s no way that’s going to happen, I like to imagine that those of us who are fierce advocates for upgraded love, are doing our work not just for ourselves, but in spirit we’re also doing it…
On behalf of our species.
Which can’t do this for itself.
And I like to imagine that even though the upgrade mission is messy and incomplete and not trending, the fact that so many of us long for upgraded love, and some unknown number of us are working for it, means that…
We humans are having our biggest moment of victory inside our final defeat.
