'Soul Of A Citizen': Make A Difference, Knowing The Outcome Won't Be Perfect

I really liked this piece:

'Soul Of A Citizen': Make A Difference, Knowing The Outcome Won't Be Perfect, by Paul Loeb

When people hesitate to take a stand on issues from the Gulf oil spill to the horror show off the coast of Gaza, it's often because they're unsure of the outcomes of their actions. The issues themselves can be complex and overwhelming. I've talked in an earlier Soul of a Citizen excerpt about the trap I call "the perfect standard," where we feel we need to know every conceivable answer before we start to take a stand. But we also hold back because all our actions seem fruitless or compromised and because we're uncertain just how they'll will play out. Yet acting despite this ambiguity is often the most effective way to make change.

Heartfelt social involvement inevitably leads us into uncertain spiritual and emotional terrain. Theologian George Johnson amplifies this point in Beyond Guilt and Powerlessness. "Most of us," he says, "are more comfortable with answers than with questions. When faced with a problem we generally approach it with the assumption that information, insights, and proper action will bring satisfactory solutions. We want to fix things right now."

But as Johnson explains, "the reality of a broken world" often leads to ambiguity rather than certainty. "What we thought, believed, assumed, or followed is suddenly brought into question .... Receiving more information unsettles us rather than making things clear and easy .... It should not surprise us that our journey into the lives of those who cry for help will be discomforting."

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The truth is self-evident: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness isn't about gender

*spams* I'm apparently too tired to comment usefully on anything, so I'm just spamming your flists with excerpts. Whoops. Anyway, interesting retrospective review of Left Hand of Darkness.

The truth is self-evident: Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness isn't about gender, by Josh Wimmer

The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. It might be a (literally cold) cold war metaphor in some ways, with the semi-anarchic monarchy of Karhide, where Genly's story starts, standing in for the U.S., and the rival communist nation of Orgoreyn, where Genly almost dies, as the U.S.S.R. It plays with history as cycle, breaking up the primary narrative with Gethenian myths that are relived by Genly and the other main character, the exiled Karhidish prime minister Estraven. And it spends a lot of time on the harmony between dichotomy and unity — yin and yang, I and Thou, individual and group. The novel's title refers to light — the opposite hand of darkness — the point being that, pervasive Judeo-Christian and other religious metaphors notwithstanding, light alone isn't good, isn't any better than darkness alone. Life deals in both.

Genly's coming-to-terms is really about overcoming that obstacle in his thinking — internalizing the understanding that life is not about any single way. Maybe paradoxically, it's also about his recognizing the power of the solitary self. He's sent alone by the Ekumen on his mission not merely because of a Prime Directive–esque philosophy that one person can't do too much harm, but also because only a self can really connect with anyone else. Any group identity is a convenient fiction — there are similarities between students at the same school, or citizens of the same country, or followers of the same religion, but nearly any time you say, "[Group X] is..." you're flattening a complex four-dimensional reality into a less accurate Mercator projection (and the more people there are in Group X, the grosser the inaccuracy becomes). The only way for Genly to get over his feelings about the Gethenians is to engage deeply with a single Gethenian, Estraven — to touch another self.

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