💾 Archived View for splint.rs › preaching.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:05:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I feel an unstated agreement among disparate civil society that one shouldn't preach. The breaches quickly show necessary hypocrisy.
Someone - usually young - preaching about veganism, trans-rights, the effects of aeroplanes on climate change, feels the rightness of their cause, and begins to lecture, then soon switches to practically ordering people how they should eat, speak, and travel. The one cause should obviously bind us, and if people could only be rational, we could all - easily - solve this one issue in a short time.
A second cause becomes a strain. Switching our language to be more sensitive 'won't kill anyone', but if we add travel on top of that, it's easy to notice how much of a burden this becomes. When leaning learning more on a subject, we start to notice that 'not flying', can't solve even the travel-related problems of global warming, and going fully vegan can stretch some people a lot more than others.
Once we add a third position, and decide to lean fully, and properly into the area we want to fix, things become hopeless. They want me to eat ethically? Okay, and which phone have they selected? This energetic young person doesn't need a phone, and even if they did, you can buy one without slave labour involved, but after using the fruits of slave-labour, they've decided to preach about someone's language. Or if their phone-purchasing preferences seem in order, we could ask about their choice of software, and whether or not they take all their friends' personal information, and feed it into Google and Facebook.
When people say this leads them to pessimism, it sounds like pure cowardice to me (though I have no idea if some consensus has emerged there). But when they don't consider their own shortcomings before preaching, it sounds like petulant whinging. Many people have causes they care about, but we can't function while we all try to shout about our own louder than anyone else.
Nobody could realistically fulfil all the things that we rationally ought to do, and if they did, we would meet someone running Parabola on their computer, eating home-grown vegan food, not travelling, never perpetuating stereotypes, and using whatever spare time remained after their gardening and work (and what work could they possibly have?) to feed the homeless. We can barely imagine a human with the strength to perform these actions, and if such a creature existed, nobody would invite them to parties.
I'm making this prolonged acknowledgement so I don't seem ignorant (even if this remains distasteful), when I say 'I will continue to preach'.
Here's my limited circumstances, and my excuse:
When someone spends more energy complaining about a problem than it would take to solve it, then I prefer to tell them how useless they are, rather than empathising.
Presumably similar circumstances exist for people more interested in veganism, and undoubtedly they end up sounding 'preachy' when an enthusiastic meat-eater starts complaining about health problems, or climate change, which could clearly be solved by adding a few soy-based meals to their standard meals.