Feb 25 JDN 2460367
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Of course I don’t care for its religious message (and the full prayer is even more overtly religious), but the serenity prayer does capture an important insight into some of the most difficult parts of human existence.
Some things are as we would like them to be. They don’t require our intervention. (Though we may still stand to benefit from teaching ourselves to savor them and express gratitude for them.)
Other things are not as we would like them to be. The best option, of course, would be to change them.
But such change is often difficult, and sometimes practically impossible.
Sometimes we don’t even know whether change is possible—that’s where the wisdom to know the difference comes in. This is a wisdom we often lack, but it’s at least worth striving for.
If it is impossible to change what we want to change, then we are left with only one choice:
Do we accept it, or not?
The serenity prayer tells us to accept it. There is wisdom in this. Often it is the right answer. Some things about our lives are awful, but simply cannot be changed by any known means.
Death, for instance.
Someday, perhaps, we will finally conquer death, and humanity—or whatever humanity has become—will enter a new era of existence. But today is not that day. When grieving the loss of people we love, ultimately our only option is to accept that they are gone, and do our best to appreciate what they left behind, and the parts of them that are still within us. They would want us to carry on and live full lives, not forever be consumed by grief.
There are many other things we’d like to change, and maybe someday we will, but right now, we simply don’t know how: diseases we can’t treat, problems we can’t solve, questions we can’t answer. It’s often useful for someone to be trying to push those frontiers, but for any given person, the best option is often to find a way to accept things as they are.
But there are also things I cannot change and yet will not accept.
Most of these things fall into one broad category:
Injustice.
I can’t end war, or poverty, or sexism, or racism, or homophobia. Neither can you. Neither can any one person, or any hundred people, or any thousand people, or probably even any million people. (If all it took were a million dreams, we’d be there already. A billion might be enough—though it would depend which billion people shared the dream.)
I can’t. You can’t. But we can.
And here I mean “we” in a very broad sense indeed: Humanity as a collective whole. All of us together can end injustice—and indeed that is the only way it ever could be ended, by our collective action. Collective action is what causes injustice, and collective action is what can end it.
I therefore consider serenity in the face of injustice to be a very dangerous thing.
At times, and to certain degrees, that serenity may be necessary.
Those who are right now in the grips of injustice may need to accept it in order to survive. Reflecting on the horror of a concentration camp won’t get you out of it. Embracing the terror of war won’t save you from being bombed. Weeping about the sorrow of being homeless won’t get you off the streets.
Even for those of us who are less directly affected, it may sometimes be wisest to blunt our rage and sorrow at injustice—for otherwise they could be paralyzing, and if we are paralyzed, we can’t help anyone.
Sometimes we may even need to withdraw from the fight for justice, simply because we are too exhausted to continue. I read recently of a powerful analogy about this:
A choir can sing the same song forever, as long as its singers take turns resting.
If everyone tries to sing their very hardest all the time, the song must eventually end, as no one can sing forever. But if we rotate our efforts, so that at any given moment some are singing while others are resting, then we theoretically could sing for all time—as some of us die, others would be born to replace us in the song.
For a literal choir this seems absurd: Who even wants to sing the same song forever? (Lamb Chop, I guess.)
But the fight for justice probably is one we will need to continue forever, in different forms in different times and places. There may never be a perfectly just society, and even if there is, there will be no guarantee that it remains so without eternal vigilance. Yet the fight is worth it: in so many ways our society is already more just than it once was, and could be made more so in the future.
This fight will only continue if we don’t accept the way things are. Even when any one of us can’t change the world—even if we aren’t sure how many of us it would take to change the world—we still have to keep trying.
But as in the choir, each one of us also needs to rest.
We can’t all be fighting all the time as hard as we can. (I suppose if literally everyone did that, the fight for justice would be immediately and automatically won. But that’s never going to happen. There will always be opposition.)
And when it is time for each of us to rest, perhaps some serenity is what we need after all. Perhaps there is a balance to be found here: We do not accept things as they are, but we do accept that we cannot change them immediately or single-handedly. We accept that our own strength is limited and sometimes we must withdraw from the fight.
So yes, we need some serenity. But not too much.
Enough serenity to accept that we won’t win the fight immediately or by ourselves, and sometimes we’ll need to stop fighting and rest. But not so much serenity that we give up the fight altogether.
For there are many things that I can’t change—but we can.
Human Economics 