For quite some time now, I’ve felt that the ideal think globally, act locally was a short-form treatise to ignore, a popular saying to which I’ve wanted to developed counter-principles. This intuitive feeling sprang from sources likely related to skepticism about philanthropy and the “service orientation” of sometimes-guilty elites (Anand Giridharadas nails the issues with charity in Winners Take All).
When I went to American University for an undergraduate degree, the school’s mantra was ideas into action, action into service. Nebulous, yes, but this ideological nudge helped lead me to sketch out lots of different methods to get cultural, social, economic, or political leverage and then improve the world. Get a bunch of money and do a Sam Bankman-Fried, develop a new not-as-shitty-as-Scientology religion to build solidarity and spirituality, start a political party that reaches into peoples’ hearts rather than their impulses for revenge or revulsion. Lots of messy, twenty-something thoughts with “making something of my life” as background desire, in the name of helping.
Turns out these projects pretty much always end in ruin, unless you get martyred early on enough to resonate across time as a beautiful, peaceful symbol (if Jesus had lived long enough to have to do Paul’s work, Christianity might not still be with us). Robert Moses, Huey Long, and Lyndon Johnson each vigorously lived out a solid cautionary parable.
Back to the catchphrase that got this started; think globally, act locally is the kind of statement that is meant to reward the wide reader and international news follower with a sense of ideological firmness that gains action traction in near-to-home projects and behaviors. You don’t have to do the Peace Corps to recycle, vote, and volunteer (though if you did, you’re even more likely to do these things).
Don’t get me wrong; voters, volunteers, and recyclers don’t seem harmful to their communities. It’s the ideological backbone of these acts that is troublesome. These citizen-technocrats believe they have spent enough time on Wikipedia, with NPR, and in universities to know what’s best. And they foist their knowledge upon the people and environments around them. I was on board with this way of being until I saw the dark side of causal reasoning as a stand-in for feeling taken to its logical extremes. And that’s precisely what thinking at a worldwide scale does: it replaces attentive, sensory input-based decision making and replaces it with a well-read algorithm.
Until I discovered philosophical Daoist writings (particularly the scintillating Zhuangzi), I did not have an alternative for the rational altruist’s false exchange of The Good for moral certitude (and consequent love of science fiction). But now I believe there is an alternative that does not turn a person into an anti-ethical nihilist: pay attention to the senses and act in accordance with what you experience and feel. The Zhuangzi is full of stories in which people cultivate attentiveness and live whichever verb they are enacting, and this method can replace the rationalist way in many cases. Shoveling the snow off your driveway and feeling pretty good? Perhaps your close attention to your feelings and shoveling motions lead you to do your neighbors’ sidewalks too. Feeling sleepy and argumentative? Maybe your body and relationships flourish after a nap, rather than a conflict-incitement.
This alternative is difficult to rationalize and turn into dicta precisely because it must be embodied by each individual human based on their senses and experiences rather than on their structured thoughts (though conscious internal dialogue certainly has an intimate interplay with sensory inputs & outputs and physical/mental memories). And yet, one can consciously free-will an attentive, sensorily-entangled way of being. A think now, act immediately mantra enhances both individual lives and interpersonal mutuality.