George Orwell, in “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” told of the 16th century clergyman who exhorted his flock to be Catholic or Protestant depending on the political winds. The vicar was a notorious failure at giving people moral guidance, but he did plant a yew in his churchyard in Berkshire. The tree was magnificent when Orwell saw it.
Here’s the principle Orwell derived from the tale: “It might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.”
When I lived on the coast, the papers were filled with stories about “wetlands mitigation.” The theory was that if developers destroyed an acre of wetlands, they’d have to “create” an acre of wetlands somewhere else.
It seemed to me that the manmade creations were never equal the original. But they were better than nothing.
Orwell has a utilitarian idea, which assumes that it makes sense to talk of greater and lesser goods, as if moral goods and evils — like French fries, soft drinks and coffees — came in various sizes. I don’t think the idea makes perfect sense, but I like it.
A note on the source: I love Orwell's essays, but this line of thought was prompted by Frances Wilson's "Invitations to Dig Deeper," an essay on Rebecca Solnit's book Orwell's Roses, in the Feb. 24 edition of The New York Review of Books.
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