One of the oddly persistent mistakes people seem to fall into in a whole host of areas of life is the idea that small amounts don't matter.
Take, for instance, the illusion that I so often fall into: "This will only take me ten minutes a day. No matter how busy I am, I always spend at least ten minutes just wasting time. Clearly, I can add this one extra activity."
With sufficient determination, and a low enough starting level of commitments, one can pull this off. But in point of fact the day is made up of a finite number of ten minute increments, and one cannot add an unlimited number of them. Sometimes, adding even one ten minute commitment ends up having more ramifications than one would imagine. And time "wasted" is often curiously hard to stamp out.
People often have this same issue with regards to money. For instance, there was a lot of buzz a little while back about a study purporting to show that Walmart could offer all of its workers a wage of at least $12/hr and pass the cost on to customers, with the result that the average Walmart purchase would go up from 43.95 to 44.41 -- a mere forty-six cents!
Small increases in cost, time commitment, etc. often seem as if they were "free" because the amounts are small enough that we have a great deal of difficulty figuring out where they come from. Our natural tendency is thus to assume that they don't come from anywhere, they're just "extra". But of course, they're not.
If I decide to set aside ten minutes each day to work my way through the Oxford Book of English Verse, I may not be able to track what it is that I forgo doing in order to spend that time, but I clearly am forgoing something. Similarly, if I pick up fast food for lunch twice a week and the restaurant I go to raises its prices by $0.20, that $0.40 a week will come out from somewhere else in my budget -- it's just impossible for me to tell what because I'll make the allocation unconsciously.
This tendency to assume that small amounts don't matter becomes especially problematic when you start applying it to large groups of people. Say I'm sitting in the headquarters of a grocery chain and I'm deciding whether to increase the price of "Toasted O's" by ten cents. I sell 200 boxes of Toasted O's each week in each of my stores, and I have 700 stores scattered around the country. That means if I raise the price by ten cents, I'll increase my sales revenue by $14,000/wk which is $728,000/year. Three quarters of a million dollars! Just by raising the price ten cents! What could go wrong? No one's going to stop eating Toasted O's or go shop at another store just because of ten cents, is he?
Well, actually, at the margins there probably are a couple people who were already on the verge of switching to some other breakfast food or some other grocery store, and that price increase will happen to be the ten cents that breaks the camel's back. But much more common is that customers won't exactly notice, but something somewhere will change. There's no truly free money or truly free time.
Someone will pass on the Toasted O's that day, someone else will buy them, but end up not buying some other product, yet another person will find that he doesn't have quite enough spare change in his pocket to buy that soda from the machine at work. It all comes from somewhere, even if it's impossible to track.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
7 hours ago
7 comments:
Coyote Blog made a similar post a while back, on some "green" ideas.
This is the whole idea behind most "charity" taxes, isn't it? "We just take an extra penny on the dollar-- you CAN'T complain about just a penny on the dollar!-- and we can do all this great stuff!"
Somehow, the great stuff never is enough, and they need another penny, and you end up with Tacoma voting "no" on raising their sales tax to 10% (The last penny that broke the camel's back!) and the buses being cut back because of it. (They became far too expensive to opperate on the old budget, not because of the rising cost of gas, but because of a lot of little raises and a lot of new, little jobs with their own raises.)
Big things start from something small. It's saddening to know that a lot of us tend to neglect doing these little but really important things that could improve our lives.
My problem with doing small amounts of stuff is that I get into this notion that nothing should last longer than, say, 30 minutes max. I'm having this problem with Sunday mass because I've gotten so accustomed to the fast 20 - 25 pared down no singing daily mass (which I have to say, really prefer no singing). So now when I go to Sunday mass, I get impatient. It just seems so.long. I'm also like that with exercise - a fast 30 minute dog walk is doable every day, but an hour long strength training class- no can do every day, too much of a commitment.
I get frustrated with the notion that small amounts of time do not mean anything. The place where it drives me out of my gourd is commuting and the ever present traffic report. They all say "just give yourself a little extra time." Where am I supposed to get this time from?
This post is so true. But, I cannot understand how Catholics can understand this point, but not understand that this is also true for population levels.
I have NO PROBLEM with large families, and think that people who are excellent parents should have as many children as they wish, but for an institution to be against non-abortive birth control methods, particularly within a marriage, just astounds me.
A while back you responded to my inquiries about this by saying that it was not a "Kantian Imperitive" to reproduce, and I suppose I did not understand your logic.
momofthree,
I'm not sure your reasoning is as clearly presented as you seem to think. As it stands, it would equally support an argument against doing anything to increase average lifespans, since even small increases in average lifespan in a large population will have the same sort of major effects on the population at large and its resources.
After all, the fact that small things matter doesn't mean that they should be avoided (which would be impossible) or done (which would equally get us into contradictions when exclusive possibilities are faced) or that knowing that small things matter tells you what the right thing to do about them is. There are some things that, if they were done ten minutes a day, would be massively beneficial; there are other things that would be just bad ideas for how much ten minutes a day would take out of your life; in both cases the small things matter. But that's not an argument for or against anything you might be doing for those ten minutes. To move from "small things matter" to "contracept to keep family size small" is a pretty obscure leap that needs a bit more filling out than you give.
momofthree,
This post is so true. But, I cannot understand how Catholics can understand this point, but not understand that this is also true for population levels.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by not understanding the same point about population levels. Certainly, the accumulation of small increases (say, each couple has "just one more" child) would have a large effect on population size -- assuming that all other things remained constant. But I don't think that people, in general, have the idea that having just one more child is a small thing. If anything, people probably often over estimate the difficulty that one more child would have on their families.
The particular thing I was trying to get at here is the idea that one can have some sort of a large cumulative effect (say, giving all the workers at Walmart a significant raise) for "free" because it would only cost a small amount of excess money from each customer. Since we can't really track what the impacts of charging everyone fifty cents more would be, we can fall into thinking that the impact is "nothing".
I have NO PROBLEM with large families, and think that people who are excellent parents should have as many children as they wish, but for an institution to be against non-abortive birth control methods, particularly within a marriage, just astounds me.
The main thing to keep in mind in this regard is that Catholic teaching in regard to birth control has nothing to do with how many children one should have (the Church would, in principle, be fine with a couple having no children so long as they were not achieving this through abortion or artificial birth control) and everything to do with what sex is in what its place in human life is. That's why the Church is fine with the use of Natural Family Planning, but opposes artificial contraception. (I did a four part post trying to get at the differences between those starting here.)
A while back you responded to my inquiries about this by saying that it was not a "Kantian Imperitive" to reproduce, and I suppose I did not understand your logic.
Sorry to get jargon-ish (or maybe just showoff-y, knowing me.) What I was trying to get at with the "Kantian Imperative" term was basically that there are multiple ways to living in keeping with the Church's teaching on sexuality, and not all of them involve having lots of children. For my wife and I, this has led to a large family (five children), but looking at the practicality of Church teaching doesn't necessarily mean assuming that everyone makes the same choices as we did (marry very young, seek to have a large family, etc.) So I don't think it's necessary to think in terms of, "If everyone has five kids, where would we be?" terms.
I feel like I may not have answered your concerns as thoroughly as would be helpful. If it would be helpful, I'd be happy to write a post focused on your specific worries about Church teaching on birth control, if you'd like to lay them out here or via email.
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