49. PROGRESS IS NOT INEVITABLE, Part One
Life is full of screwups. You’re supposed to fail sometimes. It’s a required part of the human existence.
- Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
There came a point as a soldier when I began to wonder not only if I was helping make the world a better place, but if I might actually be making it worse. Around the time soldiers in my task force accidentally killed a villager’s cow while chasing escaped prisoners, inadvertently turning an Afghan community against Coalition forces, it was becoming ever clearer the Taliban weren’t, ‘defeated,’ as they’d been declared way back in 20021. No, the reality was the Taliban were gaining ground, helped at times by the western coalition itself. By 2021, well, by then a resurgent Taliban was a foregone conclusion.
How different this reality is from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement that, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” which suggests that human societal and moral progress is inevitable. It’s a nice sentiment, it really is, echoed in President Obama’s comments about now being the historical time most of us would choose to be born.
The only thing, is that the phrase isn’t necessarily true. Progress is not inevitable, either as an individual or as a society. In fact, there are very few things in the world that are inevitable. Death and taxes, according to Benjamin Franklin. Suffering, according to Johnny Rich. Thanos, according to himself. To all these, there is one more.
Failure.
We are all going to fail. We do it our whole lives.
As babies, we fail at everything. Communicating. Eating. Walking. When we enter the school system, we fail at math, or history, or making friends. And, as adults, we fail as parents, or employees. Sometimes we fail small, like me learning how to dance. And sometimes we fail big, like in Afghanistan. Regardless, failure is probably a more unifying human experience than success.
For all that we prepare, for all that we come up with options and contingencies to help us serve our communities and the greater good, there will always be forces beyond our control with the power to take away everything we’ve got and everything we’re ever going to have. Everything, that is, except one thing: “Your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation2.”
So, the question, then, isn’t whether we’re going to fail. We are, because the world is not fair. Fair is a made-up human construct and we can’t let that stop us from serving others. There will be consequences to our actions, some of which may cause more harm than good, and so the real question we have to consider, is what we’re going to do about failure.
Walter L. Perry and David Kassing, Toppling the Taliban: Air-Ground Operations in Afghanistan, October 2001-June 2002, RAND.org, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR300/RR381/RAND_RR381.pdf, accessed 5 Jun 2023.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 3rd Edition, Touchstone: 1984.