Oh Hell

 Originally posted as a Facebook Note April 25, 2012.

Litter (from Wikimedia commons)

Yesterday afternoon I was meeting with some of my students at Brewed Awakenings when a driver on 1st Av caught my eye. He was driving a biggish car, stopped at the light at College Drive, and was trying to throw what looked like a Twix wrapper out the passenger side window. He threw it once... bounced back. Threw it again... bounced back. Finally, on the third attempt, he succeeded in throwing his trash out of his car and into the neighborhood. 

Litterbugs disgust me, because of the utter needlessness of what they do. Hydraulic fracturing and clear-cutting--and driving cars, for that matter--are bad for the environment, but they have compensating value (energy, timber, transportation). All littering gets the sociopath who commits it is some momentary convenience. (Problem for libertarians: Even a marginal benefit to the individual in this case results in real cost to the society. The logic of Mandeville, Ricardo and Smith works when it works, but not in this case.) 

What fascinated me about this guy, though, is that it didn't even get him that much. At some point his littering act became about as convenient as the invasion of Normandy. It certainly would have been less complicated for him to keep the wrapper in his spacious car until he got to his destination, and then throw it in a handy wastebasket. AND it would have been nicer to the neighborhood... bonus! 

But not this guy. He was Determined to Litter. He was a Compulsive Fouler of the Street. He was a Man on a Mission. He would have gotten that wrapper to that street if it had taken 1000 attempts, if he had to stay there through a green light with traffic honking behind him, if he had had to stop the car and get out and place the wrapper on the street himself. 

Of course he drove off, wrapper on street, mission accomplished, with no consequences to himself. Jerks like him are, I'm sure, what caused ancient peoples to conceive of hell, a place where dead people will pay eternally for what they got away with on Earth. Syncretist that I am, I like the Hindu concept of karma, where the good or evil you do eventually comes back to you. My dad, who did not believe in a literal hell, used to say that people made their own hell, and that seems to make sense. It's easy to imagine that this compulsive fouler of the streets is leading a generally unhappy life. Who could love someone who so thoughtlessly tosses trash where other people will have to deal with it, for at best a marginal benefit for themselves? 

But of course we live in a real, complicated world, where bad things happen to good people, and where too many people glide thoughtlessly through life, seeing people and resources as their playthings, and neighborhoods where they don't live as their wastebaskets. Plato would say they're not as happy as the reflective and virtuous, but do they know they're unhappy if they're not reflective?  I want them to know how unhappy they are.