Proximity Morality

[TitusTwoWife]

Proximity Morality: Focusing on our closest neighbors and environment over distant ones as a virtue.

The news is constantly informing people about distant catastrophes, corruptions, and crimes from all over the world. Not only are you not a bad person for not caring about it all, it makes sense because you can't do much about those distant events.

The people we live with and next to, our families and friends are different. We ought to be caring about them and treating them well because we have the power to actually affect their lives.

I call it proximity morality because it matters more if a soul is kind to neighbor and family than if they have total empathy for distant strangers but are rude and obnoxious to those around them.

 

[TitusTwoWife]

"The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there."

C.S Lewis The Screwtape Letters #1

(A demon is writing to another demon so the Enemy they refer to is God)