C.S. Lewi’s book The Screwtape Letters is a real masterpiece when it comes to modern wisdom literature. It’s filled with psychological insights into how we go wrong and fool ourselves while doing it. There’s one insight in particular I want to talk about, though it also is found, at least in part, in Lewis’s essay The Dangers of National Repentance, which is included in the collection God in the Dock. That insight is: when we concentrate our effort on abstract goodness, we give ourselves the space for actual evil.

Though it’s not ideal—being a saint is ideal—most of us keep a mental tally sheet of good that we do vs. bad that we do, and as long as the good column has significantly more marks in it than the bad column, we figure that we’re doing already. We could stand some improvement, but everyone can, so if there’s hope for anyone, there’s probably hope for us, too. A major weakness of this approach is how it makes all good and evil equivalent—it all comes down to a tally mark. When we put down a tally mark in the good column for something abstract like being “in favor” of something good, like reducing pollution, and also a tally mark in the bad column for something real, like being rude to a family member and making their day worse, this comes out even in our mind. But being “in favor” of reducing pollution does no one any good, while being rude to our family member does a real person real harm.

Of course, our abstract good is usually not quite that abstract. We can come up with trivial and easy but concrete things to do ostensibly in aid of our abstract good, such as (to continue my example) recycling a piece of paper or remembering to turn off the lights when we leave a room. The actual amount of good from this is absolutely trivial, but it counts as a tally mark and the technically-greather-than-zero effort we put in makes it feel justified to put it down as a tally mark.

I think that this is becoming increasingly important as so much of life moves online and ignoring the real people that we interact with becomes ever easier, together with abstractions all requiring greater-than-zero effort like posting about something. You can call it “raising awareness” or “owning the libs” or “calling out stupidity” or any other flavor of virtual-doing-something, but if you never pause to consider the actual amount of good done to actual people—and social media’s making disconnect of not knowing who’s reading what we post makes it easy to not do this—it’s way, way too easy to fool yourself into thinking that you’re being good when you’re only pretending to be good, and to use this pretend good to justify the real harm that you do, especially if it isn’t bad enough to cause permanent physical damage to anyone.

To give this a vivid image to summarize what I mean: the people I know who are in favor of increasing taxes and putting that money into public welfare programs have walked past 100% of the beggars in the street asking for help that we’ve passed together without giving them anything.