Phrases and Pharisees

I totally had to look up “Pharisees” on Wikipedia to make sure it actually meant what I wanted it to. It may wind up coming across way harsher than I wanted when I get into the actual topic of this blog, but, hey, that’s the price we pay for alliteration.

This is my — personal, biased, emotional — reaction to an attitude in myself and others that annoys me a lot. This attitude encompasses a lot of things, but it seems to me to be embodied in one use of the phrase “first-world problem”.

In a nutshell, the phrase means a problem that one is fortunate to encounter because it exists only for those born into financial and social privilege. For example, if A is frustrated because he’s out of cereal or B is sad because her car only comes in green but she wants silver, that’s a “first-world problem”. A and B are rich enough that they don’t have to worry about the basic necessities of life. If their problems don’t get solved, they won’t die or suffer drastically. Their worries are the worries of the privileged.

I think that it’s important for people like me, living a comfortable life in a developed, Western country, to realize the extent of our privilege. It’s important for me to recognize how fortunate I am, not only because it helps me to avoid being an arrogant prick, but because it helps me to develop as a person, to cultivate my own mental health by putting problems in perspective, and to set myself on a road aimed at confronting and trying to solve our planet’s injustices.

However.

While it’s great for me to set those goals for myself, and while I do believe that, in the best possible world, others in my position would share those goals, I don’t think it’s right of me to exclaim, “First-world problem!” when a friend is moaning about how his or her favourite restaurant moved across town*.

Why not? Well, a bit because it’s ineffective. Am I actually making my friend think of how ashamed he is for making a big deal about a frivolous luxury? No, I’m making him think of what a tool I am for needing to point out his moral failure in order to show I’m a better person. Not necessarily better than him, but better in general for being the sort of person who, instead of getting annoyed when her friend complains about something she doesn’t think is very important, places his action in the greater moral landscape and always judges it compared the suffering of the less fortunate. And let’s face it: I’m not actually helping any person who doesn’t share my privilege here. No one who’s starving or hurt or homeless is going to suddenly have a better life because I convince my friend that he’s making a silly complaint. This is entirely between me and him.

Also a bit because it’s insulting. I’m assuming my friend has never thought about these things, that just because he didn’t say, “It so sucks that St. Hubert moved out of the West End… although of course I am glad that I have enough to eat and a roof over my head and a safe place to work, which I know many people don’t”, he’s totally unaware of the social injustices in the world. I’m also putting my moral quest above his feelings — because, hey, even if the problem isn’t a big one in the grand scheme of things, it still clearly matters to him. In the moment I use him to advance my ethical viewpoint, I treat him as a means to an end, even if that end is social justice.

And, finally, also a bit because it undoes the very good I’m trying to do with the statement. If my ultimate goal is to get my friend and me thinking about our position as First-World citizens who enjoy comfortable and often downright luxurious standards of living, bringing the fact to his attention with a quick token phrase is shooting myself in the foot. When I do that, I’m not ready to listen to him or giving him an opportunity to open a discussion. I’m closing down the conversation, imposing my view without starting a dialogue. And the dialogue is where the real thinking comes in.

Let me put it another way. We do a whole lot of things to try to make the world a better place, and not all of them are effective. We force ourselves to eat every last morsel on our plates, despite not being hungry for them, in the belief that this is somehow less wasteful than throwing them out, when it’s arguable that the food is already wasted the moment we buy, choose, or are given a portion size that is more than we actually want or need**. We “raise awareness” about complex, nuanced issues (like breast cancer, the genocide in Darfur, and poverty) in simplistic ways that require little effort, like wearing a certain colour shirt to work or changing our Facebook status. We embrace small changes, like recycling or turning off the tap when brushing our teeth, instead of making the large-scale changes in lifestyle needed to support environmental sustainability.

And, hey, that’s understandable. If it were as easy to make the world a better place as it is to talk about wanting to make the world a better place, we wouldn’t have all these injustices and problems to worry about. My point is not that when we do these things that may not be 100% effective or that may be inconvenient for others, we’re bad, bad people and should stop being hypocrites because it’s all useless anyway. My point is that, if doing something like this is important and meaningful to you, that’s good. Just like I wouldn’t tell someone with faith to stop praying because *I* don’t believe in G-d , I wouldn’t tell someone who finds meaning in having a pink ribbon for breast cancer to stop wearing it.

However, just as I would not appreciate the same devout friend insisting that I, too, must pray in order to be as good a person as they are, I don’t appreciate a Pink Ribbon supporter telling me or acting like they and their fellow ribbon-wearers have the one and only good way to acknowledge or aid the cause of fighting breast cancer. There are lots of ways to wrestle with a problem and lots of ways to help, and any of them can contribute to personal growth as long as it has meaning for the person doing it. If my way of keeping myself on track is to remind myself that my various difficulties are first-world problems, that’s great. But I can’t assume that what has meaning for me has meaning for others, nor can I demand that they share my interpretation of the action.

What I can do is discuss my position on the issue in question. I can debate the effectiveness of particular approaches, talk about the goals I think one should have and why one should have them; I can say, “Hey, I’m sorry your favourite restaurant closed. I know you liked it a lot. But you know what I’ve been thinking about lately?”

Learning how privileged one is to be wealthy, or a first-world citizen, or white, or male, or heterosexual, or middle-class, or physically able, etc. and accepting moral responsibility for that privilege is ethically and psychologically important. But it starts as an individual journey. Nobody can force any of us to confront our privilege if we choose not to do so — that is, after all, one of the essences of privilege. And it’s especially problematic to try to force someone to confront a privilege that’s shared — who am I to call myself a voice for others when you and I are in the same boat?

*Unless, obviously, that particular friend and I have had a discussion about this beforehand, and we’ve agreed that we prefer to work that way. All things are open to negotiation.

** As you can imagine, I encounter a lot of people who disagree with this position, and I’d be happy to discuss it in the comments. (Unless you are my sister, because we talked about it enough.)