The payoff of my "Problem of Good in the Anthropocene" is that something like a problem of evil mindset is among the problems we need to confront, and a problem of good mindset would be not only a good alternative but useful for facing Anthropocene challenges.
What's the problem of evil mindset and what are is problems? It expects order and even takes it for granted and is indignant at its breaching. When disorder arises, it seems an exception either explicable in the particular case or not - in which case it escalates to a systemic question. That abstract description doesn't do it justice but it has the same structure as the mindset I'm calling in question. I don't want to say that at a particular heartbreak people are somehow mistaken to ask broader questions about what's going on, indeed to find their confidence in the whole shaken. Going through the crucible of loss people might change their understanding of the whole... but it won't be through grappling with the problem of evil. More likely will be finding some echo of their grief beyond themselves, in other people or in the more than human world, a discovery more likely to come through lament than through the prissiness of the problem of evil. Fixation on the problem of evil separates the mourner from the affronting world, also separating the lost from the world which it had been part of, a talisman of the untrustworthiness of the world.
What is the problem of good mindset? Amazed and grateful it tries not to take good for granted, something it knows requires some effort. We take order and good for granted not just through habit but because they invite us to. The problem of good mindset knows that breaches in order will arrive, but thinks that focusing only on those moments of rupture is incomplete. Pain and betrayal should make us appreciate shattered blessings even more. The problem is not that a good order is assailed by something outside it, but that good is fragile - and it is fragile because it is good. (I'll parse the relationship with the idea that true good is invulnerable some other time.) Evil is able to compromise and pervert it because of something like the same invitation that leads us to take it for granted. This doesn't make evil any less evil, but it should change our response to evils as well as goods. Greater awareness of the porosity of the good should help us commit more effectively to helping it persist, and may make us more compassionate when it fails. And where the problem of evil cauterizes the wound, separating us and the victims of evil from the world, the attention of the problem of good mindset is drawn to particulars in the miracle of their becomings, becomings which are, given the porosity of the good, always relational.
It is not inured to the pain of evil, nor does it accept it. But it is impatient with a fixation on disappointed expectations and ruptures rather than connections and the discovery of new affinities. To use language from Donna Haraway, the problem of good is about sympoietic ongoingness. And it demands we stay with the trouble.
