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I can”€™t work myself up into a state of righteous indignation over all this wastage and extravagance because I have in my time done a fair bit of traveling at other people’s expense to no very obvious benefit to anyone except myself. These days I don”€™t go anywhere only because I”€™m not asked, or not often. If someone tomorrow were to offer me a free trip in luxurious conditions to Laos (a country I have long wanted to visit, my imagined personal Shangri-la) to discuss, say, the works of Henry Vaughan, the 17th-century religious poet of mid-Wales, I should of course at once accept, even if by doing so I added my mite to the downfall of the planet and the destruction of the coral reefs in the Pacific. After all:

What is love? “€™Tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What’s to come is still unsure;

In delay there lies no plenty….

Indignation is always selective, it cannot be otherwise; but because it is so pleasant and self-satisfying an emotion there is always the temptation to simulate it. It can be a genuinely generous emotion where it is in response to the outright injustice, cruelty, or neglect of others, but it can also be used to justify one’s own bad behavior (throwing bottles in the Place de la République) and to exile the locus of one’s moral concern from one’s own conduct to that of matters far beyond one’s personal control. In other words, purity in the world, libertinism in one’s life.