I used to think heated seats in automobiles were frivolous extras shamelessly marketed to spoiled consumers. Then last summer I bought a used vehicle that just happened to have heated seats. I think you can see where this is going.
Yesterday’s evening temperatures hovered in the teens, and never had a frivolous extra seemed so essential as when I put my key in the ignition to begin the cold drive home. In my mind and in my heart I still know this makes me a spoiled consumer, but now there’s a third region of my anatomy that wants to weigh in.
Earlier in the day I had been reading about seats of a different kind. The January issue of The Rotarian, the official magazine of Rotary International, features a cover story about the serious health risks posed by poor sanitation in regions around the world. Cleverly titled 
“Nowhere to Go,” the article provided startling information about the lack of sanitary waste disposal facilities — in a word, toilets — and the number of people who die each day from related diseases.
I wonder how many public toilets my heated seats would buy?
How do I imagine life without even a decent outhouse when I have forgotten what it feels like to have a cold backside during my daily commute?
I am not going to get sentimental or, worse, preachy. Heated seats are just one example among thousands of how my life as a middle-class American is utterly removed from the realities of existence for 80% of the world’s population, and giving up my creature comforts will not alter the balance of geopolitical economics. Still, there’s got to be something worth pausing to consider here.
My awareness of the needs around me far surpasses any efforts I have made to meet those needs. I contribute to charities, regularly vote for tax increases to support social services and education, and do the occasional volunteer service, but these are such a drop in the bucket. No, put more accurately, they are such drops from my bucket. It is so easy to seek my own comfort, and most of my world applauds me for doing so. And what difference would it make, really, if I tried to live differently?
My own answers to this question reflect also some of what I hope a university education aims to cultivate.
- Even if choices about how to live my life don’t change the world — and we could probably argue about that — those choices affect my world and how I experience it. As the old adage goes, character is what we display when we think no one is watching. Independent of the practical external impact, my choices define who I am.
- Even if I cannot change the world — and, again, we could probably argue about that — I should never stop asking how the world ought to be changed.
- My priorities need to fall closer to “no one should have to squat in the gutter” than “heated seats for everyone!” Change may not happen with one person, but it does happen one person at a time.
- While individual prosperity and freedoms are important, social justice is more important.
- Inability — or perceived inability — to change the world does not relieve me of my responsibility to seek understanding of why the world is the way it is.
- Guilt does not motivate me to act; usually it simply motivates me to deny and to hide. Guilt is not a useful emotion. Compassion is, though. Anger is. Love is.
- I have the capacity to create. What will my life add to the world around me?
A few years ago Daniel Pink authored a popular book titled, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future, in he which argued that in developed economies where needs for functional products have been met, aesthetics and design themselves become the commodities. Why else do we have chic artists and designers creating unique toilet brushes for Target? The creative artists and communicators graduating from our college’s programs, according to Pink, should have the advantage in an economy that values design. I think it is worth asking, however, whether we are helping them develop dispositions that favor, metaphorically at least, heated seats or toilet seats.
