It's always wonderful to have requests from a member of the congregation for me to reflect on a specific topic - wonderful, and very challenging! I never want to disappoint the person who asked, but I don't always know exactly what was in their mind when they suggested the topic, and it's also important to consider the needs and interests of everyone in the congregation. Usually - it might even be always - I'm unclear about the many dimensions of a particular question and it requires a fair amount of pre-reflection on my part before I can hope to have anything worth saying. Even then, I'm only at the beginning of the learning process for myself. This morning's topic is especially challenging because it involves so many areas of thought - philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, for a start - and because the word "altruism" itself, like so many vitally important words, is ambiguous and understood in many ways. I don't think it can be defined, or pinned down, in any totally satisfactory way, but it may be helpful to consider some of the various meanings it can have.
Altruism is perhaps most often thought of as a pure and unselfish form of love which expects no benefits or rewards. Anthropologists and biologists have struggled to explain why it exists at all, since it's not easy to understand its survival value, and some of them have come up with the idea that there's a kind of species selfishness involved: what looks like unselfish love may actually be a residual form of the self-preservation instinct. It may be aimed at the preservation of the human species or a group within it. When you read about the woman whose car plunged off the road not far from here, in last week's icy conditions, and left her suspended upside down above a freezing creek, and who was rescued by people who didn't hesitate for a moment to endanger their own comfort at least, and possibly their safety -- did you admire the rescuers for their unselfish behaviour, their altruism? Or did you think that they were just doing what was hard-wired into them - helping along the survival of the human species, particularly the human species in the same neighbourhood, and particularly since the woman involved was in her reproductive years?
Biologist Elliott Sober has pointed out that there's not only a somewhat disillusioning aspect to that possibility, but also a possible dark side to that kind of species-related or group-oriented altruism, if that's indeed what it is. At its core, it's about competition and conflict between groups or species. Are we only interested, at base, in perpetuating our own kind? Is that the ultimate explanation of love? Certainly if altruistic behavior is based on attaining evolutionary advantages and is not purely unselfish it's difficult to reconcile with religious and spiritual traditions that advocate completely unselfish, nondiscriminating love. Theologians have even referred to altruistic love as a proof of the existence of God: they ask what can explain unselfishness, if not for some being who has implanted it in us. So for some theologians, those who want a way to believe in God, there's a kind of vested interest in answering today's question positively. "Can altruistic love exist? Yes, because if it can't, there's less evidence for the existence of God."
But most thinkers, religious or otherwise, would acknowledge that there's always a kind of "ordering" of love; after all, even virtuous persons are expected to show preferences for those close to them. Unless we espouse a rare form of absolute communism, we're not expected to act towards every human being in the world in exactly the way we act towards our close relatives. Such basic human concepts as private property, the family unit, and citizenship make that clear. So some built-in selfishness is understood and accepted by most of us as natural -- even right and proper. Perhaps what we really want to know, in light of that, is whether it's possible, even on rare occasions, to step outside the usual bounds of relationship and self-interest and act lovingly to someone even when there's no apparent reason for it, no obvious reward to us in doing so. In real life, that's what's important, isn't it? Motives, unconscious or conscious, seem secondary.
So maybe it doesn't much matter whether we can ever be sure that an act or an attitude is really pure and untainted by some underlying and unconscious selfishness. What seems far more important in practice is whether we can overcome the much more obvious selfishness which would, for example, have caused those rescuers quite understandably to have simply carried on down the 401, blotting out of their minds as far as they could the consciousness of that car plunging off the road in front of them. They didn't, and unless you're interested in their actions only from a philosophical or anthropological viewpoint, those actions seem to have been altruistic. I don't know about love; that's another matter, perhaps, but they were coupled together in today's question: "Can altruistic love exist?" If altruistic love is, as someone has suggested, "placing another person's well-being before one's own, learning to care for the other more than one's self, sacrifice for another," then I guess rescuing someone from a car accident is altruistic love.
A good deal of the studies of altruism have been devoted to the study of people who rescued Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. What many researchers find is that altruistic tendencies toward strangers often seem to emerge spontaneously and without much reflection beforehand. That is, it's not necessarily, or even usually, people who've thought long and hard about how to be unselfish who do heroically unselfish things, or those who're most devoted to the teachings of their faith. It seems a lot less predictable than that. A true story which I treasure (and in fact have told before more than once) fits into this category and illustrates this truth. I first heard it from Rev. John Buehrens, past President of the Unitarian Universalist Association:
Imagine yourself in Germany in the late 1930s. A bus is carrying an assortment of people home from work in a large city, stopping frequently to pick up and set down passengers. At one stop, two uniformed security police board and start going from seat to seat asking to see the passengers' identification documents. Towards the back of the bus, two people, strangers to one another, a man and a woman, are sitting together. The woman starts to tremble and is obviously very agitated. "What's the matter?" asks the man. "Are you worried about getting home late? They seem to be moving quite quickly." "It's not that," says the woman, and begins to weep. "If it were only that ... but I don't have the right papers. I'm a Jew. They'll take me away."
The man stared at her. After a few seconds, he took hold of her arm and started shaking it and talking very loudly, his voice rising to a shout as the S.S. men came nearer. "You stupid woman!" he yelled. "Why do you do this every time? Isn't it enough that you're a rotten cook and always so jealous, but you have to keep forgetting your papers!!" People were turning to stare at the couple now, slightly embarrassed but a bit amused at the scene. The S.S. were at their seat now, and the woman was crying pitifully. "Sorry, officers," said the man, lowering his voice a fraction as he showed them his I.D. "You see what I have to put up with? This useless woman does it all the time, comes out without her papers no matter how many times I remind her!"
And the officers laughed, and moved on.
Everyone who ever looks at the state of things in the world probably asks sooner or later, "Why do people do what they do to one another?" How do we explain the Holocaust, wars, terrorist attacks, torture, oppression, discrimination, and our awful insensitivity to starvation, poverty, and homelessness? But there's an even more perplexing opposite question: "Why do people do what they do for one another?" Our callous selfishness is real and undeniable, but so is our ability to care for and help family, friends, and even total strangers. In fact it may be easier to explain our callousness than our compassion. After all, our selfishness can be attributed to an instinct to do anything and everything necessary to promote our own welfare. But acts of compassion such as the one in John Buehrens' story, and the one in last week's newspaper story, seem to challenge the truism of self-interest, making us ask: Could it be that we are capable of having another person's welfare as an ultimate goal, that not all of our efforts are directed toward looking out for ourselves? If so, and if our capacity for compassion, as I've suggested, doesn't depend on philosophical study or intense faith, then what does make it happen? To change the question just a little bit, perhaps to be more useful, "How can altruistic love exist?"
I wouldn't want to claim that there's any easy answer to this at all. But the evidence from research seems to suggest that the capacity for altruism may be closely related to the capacity for empathy. Empathy, as you probably know, is the state of feeling with another person, deeply understanding where they're coming from. It seems as if we are more likely to be altruistic if we can put ourselves in another person's shoes. That sounds very simple, but like so many human abilities it's very unevenly distributed among us. Some human beings (and apparently some non-human animals, too) are extremely sensitive to others' experience, to the extent that another person's pain is almost equally painful for them. At the opposite end of the spectrum are psychopaths and sociopaths who seem unable to feel for another individual at all, let alone for a group of people or society as a whole. And in the middle range are all those of us who have some empathic abilities and could perhaps be helped to have more, so that we might act like that man on the bus, or those Good Samaritans who reach out to people in all kinds of distress. How can empathy, and therefore altruistic love, be encouraged? To me, this seems an enormously important question, and perhaps one fruitful place where reason and emotion intersect. As UU Minister Alice Blair Wesley has said, reason is nowhere near enough:
[People] can rationally figure out how to gas millions or administer apartheid or cheat customers or deceive the electorate. We need to be rational about figuring out what the ways of love are [and how to nurture them].
That's a long and arduous task, probably a lifelong task - figuring out how to encourage empathy, how to nurture the ways of love. I'm sure it begins best as early in childhood as humanly possible, and as with most teaching it's probably most effectively caught rather than explicitly taught. The parent who empathizes with a child's pain or with their joy in a particular activity or a dislike of some food, is modelling and passing on a treasure, not only to the child but to everyone who'll ever relate to that child! That parent is likely to raise a child like the one in the anecdote by Richard Gilbert, a little girl whose mother sent her on an errand. The little girl was gone a long time and when she finally returned home her mother asked what had taken her so long. She said she'd stopped to help a friend, a boy whose bicycle had broken. "But you don't know anything about fixing bicycles," exclaimed her mother. "I know," replied the child, "I stopped to help him cry."
When that little girl grows up, she'll probably be an adult like the one described by Parker Palmer, author of some wonderful books including The Company of Strangers. Palmer says:
Twice in my life I have experienced deep depression. Both times various friends tried to rescue me with well-intended encouragement and advice. ... In the midst of my depression I had a friend who took a different tack. Every afternoon at around four o'clock he came to me, sat me in a chair, removed my shoes, and massaged my feet. He hardly said a word, but he was there, he was with me. He was a lifeline for me, a link to the human community and thus to my own humanity. He had no need to "fix" me. He knew the meaning of compassion.
Maybe you've noticed already that empathy and compassion are basically the same word, meaning "feeling with". They represent a capacity which is present in most of us from our very beginnings and which I think is the capacity most able to transform the world into a better place. Reason and other skills are the tools which can help organize our individual empathy and compassion into group efforts, national policies, world structures for ensuring human rights and standards of living, but they're horribly fragile, I'm convinced, without a strong basis in the capacity to feel with another person. And that capacity is better nurtured by experience than by reason. Try talking someone into being kind! Very unlikely to have much effect. But meet someone in a way that lets them know you feel for them, and chances are at least somewhat improved that they, in turn, will relate more empathically to others. It's a miracle when it happens - when one individual shares another's experience and, as the poet Rilke has said, "two solitudes protect and limit and greet each other."
Unitarians tend to be, almost by definition, a very rational bunch of people, and I have a feeling that simply saying that altruism goes beyond reason just won't cut it with most of you. So I want to say now that I believe it's at least possible to find a satisfying, reasonable, philosophical basis for acting in altruistic and loving ways, and moreover one in harmony with both the traditional religious teachings which call us to be unselfish and the biological and behavioural findings about species self-interest. It's very simply described as the interdependent web of existence. It means that as great teachers have often told us, everything we do to others we do to ourselves. It means that we can never opt out of the interconnectedness of all beings, except perhaps in the very short (and short-sighted) term. It means, on the other hand, that altruism takes effort and determination, because the long-term interests of humanity and the short-term interests of the individual are often hard to reconcile. But the effort and determination are supremely worthwhile, I believe, and make for ultimate meaning and purpose in our lives.
One of my daughters gave me a book for Christmas by the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom. The new book is called The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and it contains this thought, certainly not original, but well-expressed: "Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves." At the end of the book, Eddie, the central figure, has learned (according to Mitch Albom), "the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."
So yes, altruistic love does exist, I believe, and in case we still might be inclined to doubt it - and because there almost certainly will be times for all of us when we do doubt it, let's take a few moments to ponder one more reading and one more story. First, part of the wording used at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Olinda for their chalice lighting each Sunday (I'll pause after each stanza so we can take it in):
This church was founded on the faith that love is a more positive force for good than fear.
The light we kindle is a symbol of the warmth of love and its power to overcome fear.
The light we kindle is a symbol of our aspirations and highest religious ideals, our striving for inclusiveness.
As the wick joins the flame and the candle, may our separate selves be joined in one community of warmth and light.
And the story. It's an old one, and perhaps familiar to some of you; it's a favourite of mine, from an ancient tradition:
A man was on his way from Jerusalem down to Jericho when he fell in with robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went off leaving him half dead.
It so happened that a priest was going down by the same road; but when he saw him, he went past on the other side.
So too a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him went past on the other side.
But a Samaritan who was making the journey came upon him, and when he saw him was moved to pity. He went up and bandaged his wounds, bathing them with oil and wine. Then he lifted him on his own beast, brought him to an inn, and looked after him there. Next day, he produced two silver pieces and gave them to the innkeeper, and said, "Look after him; and if you spend any more, I will repay you on my way back."
Which of these three do you think was neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? [The listener] answered, "The one who showed him kindness." [The teacher] said, "Go and do as he did."
Altruistic love, the love which has no consciously or immediately selfish motive, does exist. We see it not only in Good Samaritans tending to victims of roadside accidents, but in a multitude of more everyday forms - teachers staying after school to help students in difficulty, volunteers in soup kitchens and shelters, children befriending a new immigrant neighbour. And if we find ourselves troubled by uncertainty about just how altruistic or unselfish such acts really are (Is the teacher wanting points for her resume? Are the volunteers working off some load of guilt from real or imaginary sins? Is the child trying to gain a parent's approval?) I suggest we just forget it. It doesn't matter. The sooner we can get rid of the delusion that we or anyone else can ever be completely pure and unsullied in what we do or in our motives for what we do, the better it will be, I believe. A colleague wrote on a UU Ministers' chat-line:
I had an experience today at [a local service club]; the speaker was a dentist who had gone to rural China four times to do medical work in remote villages. He seemed to have slept through any cultural sensitivity workshop he had ever been to. His presentation was "a wince a minute."
On the other hand, he [had been] to China and [he] did this good work, while I did not.
Never mind how altruistic our deeds, your deeds, or someone else's are. Let's appreciate the love given by others, whether it's given from guilt or need or hope, and give whatever love we can, however imperfectly, whether from guilt or need or hope or whatever. May we give people the benefit of the doubt whenever we can and assume that their apparently unselfish acts really are, at least as far as it's humanly possible for them to be. That Samaritan may well have been trying to work his way into heaven by what he did, or into the good books of his religious community, and perhaps after he left the mugging victim at the inn he went home to a family who knew him to be a far from perfect husband and father. But the teacher said, "Go and do as he did."
May we go and do likewise, in love. So may it be.