Post by Elfie on May 1, 2006 14:33:59 GMT -5
“There is no such thing as a selfless good deed.” Joey, from the 90’s sitcom Friends, has never been known as one to provide massively insightful ideas, but in this one case he might have hit something. “There is no such thing as a selfless good deed.” Think about it. Think about any good deed you have ever done. It made you feel good to do the right things. It made you feel good to help that blind lady across the road or give that beggar some of your money.
So what? Of course it made me feel good. I’m doing the right thing. Why does it matter? Well consider this. Why did you do the “right thing”? I mean, there has to be a logical reason behind it. No, “I did the right thing because it was right” is not a logical reason. May I suggest, perhaps, that the answer is that it made you feel good? In fact, wouldn’t it be fair to say that’s why we as humans do pretty much anything? On a strictly biological level, it could be defined as an attempt to trigger as much dopamine to the brain over as long a period as possible, but that might be needlessly splitting hairs. The point is that we are continuously seeking pleasure for ourselves. Whether we do this through selfish or selfless actions may define whether we are “good” or “evil” but it does not change the base instinct driving our actions. We want to feel good.
Sadly, this seems to indicate something about ourselves that we might not immediately want to admit. We, as a species, are driven by greed. It’s not always the obvious “I want a giant house and a beautiful car, not to mention a beautiful wife” greed, but it is greed nonetheless. It’s a greed for praise, or when praise is not immediately forthcoming, at least that self-righteous smugness that we do the right thing while others do not and that makes us special, even if we never tell anyone else about it. It’s that knowledge that while we can’t act holier than thou because that would be wrong, the very fact that we restrain ourselves is evidence that we are holier than some others. That’s the kind of greed I’m talking about.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: there is no way to remove that kind of greed from our lives. Every time we try to give up feeling good about doing the right thing, we inevitably feel good about having given up feeling good. It’s pretty much an endless cycle. I’m here to tell you, and I know this will come hard for some of you, that greed can be okay. Heck, greed can be good. Insider trading, and the other things that Michael Douglas’s character does in the movie Wall Street are not so good, but believe it or not, the man had a decent point.
Well wait just a moment. One of the staples of the bible is that greed is bad. At least, that’s how we’ve always looked at it. After all, isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins? Well no, it’s not. Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins, and this time I’m not just splitting hairs. You see, avarice is defined in relation to greed, but not as a synonym for greed. Here are some of the definitions you can find if you look it up. Avarice is an “immoderate desire for wealth”, a “reprehensible acquisitiveness”, and an “extreme greed for material wealth”, but never just greed in the first place. Even back with the writing of the bible and the creation of the early church, they could not bring themselves to abandon the notion of greed altogether. What they did was advise people not to take it too far, to be ethical in their greed, as paradoxical as that sounds. They call it enlightened self-interest.
Enlightened self-interest is one of the staples of modern society, and it’s one that requires a great deal of vigilance to maintain. It’s easy to see short term benefits to unfair trade practices and exploitation. That’s self-interest. Enlightened self-interest, however, is quite different. It’s realizing that it’s your own best interest to fight poverty because the poor people of today are the customers, inventors and employees of tomorrow. It’s providing people with education on the grounds that if their healthy and smart, they might be able to find a way to help you out when age has made it so you’re not healthy and smart. Most importantly, it’s being compassionate, but recognizing that being compassionate will make you feel good about yourself, and that you’re okay with that.
There’s an old song that features the lyrics: “tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more.” Well, it’s old to me. Some of you might have been in your twenties, thirties or even forties when it hit the airwaves. The song is “I’d Love to Change the World” by Ten Years After. Certainly feeding the poor should be high on our list of priorities, but how do we go about accomplishing something like that? This is where a lot of people diverge. I mean, I’ll grant you right now that some people honestly don’t care what happens to poor people, and we’ll just ignore them because there’s very little we can do about them except react in shock and disbelief at their selfishness. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that even once we decide to help the poor, there’s more than one way of going about it.
First, there is the equality based methodology, which we’re all pretty much familiar with here. Some people have lots. Some people do not have much at all. If we take away all the stuff from people who have lots and give it to those who do not, we can make it so that everyone has a decent amount. Seems pretty straightforward to most of us, no? Unfortunately, the people who it doesn’t make sense to seem to always be the ones who have a lot. Is it greed? Well yes, going by what I said above, everything is greed. It isn’t just greed, however. It’s a sense of fairness. It’s these people saying, “I spent hours cooped up in my room studying while you guys went out drinking. Don’t I at least deserve to have a bigger house than you?”, or “I work 16 hours a day while you go home when the clock strikes five to watch TV. You get the benefit of eight extra hours in a day. Can’t I at least get the benefit of being rewarded for my hard work?”
Now sometimes this analogy does not hold true. For example, it’s rather unfair to suggest that a starving Ugandan is starving because he does not work hard enough or made bad life decisions. Somehow “it’s his own darn fault for being born in Uganda” does not hold water with most people. Furthermore, the systematic exploitation of land resources and corruption of many developing governments allows a lot of people’s greed to become avarice, unchecked by any laws or rules. However, the problem here is corruption, which is wrong no matter what system of government you live under, except maybe for a kleptocracy, where corruption is just the kind of government you live under. My point, however, is that while we need more monetary equality in some cases, in other cases monetary equality simply creates greater inequalities by allowing some people to have more free time and still get the same pay.
So what’s the other solution to the problem of poverty? Some people advocate focusing on prosperity rather than equality. That is, it does not matter if we have income inequality as long as it’s the difference between the rich and the richer. The idea that the world is a fixed pie that can only produce so much and must be fairly divided is discarded in favour of the idea that the world is a field where we can grow as many or as few pies as we want, assuming of course that we’ve figured out somewhere along the way how to grow pie trees. If some central figure tells everyone exactly where to plant their pies, there are problems of bureaucracy that reduce the total number of pies. However, if everyone were given some basic tools to plant or not plant their own pie tree as they saw fit, everyone would be better off. The great thing is that we continue to learn how to plant more and more pies. We refine existing pie-planting techniques and create new ones all the time.
Leaving the pie example alone, which, while tasty, might be viewed as confusing, the point is that why the earth’s resources might be finite, humanity’s knack for innovation and invention is not. It’s no random coincidence that every major spurt in population growth has been preceded by a major improvement in technology. The agricultural revolution, price revolution, and first and second industrial revolution are all examples of this. Now my point isn’t that we shouldn’t engage in conservation or worry about the environment, as some people take this rejection of the Malthusian principle to mean. Instead it means that the idea of having the rich and the richer is a realistic possibility, and not just some pipe dream. We can fight poverty without driving those who are currently fortunate to destitution.
So what does the bible have to say about this? Well the bible, contrary to popular belief, remains rather mute on the battle between prosperity and equality. It states that the poor shall be rich, but never states that the rich shall be poor. It states that the meek shall inherit the earth, but it does not say it will be done at the expense of the strong. Basically, the bible reaffirms our commitment to fighting poverty in our world, but it does not say how. What about some of the references to the early church living in a communal lifestyle? There’s no reason to doubt that this happened, but the communal lifestyle was entirely consensual. Nobody collected payment from the rich members based on the threat of jail time. The rich willingly offered charity to help the poor in the knowledge that they would be repaid in other ways, not that they would never be repaid at all. Need has always been fair grounds to ask for assistance, but it has never been fair grounds to demand it.
This is not to suggest that wealth is a free ride to heaven. Far from it, wealth has no bearing at all on salvation. It’s how wealth is applied that determines what God has in store for you, or in simpler terms: “it’s not the size that matters; it’s how you use it”. The bible does condemn the rich man who gives away more than the poor man but inconveniences himself less with his offering based on proportion, but it does not comment on the fate of the rich man who gives away the same proportion of his wealth as the poor man. God’s not going to punish you for being rich or making lots of money and He’s not going to reward for remaining dirt poor. He’s going to determine what happens to you based on whether or not you take the devices that have been given to you and use them compassionately.
The man who has ten million dollars and gives away all but one inconveniences himself far greater than the man who has two dollars and gives away all but one. Similarly, the man who ten million dollars and gives away only one inconveniences himself far less than the man who has two dollars and gives away only one. The real question however, is who is more inconvenienced when the ten million dollar man gives away half his money and the two dollar man does the same? While the two dollar man may have started off more inconvenienced, the actions themselves contain the same relative hardship, and thus the virtue of both actions is comparable. Similar to how a man who has never known warmth is less likely to realize how cold it is, a man who has never known wealth is less likely to realize how little he has given away.
While we are not Muslims here, it’s worth noting that the Muslim faith does not set a standard sum to be paid in charity. Rather, it establishes a proportion: one fortieth of all assets owned by an individual annually. It also addresses the relativity of charity in this excerpt. The Prophet Mohammed said: "Charity is a necessity for every Muslim." He was asked: "What if a person has nothing?" The Prophet replied: "He should work with his own hands for his benefit and then give something out of such earnings in charity." The Companions of the Prophet asked: "What if he is not able to work?" The Prophet said: "He should help the poor and needy." The Companions further asked: "What if he cannot do even that?" The Prophet said: "He should urge others to do good." The Companions said: "What if he lacks that also?" The Prophet said: "He should check himself from doing evil. That is also an act of charity." The important thing is not that everyone give everything, but rather that each person be proportionately charitable.
The baggage we take with us through the eye of the needle is not our wealth. It is the treatment of our status as poor or rich that determines how easily we cross. It is more difficult for a rich man to pass through the eye, not because he is rich, but because being rich affords him more temptation to be insufficiently compassionate. In some ways, it’s quite a bit more tempting not to give away five million of your ten million dollars than one of your two dollars, simply because we look in terms of sums, not proportions. As such, we recognize that it is indeed harder to pass through the eye of the needle as a rich man, not because you are rich, but because once you’re rich it’s tougher to be compassionate.
In the end, we don’t need to go cutting down the rich in the name of the greater good. Prosperity is possible for all people, though admittedly in different forms, if we are willing to break down the barriers between peoples and coexist. The notion of taking from those who have played by the rules and done well to give to those who have played by the rules and done badly will only serve to enshrine mediocrity, but adjusting the rules so that everyone has a chance to play and do well or badly on their own will encourage the best in all of us. Those who fall behind who look to those who succeed in the hopes that the human greed to feel good about oneself and commit good deeds is adequate will be rewarded, but those who fall behind and use it as grounds to make demands of those that succeed will have to fight against the dug in heels of the most successful and powerful people in society. Charity, by definition, is given by choice, not taken by force.
My recommendation to you is to go out and get what you want, or failing that, get what you need. Don't forget to help people along the way and remember to keep your morals intact, but don't feel bad about being good at something and beating others. If everything felt guilty everytime they were better at something than someone else, well I guess in some ways that's socialism, but the important thing is that nothing would get done. Go out, work hard, and do what it takes to feel good about yourself, whether its making a million dollars or giving that million to a great cause. It's only when we're free to be greedy that we can harness our greed to create a better society.
So what? Of course it made me feel good. I’m doing the right thing. Why does it matter? Well consider this. Why did you do the “right thing”? I mean, there has to be a logical reason behind it. No, “I did the right thing because it was right” is not a logical reason. May I suggest, perhaps, that the answer is that it made you feel good? In fact, wouldn’t it be fair to say that’s why we as humans do pretty much anything? On a strictly biological level, it could be defined as an attempt to trigger as much dopamine to the brain over as long a period as possible, but that might be needlessly splitting hairs. The point is that we are continuously seeking pleasure for ourselves. Whether we do this through selfish or selfless actions may define whether we are “good” or “evil” but it does not change the base instinct driving our actions. We want to feel good.
Sadly, this seems to indicate something about ourselves that we might not immediately want to admit. We, as a species, are driven by greed. It’s not always the obvious “I want a giant house and a beautiful car, not to mention a beautiful wife” greed, but it is greed nonetheless. It’s a greed for praise, or when praise is not immediately forthcoming, at least that self-righteous smugness that we do the right thing while others do not and that makes us special, even if we never tell anyone else about it. It’s that knowledge that while we can’t act holier than thou because that would be wrong, the very fact that we restrain ourselves is evidence that we are holier than some others. That’s the kind of greed I’m talking about.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: there is no way to remove that kind of greed from our lives. Every time we try to give up feeling good about doing the right thing, we inevitably feel good about having given up feeling good. It’s pretty much an endless cycle. I’m here to tell you, and I know this will come hard for some of you, that greed can be okay. Heck, greed can be good. Insider trading, and the other things that Michael Douglas’s character does in the movie Wall Street are not so good, but believe it or not, the man had a decent point.
Well wait just a moment. One of the staples of the bible is that greed is bad. At least, that’s how we’ve always looked at it. After all, isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins? Well no, it’s not. Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins, and this time I’m not just splitting hairs. You see, avarice is defined in relation to greed, but not as a synonym for greed. Here are some of the definitions you can find if you look it up. Avarice is an “immoderate desire for wealth”, a “reprehensible acquisitiveness”, and an “extreme greed for material wealth”, but never just greed in the first place. Even back with the writing of the bible and the creation of the early church, they could not bring themselves to abandon the notion of greed altogether. What they did was advise people not to take it too far, to be ethical in their greed, as paradoxical as that sounds. They call it enlightened self-interest.
Enlightened self-interest is one of the staples of modern society, and it’s one that requires a great deal of vigilance to maintain. It’s easy to see short term benefits to unfair trade practices and exploitation. That’s self-interest. Enlightened self-interest, however, is quite different. It’s realizing that it’s your own best interest to fight poverty because the poor people of today are the customers, inventors and employees of tomorrow. It’s providing people with education on the grounds that if their healthy and smart, they might be able to find a way to help you out when age has made it so you’re not healthy and smart. Most importantly, it’s being compassionate, but recognizing that being compassionate will make you feel good about yourself, and that you’re okay with that.
There’s an old song that features the lyrics: “tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more.” Well, it’s old to me. Some of you might have been in your twenties, thirties or even forties when it hit the airwaves. The song is “I’d Love to Change the World” by Ten Years After. Certainly feeding the poor should be high on our list of priorities, but how do we go about accomplishing something like that? This is where a lot of people diverge. I mean, I’ll grant you right now that some people honestly don’t care what happens to poor people, and we’ll just ignore them because there’s very little we can do about them except react in shock and disbelief at their selfishness. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that even once we decide to help the poor, there’s more than one way of going about it.
First, there is the equality based methodology, which we’re all pretty much familiar with here. Some people have lots. Some people do not have much at all. If we take away all the stuff from people who have lots and give it to those who do not, we can make it so that everyone has a decent amount. Seems pretty straightforward to most of us, no? Unfortunately, the people who it doesn’t make sense to seem to always be the ones who have a lot. Is it greed? Well yes, going by what I said above, everything is greed. It isn’t just greed, however. It’s a sense of fairness. It’s these people saying, “I spent hours cooped up in my room studying while you guys went out drinking. Don’t I at least deserve to have a bigger house than you?”, or “I work 16 hours a day while you go home when the clock strikes five to watch TV. You get the benefit of eight extra hours in a day. Can’t I at least get the benefit of being rewarded for my hard work?”
Now sometimes this analogy does not hold true. For example, it’s rather unfair to suggest that a starving Ugandan is starving because he does not work hard enough or made bad life decisions. Somehow “it’s his own darn fault for being born in Uganda” does not hold water with most people. Furthermore, the systematic exploitation of land resources and corruption of many developing governments allows a lot of people’s greed to become avarice, unchecked by any laws or rules. However, the problem here is corruption, which is wrong no matter what system of government you live under, except maybe for a kleptocracy, where corruption is just the kind of government you live under. My point, however, is that while we need more monetary equality in some cases, in other cases monetary equality simply creates greater inequalities by allowing some people to have more free time and still get the same pay.
So what’s the other solution to the problem of poverty? Some people advocate focusing on prosperity rather than equality. That is, it does not matter if we have income inequality as long as it’s the difference between the rich and the richer. The idea that the world is a fixed pie that can only produce so much and must be fairly divided is discarded in favour of the idea that the world is a field where we can grow as many or as few pies as we want, assuming of course that we’ve figured out somewhere along the way how to grow pie trees. If some central figure tells everyone exactly where to plant their pies, there are problems of bureaucracy that reduce the total number of pies. However, if everyone were given some basic tools to plant or not plant their own pie tree as they saw fit, everyone would be better off. The great thing is that we continue to learn how to plant more and more pies. We refine existing pie-planting techniques and create new ones all the time.
Leaving the pie example alone, which, while tasty, might be viewed as confusing, the point is that why the earth’s resources might be finite, humanity’s knack for innovation and invention is not. It’s no random coincidence that every major spurt in population growth has been preceded by a major improvement in technology. The agricultural revolution, price revolution, and first and second industrial revolution are all examples of this. Now my point isn’t that we shouldn’t engage in conservation or worry about the environment, as some people take this rejection of the Malthusian principle to mean. Instead it means that the idea of having the rich and the richer is a realistic possibility, and not just some pipe dream. We can fight poverty without driving those who are currently fortunate to destitution.
So what does the bible have to say about this? Well the bible, contrary to popular belief, remains rather mute on the battle between prosperity and equality. It states that the poor shall be rich, but never states that the rich shall be poor. It states that the meek shall inherit the earth, but it does not say it will be done at the expense of the strong. Basically, the bible reaffirms our commitment to fighting poverty in our world, but it does not say how. What about some of the references to the early church living in a communal lifestyle? There’s no reason to doubt that this happened, but the communal lifestyle was entirely consensual. Nobody collected payment from the rich members based on the threat of jail time. The rich willingly offered charity to help the poor in the knowledge that they would be repaid in other ways, not that they would never be repaid at all. Need has always been fair grounds to ask for assistance, but it has never been fair grounds to demand it.
This is not to suggest that wealth is a free ride to heaven. Far from it, wealth has no bearing at all on salvation. It’s how wealth is applied that determines what God has in store for you, or in simpler terms: “it’s not the size that matters; it’s how you use it”. The bible does condemn the rich man who gives away more than the poor man but inconveniences himself less with his offering based on proportion, but it does not comment on the fate of the rich man who gives away the same proportion of his wealth as the poor man. God’s not going to punish you for being rich or making lots of money and He’s not going to reward for remaining dirt poor. He’s going to determine what happens to you based on whether or not you take the devices that have been given to you and use them compassionately.
The man who has ten million dollars and gives away all but one inconveniences himself far greater than the man who has two dollars and gives away all but one. Similarly, the man who ten million dollars and gives away only one inconveniences himself far less than the man who has two dollars and gives away only one. The real question however, is who is more inconvenienced when the ten million dollar man gives away half his money and the two dollar man does the same? While the two dollar man may have started off more inconvenienced, the actions themselves contain the same relative hardship, and thus the virtue of both actions is comparable. Similar to how a man who has never known warmth is less likely to realize how cold it is, a man who has never known wealth is less likely to realize how little he has given away.
While we are not Muslims here, it’s worth noting that the Muslim faith does not set a standard sum to be paid in charity. Rather, it establishes a proportion: one fortieth of all assets owned by an individual annually. It also addresses the relativity of charity in this excerpt. The Prophet Mohammed said: "Charity is a necessity for every Muslim." He was asked: "What if a person has nothing?" The Prophet replied: "He should work with his own hands for his benefit and then give something out of such earnings in charity." The Companions of the Prophet asked: "What if he is not able to work?" The Prophet said: "He should help the poor and needy." The Companions further asked: "What if he cannot do even that?" The Prophet said: "He should urge others to do good." The Companions said: "What if he lacks that also?" The Prophet said: "He should check himself from doing evil. That is also an act of charity." The important thing is not that everyone give everything, but rather that each person be proportionately charitable.
The baggage we take with us through the eye of the needle is not our wealth. It is the treatment of our status as poor or rich that determines how easily we cross. It is more difficult for a rich man to pass through the eye, not because he is rich, but because being rich affords him more temptation to be insufficiently compassionate. In some ways, it’s quite a bit more tempting not to give away five million of your ten million dollars than one of your two dollars, simply because we look in terms of sums, not proportions. As such, we recognize that it is indeed harder to pass through the eye of the needle as a rich man, not because you are rich, but because once you’re rich it’s tougher to be compassionate.
In the end, we don’t need to go cutting down the rich in the name of the greater good. Prosperity is possible for all people, though admittedly in different forms, if we are willing to break down the barriers between peoples and coexist. The notion of taking from those who have played by the rules and done well to give to those who have played by the rules and done badly will only serve to enshrine mediocrity, but adjusting the rules so that everyone has a chance to play and do well or badly on their own will encourage the best in all of us. Those who fall behind who look to those who succeed in the hopes that the human greed to feel good about oneself and commit good deeds is adequate will be rewarded, but those who fall behind and use it as grounds to make demands of those that succeed will have to fight against the dug in heels of the most successful and powerful people in society. Charity, by definition, is given by choice, not taken by force.
My recommendation to you is to go out and get what you want, or failing that, get what you need. Don't forget to help people along the way and remember to keep your morals intact, but don't feel bad about being good at something and beating others. If everything felt guilty everytime they were better at something than someone else, well I guess in some ways that's socialism, but the important thing is that nothing would get done. Go out, work hard, and do what it takes to feel good about yourself, whether its making a million dollars or giving that million to a great cause. It's only when we're free to be greedy that we can harness our greed to create a better society.