Now that the
year-end holidays have passed, so have the barrage of entreaties to nurture a
sense of “good will to all mankind,” to extend our love and care to others
beyond our usual circle of friends and family. Certainly, this is a message we
are meant to take to heart not just in December but all year long. It is a
central ideal of several religious and ethical systems. In the light of
the new year, it’s worth considering how far we actually can, or should, extend
this good will. To some, the answer might seem obvious. One of the more deeply
engrained assumptions of Western liberalism is that we humans can indefinitely
increase our capacity to care for others, that we can, with the right effort
and dedication, extend our care to wider and wider circles until we envelop the
whole species within our ethical regard. It is an inspiring thought. But I’m
rather doubtful. My incredulity, though, is not because people are hypocritical
about their ideals or because they succumb to selfishness. The problem lies,
instead, in a radical misunderstanding about the true wellsprings of ethical
care, namely the emotions. Two of the leading liberal social theorists, Jeremy
Rifkin and Peter Singer, think we can overcome factional bias and eventually
become one giant tribe. They have different prescriptions for arriving at
ethical utopia. Singer, who is perhaps
the world’s best known utilitarian philosopher, argues in his book The
Expanding Circle that the relative
neocortical sophistication of humans allows us to rationally broaden our
ethical duty beyond the “tribe” — to an equal and impartial concern for all
human beings.
Like mathematics, which can continue its
recursive operations infinitely upward, ethical reasoning can spiral out (should
spiral out, according to Singer) to larger and larger sets of equal moral
subjects. “Taking the impartial element in ethical reasoning to its logical
conclusion means, first, accepting that we ought to have equal concern for all
human beings.” All this sounds nice at first — indeed, I would like it to be
true — but let me throw a little cold water on the idea. Singer seems to be
suggesting that I arrive at perfect egalitarian ethics by first accepting
perfect egalitarian metaphysics. But I, for one, do not accept it. Nor, I
venture to guess, do many others. All people are not equally entitled to my
time, affection, resources or moral duties — and only conjectural assumption
can make them appear so. (For many of us, family members are more entitled than
friends, and friends more entitled than acquaintances, and acquaintances more
than strangers, and so on.) It seems dubious to say that we should transcend
tribe and be utilitarian because all people are equal, when the equal status of
strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption. Singer’s abstract “ethical point of view”
is not wrong so much as irrelevant. Our actual lives are punctuated by moral
gravity, which makes some people (kith and kin) much more central and forceful
in our daily orbit of values. (Gravity is actually an apt metaphor. Some people
in our lives take on great “affection mass” and bend our continuum of values
into a solar-system of biases. Family members usually have more moral
gravity —what Robert Nozick calls “ethical pull.”
One of the architects of utilitarian ethics, and
a forerunner of Singer’s logic, was William Godwin (1756-1836), who formulated
a famous thought experiment. He asked us to imagine if you could save only one
person from a burning building. One of those persons is Archbishop Fénelon and
the other is a common chambermaid. Furthermore, the archbishop is just about to
compose his famous work The Adventures of Telemachus (an influential defense of human rights). Now
here’s the rub. The chambermaid is your mother. Godwin argues that the
utilitarian principle (the greatest good for the greatest number) requires you
to save the archbishop rather than your mother. He asks, “What magic is there in
the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of
impartial truth?” Singer has famously pushed the logic further, arguing that we
should do everything within our power to help strangers meet their basic needs,
even if it severely compromises our kin’s happiness. In the utilitarian
calculus, needs always trump enjoyments. If I am to be utterly impartial to all
human beings, then I should reduce my own family’s life to a subsistence level,
just above the poverty line, and distribute the surplus wealth to needy
strangers.
Besides the impracticalities of such
redistribution, the problems here are also conceptual. Say I bought a fancy
pair of shoes for my son. In light of the one-tribe calculus of interests, I
should probably give these shoes to someone who doesn’t have any. I do research
and find a child in a poor part of Chicago who needs shoes to walk to school
every day. So, I take them off my son (replacing them with Walmart tennis
shoes) and head off to the impoverished Westside. On the way, I see a newspaper
story about five children who are malnourished in Cambodia. Now I can’t give
the shoeless Chicago child the shoes, because I should sell the shoes for money
and use the money to get food for the five malnourished kids. On my way to sell
the shoes, I remember that my son has an important job interview for a
clean-water non-profit organization and if he gets the job, he’ll be able to
help save whole villages from contaminated water. But he won’t get the job if
he shows up in Walmart tennis shoes. As I head back home, it dawns on me that
for many people in the developing world, Walmart tennis shoes are truly
luxurious when compared with burlap sack shoes, and since needs always trump
luxuries I’ll need to sell the tennis shoes too; and on, and on, and on.
This brings us to the other recent argument for
transcending tribe, and it’s the idea that we can infinitely stretch our domain
of care. Jeremy Rifkin voices a popular view in his recent book The Empathic Civilization that we can feel care and empathy for the
whole human species if we just try hard enough. This view has the
advantage over Singer’s metric view, in that it locates moral conviction in the
heart rather than the rational head. But it fails for another reason. I submit
that care or empathy is a very limited resource. But it is Rifkin’s quixotic
view that empathy is an almost limitless reserve. He sketches a progressive,
ever widening evolution of empathy. First, we had blood-based tribalism (in
what Rifkin calls the time of “forager/hunter societies”), then
religion-based tribalism (after the invention of agriculture and writing), then
nation-state tribalism, but now we are poised for an empathic embrace of all
humanity — and even beyond species-centric bias to Buddha-like compassion for
all creatures. He argues that empathy is the real “invisible hand” that will
guide us out of our local and global crises. Using a secular version of
Gandhi’s non-attachment mixed with some old-fashioned apocalyptic fear mongering,
Rifkin warns us that we must reach “biosphere consciousness and global empathy
in time to avert planetary collapse.” The way to do this, he argues, is to
start feeling as if the entire human race is our extended family.
I have to concede that I want cosmic love to work.
I want Rifkin to be right. And in some abstract sense, I agree with the idea of
an evolutionary shared descent that makes us all “family.” But feelings of care
and empathy are very different from evolutionary taxonomy. Empathy is actually
a biological emotion (centered in the limbic brain) that comes in degrees,
because it has a specific physiological chemical progression. Empathy is not a
concept, but a natural biological event —an activity, a process. The feeling of
care is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells,
flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors (and
oxytocin and opioids). Care is like sprint racing. It takes time — duration,
energy, systemic warm-up and cool-down, practice and a strange mixture of
pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind
of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short
order, if you ramp-up the care system every time you see someone in need. The
nightly news would render you literally exhausted. The limbic system can’t
handle the kind of constant stimulation that Rifkin and the cosmic love
proponents expect of it. And that’s because they don’t take into account the
biology of empathy, and imagine instead that care is more like a thought.
If care is indeed a limited resource, then it
cannot stretch indefinitely to cover the massive domain of strangers and
nonhuman animals. Of course, when we see the suffering of strangers in the
street or on television, our heartstrings vibrate naturally. We can have
contagion-like feelings of sympathy when we see other beings suffering, and
that’s a good thing — but that is a long way from the kinds of active
preferential devotions that we marshal for members of our respective tribes.
Real tribe members donate organs to you, bring soup when you’re sick, watch
your kids in an emergency, open professional doors for you, rearrange
their schedules and lives for you, protect you, and fight for you — and
you return all this hard work. Our tribes of kith and kin are “affective
communities” and this unique emotional connection with our favorites entails
great generosity and selfless loyalty. There’s an upper limit to our tribal
emotional expansion, and that limit is a good deal lower than the “biosphere.” For
my purposes, I’ll stick with Cicero, who said, “society and human fellowship
will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are
most closely associated.” Why should our care be concentrated in small circles
of kith and kin? I’ve tried to suggest that it can’t be otherwise, given the
bio-emotional origin of care, but more needs to be said if I’m making a
normative claim. If we embraced our filial biases, we could better exercise
some disappearing virtues, like loyalty, generosity and gratitude.
Cultivating loyalty is no small thing. George
Orwell, for example, considered preferential loyalty to be the “essence of
being human.” Critiquing Gandhi’s recommendation — that we must have no close
friendships or exclusive loves because these will introduce loyalty and
favoritism, preventing us from loving everyone equally — Orwell retorted
that “the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one
is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty … and that one is
prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the
inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.” In general we have circles of favorites (family,
friends, allies) and we mutually protect one another, even when such devotion
disadvantages us personally. But the interesting thing about loyalty is that it
ignores both merit-based fairness and equality-based fairness. It’s not
premised on optimal conditions. You need to have my back, even when I’m
sometimes wrong. You need to have my back, even when I sometimes screw up the
job. And I have to extend the same loyalty to you. That kind of pro-social
risky virtue happens more among favorites. I also think generosity can
better flourish under the umbrella of favoritism. Generosity is a virtue that
characterizes the kind of affection-based giving that we see in positive
nepotism. So often, nepotism is confused with corruption, when it really just
means family preference. And favoritists (if I can invent a word here) are very
good at selflessly giving to members of their inner circle.
Gratitude is another virtue that thrives more in
a favoritism context. The world of Singer’s utilitarianism and Rifkin’s
one-tribism is a world of bare minimums, with care spread thinly to cover per
capita needs. But in favoritism (like a love relation) people can get way more
than they deserve. It’s an abundance of affection and benefits. In a real
circle of favorites, one needs to accept help gracefully. We must accept,
without cynicism, the fact that some of our family and friends give to us for
our own sake (our own flourishing) and not for their eventual selfish gain.
However animalistic were the evolutionary origins of giving (and however
vigorous the furtive selfish genes), the human heart, neocortex and culture
have all united to eventually create true altruism. Gratitude is a necessary response in a sincere circle of
favorites.
Finally, my case for small-circle care dovetails
nicely with the commonly agreed upon crucial ingredient in human happiness,
namely, strong social bonds. A recent Niagara of longitudinal happiness studies
all confirm that the most important element in a good life (eudaimonia) is
close family and friendship ties — ties that bind. These are not digital
Facebook friends nor are they needy faraway strangers, but robust proximate
relationships that you can count on one or two hands — and these bonds are
created and sustained by the very finite resource of emotional care that I’ve
outlined. As Graham Greene reminds us, “one can’t love humanity, one can only
love people.”
'The
Myth of Universal Love’ by Stephen T. Asma from the New York Times.
