Word Extinction #3: Altruistic

A beautiful mind is the best aphrodisiac, so feast yourselves on Peter Singer, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher, probably the most famous philosopher of our time (which says about as much as you think it does). He teaches at Princeton and stirs people up everywhere.

He made a first big splash by writing Animal Liberation, since considered a Bible of the animal rights movement. And he has made many littler splashes since then. He can be classified as a utilitarian, which means that he thinks what is best for the most people is generally best. He writes a whole ton on ethics, and in the past couple of decades has been making a strong argument that we all ought to be giving more to charity than we do.

Specifically, we ought to be giving to causes which work to eradicate worldwide poverty. Not U.S. recession poverty, but three of my nine kids died of diarrhea poverty. Muhammad Yunus poverty. By the way, Yunus is having some trouble in Bangladesh.

If you took AP Lang in the recent past, there’s a decent chance you read something like “The Singer Solution to Poverty,” which was an article he wrote in the 90s which laid out an early version of his argument.

He starts off by giving us a summary of the film Central Station, where a woman puts herself up against some serious obstacles to save the life of a young boy. He likes to do this; he has many tricky stories that lead us to say, “Well of course you save the kid even if it ruins your new shoes. Of course you do that, what are you, crazy?”

And then he’s all like, oh, well, then why did you buy new shoes last week instead of donating $50 to Oxfam? Don’t you think that could have saved a life too?

And then we’re all like, oh…shit.

Singer worked out a number, the amount of money he thinks one can live on in the Western world. He thinks we should donate any income we make above and beyond that number. Wouldn’t you give the money if someone held a gun to a kid’s head in front of you and asked for it? Or actually held guns to the heads of hundreds of kids, since subtracting Singer’s modest number from an average income would save not one but many many. Sure, you would. Unless you’re a dick.

Yes, I used a cat instead of a kid for the picture.

But put the kid in Africa or somewhere we can’t locate on a map and we no longer feel the need to donate. For me, buying books and theater tickets comes first. For you probably porn subscriptions and White Russian fixings. A chacun son gout.

Singer’s article caused an uproar when I taught AP Lang. Many of the students got incredibly defensive: “How much money is Singer giving?” they asked. I told them that was completely beside the point. An argument is valid whether or not the person putting it forth is living out its tenets. They sipped their Starbucks. (There was a palpable resentment one morning when another teacher came in to raise money for our Haiti fundraiser, and told the kids if they could afford Starbucks they could afford to give money to Haiti.)

Well, Singer has mellowed his argument a bit for his more recent book, The Life You Can Save. The idea is the same, but now he emphasizes doing what feels comfortable. Like a yoga class. Then next class you stretch a little farther, then a little farther. Yeah, I was feeling a cat motif today. Get over it.

In the book by the way he already has an answer for every counterargument you’ve got. This finally brings me to our new word extinction. Sometimes we judge those who donate, who give their time and energy and money to the poor and the needy. We question their motives, wondering if they’re not doing this simply for self-promotion, or for the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with doing a good deed. If you’re doing it for those reasons, we say, you’re not being altruistic. And then we sip more Starbucks.

The word altruism was coined by a French philosopher named August Comte in the 19th century. He is tied to John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, whom we usually associate with utilitarianism. Comte wanted to found a religion of humanity, and the idea of serving others (in French, autrui, from the Latin alter, other) led to the word altruism.

The word’s taken some kicks along the way. Ayn Rand is famous for writing really long books and for believing altruism to be evil. She thought people should work for what is in their own best interests. This has made her popular with rich people for years. In The Fountainhead, she makes a cartoony villain out of socialist Ellsworth Toohey, repeatedly drawing our attention to his literal giant egg head. Subtle, Ayn.

Throw in that weird rape scene and you can see why The Fountainhead has been popular with assholes and incubator intellectuals for a long time. And also why it has confused lots of high schoolers, like the one who asked for help on answers.yahoo.com:

In the book The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, it appears that Howard rapes Dominique. In websites like sparknotes and gradesaver, it says how this scene is very important. Why? And also, how come Dominique wanted Howard to rape her for? If she liked it, then would it really be called rape? Please answer these questions in your own words. Thank you.

Love it. Speaking of school again, that same English teacher I mentioned above was delighted to find out that the Ayn Rand Scholarship Fund gives out free books to teachers who get their kids to write essays about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, objectivism. I reminded her that cults always give free literature.

But we’re missing the point! The point is that The Fountainhead spawns those irritating conversations, the ones where people try to prove that there is no such thing as a selfless act. It’s like the asshole who always brings up that a non-conformist is always conforming to non-conformity. Yes, thank you, I am also not mentally handicapped, so I understood that already. Put down your Starbucks.

“When celebrities like Angelina Jolie or Madonna support organizations that support the poor,” Singer writes, “we look for hidden selfish reasons…Undeniably selfless behavior makes us uncomfortable,” since we don’t act that way ourselves usually, so we are happier believing that they are shallow attention-seeking bleeding hearts. And there is no doubt that a lot of charitable behavior and donation owes itself to selfish motives of one degree or another.

But so what, Singer asks? Hasn’t the money still been donated, the child saved? What is the potential point in beating out of yourself the little pleasure you might get from sacrificing your time or your money? We only really judge the motives of others in order to feel better that our acts do not measure up to theirs.

Objectively speaking, the motive of a charitable act does not matter. Pure altruism, whether or not it’s an impossibility, is actually an irrelevance. Give $450 to give a woman for fistula surgery and then post it on facebook for crying out loud.

Is it nobler to keep it to yourself, to stay anonymous, to not let the left hand know what the right is doing, as Jesus would have it? Probably. But life is too short to worry about sneaking around our selfish human natures. Children are dying. Sign the check.

So I think we should just get rid of the word altruism altogether. It’s been distorted to demand some impossible standard of selflessness. Generosity and decency and charity describe the better angels of our nature just fine without this stinking French import of a word.

You should read The Life You Can Save. It’s not long. Or if you want to buy me some Starbucks one day I’ll give you a twenty-minute lecture version. Don’t worry; I’ll recycle our garbage after.

But before I leave Peter Singer I want to introduce you to at least one of his other arguments, which has gotten him in some trouble, as you might imagine. The website utilitarian.net has collected many of his writings, including a short one on abortion. Singer describes the primary argument against abortion as having three points:

It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
 A human foetus is an innocent human being.
 Therefore it is wrong to kill a human foetus.

He says that most abortion defenders attack the second point, initiating “a dispute about whether a foetus is a human being, or, in other words, when a human life begins.” But what if they went after the first point?

To describe a being as ‘human’ is to use a term that straddles two distinct notions: membership of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person, in the sense of a rational or self-conscious being. If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent to ‘person’, the second premiss of the argument, which asserts that the foetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a foetus is either rational or self-conscious. If, on the other hand, ‘human’ is taken to mean no more than ‘member of the species Homo sapiens‘, then it needs to be shown why mere membership of a given biological species should be a sufficient basis for a right to life. Rather, the defender of abortion may wish to argue, we should look at the foetus for what it is – the actual characteristics it possesses – and value its life accordingly.

In other words, what’s so special about a human life that guarantees it the right to life?

I want you to think about that as you eat your giant steak. From Starbucks.

Finally, on a more cheerful note, maybe, I have to include a story about Paul Farmer from Singer’s book. Farmer is a doctor famous for his work for the poor, especially in Haiti. Well, Singer tells about a time when Farmer was not able to save a newborn child. It died, and he cried. The curious thing is he said he cried because he realized he had in his mind substituted his young daughter for the baby. This seems normal, maybe even admirable. After all, we’re always told to imagine “what if it was your mother, your child, etc.” But Farmer was upset by this substitution. Why should he have needed to personalize this in order to be sad about it? “He saw his inability to love other children as he loved his own as ‘a failure of empathy,'” Singer writes.

In a real life example of that death penalty exercise I suggested (visualing someone who’s not like you and repeating that his life has value), Farmer now carries two pictures wherever he goes: one of his daughter, and one of his patients.

Keep that child in sight, and you’ll be more likely to let those shoes of yours get ruined.

How much do I donate, you ask? Completely beside the point. Remember?

BUT, if you want a photo of a child unlike your own to keep in your wallet, here’s one I took.