Posted by Helen on: 11.27.2006 /
In comment #28 on Are we “graciously” encouraging people away from Jesus, JG wrote:
I agree with you 100% that there are many people who have no religious faith but who care deeply about other people and about the world around them.
But there are also people who appear to be very selfish and who think only of themselves.
Why do you think there is this difference? What makes one person more caring than another? What makes one person care more about MTWABP than other people?
Leaving faith aside, scientifically, how does this difference arise? And how does this difference link in to evolution?
Comment by: Paul M
1Well that’s a very interesting Q…
making the world a better place does appeal to my own enlightened self interest, particularly when it involves making the world a better place for me as well as you…
I’m not saying enlightened self interest is a bad thing, the New Testament often appeals to it as a good reason for helping other people as much as obeying God etc - in others doing this will ultimately be better for you than doing going against the grain of the universe and picking up splinters…
You could also call it an evolutionary trait, I do seem to like looking out for my own, whether it’s tribe, family, friends, company, sports team, religion etc. I care about these people and hopefully they care about me in return, our aims are fairly mutual and we share a common heritage/task - previously survival now maybe adding quality to our shared lives…
Which is of course betrayal by some one, being let down, rejected, not accepted etc are so hard to take and can leave such hurt behind, it’s like yrs of social investment just went through the floor leaving me with a bunch of worthless options…
One of the down sides of this kind of interest is that it still means that someone has to loose, if my tribe are doing good well it might be at the expense of yours… it we’re the biggest and strongest does it mean that we are so only as a result of a series of bum deals for everyone else - we take more so there is less for everyone esle to share.
And of course since i live in a civilised market driven nation, my own consumption supports the home team, my wealth rises and all the losers well they are mainly kept out of sight, in different shores far away or in inner city crumbling ruins far from my nice civilised people like me burb…
I guess my self reflection says then queries ‘the world’ a better place, maybe my reality/experience of my world a better place but really I am not so sure anymore if i can truly say it makes many people’s worlds that much better?
Comment by: Helen
2Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Paul.
I like ‘enlightened self-interest’ - I like the honesty of it, that it makes clear we derive personal benefit from being kind to others.
I appreciate how you pointed out that helping ‘my tribe’ can result in hurting other tribes. So it’s important not to forget that there’s a world out there beyond ‘my tribe’.
But then as you also point out (if I’m understanding you correctly), it’s easy to get overwhelmed when we try to think about ‘the whole world’ so we don’t overfocus on our own tribe at the expense of others. I think that takes us back to another discussion we had recently: how can I make a difference?
Comment by: Helen
3One thing I’ve come to believe very strongly is that happy people are more emotionally free to care about others than unhappy people. It seems to me based on observing people, that happy people are much more generous and much more willing to experiment with kindness rather than, say, treating others as badly as they treated them.
I think to be happy a person has to have some basic needs met; if those are taken care of (and the person is not in the midst of or recovery from a traumatic event) then I think happiness is largely a choice.
And as I said I think making that choice tends to make a person more generous and caring.
Comment by: JG
4Helen,
I think this can work both ways.
I do agree that if most of a person’s energy is taken up with mere survival, they will have little capacity for helping others.
But, and I think it is a big but, if someone has experienced difficulty themselves, they are far more likely to understand and sympathise with the difficulties of others.
Sensitive people are more likely to care about others but are also more likely to get upset by things and hence to have times when they are not happy. In one sense, to care means to feel someone else’s pain.
But I agree that others react to their own pain by inflicting pain on others.
Comment by: Helen
5JG, I do agree - I think that for a person’s own difficulties to enable them to help others with similar ones, that person needs to have ‘processed’ their own difficulties. Otherwise they are likely to still be too focused on their own difficulties to be of help to others.
People who react to pain by inflicting it on others probably haven’t ‘recovered’ from it yet, imo.
Comment by: Paul M
6I’m not sure that overwhelmed was what I was looking for - more whether I actually bother to look at all. Most of the time i think i scratch the surface of justice for others when it is still at my convinience. Something I am beginning to learn is that justice is often inconvenient, intrudes and costs me something more than a few extra pence here and there for fadetrade this and ethical that - altho that has been a good place to start…
Comment by: The Hungarian Luddite
7I am of the opinion that our life experiences help make us what we are. The things I have experienced, endured, and suffered all help make me what I am. I don’t believe I could be caring and compassionate without going through these things.
Religiously, becoming broken helps me to be compassionate. If I have never fallen, then I have no frame of reference to help others. It is easy to be self-righteous when you have always had it together in your life. (or give the appearance any way)
As a pastor I have done my fair share of counseling. I often deal with people who think I have no frame of reference because pastors live perfect lives. Sometimes I say, Really? You mean like growing up on welfare? Or my mom being mentally ill? or my mom killing herself? Or my dad dying at 49?
And on and on I could go. It is my life experiences that give me compassion for the hurting and broken. I am one with them as a fellow human being.
Now, this doesn’t play well in Church. Churches want perfect leaders with perfect lives. I suspect, in that regard, I have failed every Church I have ever pastored.
Comment by: Helen
8The Hungarian Luddite wrote:
Actually, my ideal pastor wouldn’t be perfect. He/she would be treat me as a peer; he/she would be accessible and listen to me (those two things within reason given that would be busy and have a number of demands on his/her time).
With the list of things you mentioned you might be a pretty good fit for my ideal pastor…plus, I would be reassured by your having been through difficult experiences that you would be unlikely to be hurtfully dismissive of mine.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts here, THL - I appreciate it.
Comment by: HereandNow
9Two very interesting sources that address the initial question of what motivates responses of caring/indifference in this world are a short academic work by Alice Miller called The Drama of the Gifted Child and a recent movie made in South Africa called Tsotsi. Drama basically comes down on the side of these traits being nurtured by our experience of pain and suffering in early childhood. Not everyone responds the same way, but Miller makes an interesting case for the way things unfold. Tsotsi, on the other hand, is based on a novel, so I assume very fictionalized. The main character is ruthless, but in the midst of his ruthlessness, he begins to experience a sort of transformation due to stealing a car with an infant in it. It deals with personal transformation of character from ruthlessness to compassion with out being trite or unrealistic (sort of).
Now, I’ll weigh in on what I think the origins/motivations of being either consumed with compassion (other-centered) or indifference (self-centered). I think it comes down to whether we are preoccupied with justice or personal righteousness (I know, we’d like to be equally devoted to both, but it’s a rare person who is). How we derive at these preoccupations is the result of our trying to make sense of the hardships of life, be they from abuse, genetic limitations or just plain stupidity on our part. But, we try and construct systems that make sense of the pain of the human condition (loaded term that I don’t mean to equate with the fall of humanity from any state of grace in Eden). While I generally hate to dichotomize things into either/or, in this issue I do think that we either gravitate towards trying to deal with our own hurt by trying to bring justice into our world, or we deal with it by trying to protect the self at the cost of anything that gets in the way of that protection. Which side of the proverbial fence we fall on will make vast differences in how we treat ourselves and others.
Comment by: benjamin ady
10hereandnow–isn’t alice miller astounding? I love this from her
Quoting from memory here so prolly it’s a paraphrase–but it captures the meaning. It’s very *anti* the whole noxious nauseating “forgive and forget” fake christian fake nice forgiveness fake happy happy joy joy thing.
Wow–I also *love* the distinction you draw between the pursuit of personal righteousness and the pursuit of justice. That is *so* true. Thankyou so much for that. I hadn’t seen that in quite those terms before. That’s extremely helpful. Do you write regularly somewhere?
I also found another movie about South Africa which touched on these themes very helpful–It’s called Red Dust.
Comment by: Helen
11Thanks for your comment, HereandNow.
I think unless we are very careful, bringing justice into our world can become primarily about bringing justice to ME - which means it has become an act of self-protection. It seems to me that it’s easy to experience this ‘motive drift’ where we start out with the idea of being altruistic but we end up self-focused.
Comment by: HereandNow
12Ben,
Thanks for you kind words. It’s been a while since I’ve read Miller, but yes, she is astounding. I don’t really write regularly anywhere, except for stuff that gets stored on my hard drive and shown to my wife and a few others. I’ll enjoy checking out Red Dust. Sometimes I think I watch more movies than Ebert and Roeper combined, but I’m always glad to get new recommendations.
The distinction between justice vs. piety/personal righteousness needs quite a bit more work, but I’m eager to draw out the implications, so to you, Ben, and to anyone else, I welcome critical evaluations of the cursory statements I made.
Peace,
HereandNow
Comment by: HereandNow
13Helen,
I couldn’t agree more. I think that we all have such a difficult time not viewing ourselves as the center of the universe, that whether we are oriented towards justice or personal righteousness, we are going to gravitate towards how things impact “me”.
In my christian life, I was in full-time urban ministry. After a few years I came to realize that the efforts in social justice that I was engaged in were often little more than efforts on my part to carve out some “just world” for myself. I was frequently competing within with wanting to work towards justice altruisticly and working towards it because I was busy trying to work out my own little (or not so little) need for justice in my life. Now, with a few years seperating me from that work, I’ve come to think that altruism is not only impossible, but also unecessary in matters of justice. Furthermore, the ongoing effort to bring justice to ME as you put it, is something that should be watched, but not something that should necessarily be avoided. I guess I kind of reject the Kantian notion that good deeds are only good deeds if altruisticly performed (not that you are saying this). Nonetheless, self-preservation is something that is inherent in all of us, and while it can lead to incredibly selfish and ignorant behavior, it doesn’t necessarily.
Comment by: Helen
14Hereandnow - yes, I see what you mean. I have no problem with the concept that when we do good we can be intentionally doing it for ourselves as well as others. I see this as being the ‘enlightened self-interest’ Paul referred to in comment #1.
I think it becomes problematic when my way of doing something good for me involves exploiting/hurting/abusing others.
Comment by: HereandNow
15I agree about the problematic nature of self-serving attempts at organized justice. One caviat would be that while it is always wrong to exploit and abuse, there are instances in which “hurting” is not only inevitable, but also morally acceptable. While I’d want to be extremely careful not to let this be an excuse for abusing and exploiting (and I admit that I’ve seen many instances where it does become such), I do think that acts that hurt people in an effort to do good for self have their, albeit limited, place.
I’m fascinated by the topic of what makes bad things abuse and what makes them just plain hard lessons to endure. The postings on this web site are so full of stories of abuse from our institutional/organized worship experiences. I wish that it weren’t as common as it is, but I can say that in the last several years as I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with saying that I don’t believe in God (as christianity defines God), it has been incredibly helpful to seperate between instances that were abusive and exploitive on the one hand, and instances that were just plain painful to endure on the other (like having to slowly admit to a community of people with whom I shared deep fellowship that I no longer shared the beliefs we all held in common). I’m lucky that when I did this, I didn’t get any of the manipulative crap that others on this website have described. While people felt genuine sorrow for the change (I would expect that given the beliefs they hold) no one to date, and it’s been about 6 or 7 years, has wigged out about it to the extent that they call me “lost” or “backslidden” or “never saved in the first place”–atleast not to my face. So, in that context, people hurt over the loss of faith, and I hurt over the loss of some of the deepest intimacy that I’ve ever had with a group of people, but none of that hurt has been abusive or exploitive.
All this is much more long-winded an answer than I intended to give, but it’s early in the mornign and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee, so what the heck.
Comment by: Helen
16HereandNow wrote:
I am too!
In fact I’m fascinated by the tension that challenging and hard things can cause us to ‘grow’ - they can be ‘good’ for us; so while we might sometimes wish for an easier life, we would not enjoy a life with NO challenge in it. Nor would it help us be all we can be.
I’m glad your friends have responded well. The Christians who know me best have responded with the sorrow you mention. I wish it could be otherwise - because it does make it a lot harder to have fun chats with them - but I know it can’t be otherwise, since I’ve abandoned what they hold most dear and sacred.
Indeed ;-)
HereandNow, I’m enjoying your comments very much. Thanks for joining us in this discussion!
Comment by: JG
17When we look back over history, how many communities have there been who have attempted to live “without faith”? And what have such communities been like?
Examples like France during the French Revolution and Communist countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Cambodia come to mind. But are there any positive examples of communities who have wholly abandoned faith and been MORE caring as a result?