A friend once described a similar sort of individual, a member
of his church. This gentleman (let’s call him Walter), who died a couple of
years ago, had inherited a significant property portfolio in and around London
which enabled him to become a one-man housing agency for poor and vulnerable
people, while himself living a life of such extreme frugality that even Julia
and Jeff might have balked at such privations: he slept in an overcoat (considering
bedclothes unnecessary), had no heating in his own house, and washed in
rainwater. He affected for good the lives of many, many other people, even if
his own life was odd (while to him it was entirely rational). His funeral was
packed with mainly his current and former tenants, which is not something most
landlords can hope for.
The typical response of most of us is defensive as we seek
to justify not doing the same kind of thing. We know there is much suffering in
the world, and that much of the way we live is strictly unnecessary,
superfluous. So we categorise ‘extreme altruism’ as weird and pathological, and
come up with convoluted reasons to condemn it morally too (you can, should you
choose, read some of them in the responses to the Guardian article).
To be honest, Julia does seem motivated by a sort of ‘survivor
guilt’, which compels her to see every pleasure of her own life as paid for by
the suffering of someone else; you could indeed describe these thoughts as
obsessive-compulsive, and her charitableness as an attempt to buy them off – an
attempt which can only ever be in vain, because there will always be more
suffering somewhere in the world, and always more one could do, more sacrifices
one could make, to alleviate it. No wonder she gets episodes of depression.
However this doesn’t seem applicable to Walter, at least in so far as I know
his story. As the article suggests, some ‘extreme altruists’ are constitutionally
happy, and some aren’t; their life choices actually seem to relate very little
to their mental health.
Nor do they seem constrained by ideology that much.
Obviously Walter was a Christian and his altruism was framed in a Christian
structure. Julia, very interestingly, started out life as a Christian,
abandoning her faith in her early teens on realising that ‘other people must
believe just as strongly in their holy books’ – a pretty jejune line of reasoning,
I think, but there it is. However her altruism remained unaffected by her ideological
change. She remained haunted by the sufferings of others, and the conviction
that every human being is of equal value continued to demand of her that all
her spare resources had to be devoted to their support.
I must say I would question the philosophical basis of this assertion.
For assertion it seems to be: if I think what ‘value’ I, or any other person,
has, what I find is not something intrinsic, something absolute, at all, but
something relational. My own feelings of my worth to myself aside, I am
valuable to the degree that I contribute to the life of others; the whole notion
of value requires someone else to be of value to. Equally, people I don’t know,
who have no social or economic relation with me, are of no value to me. The
last human being in existence would be of precisely no value at all, there being
nobody else to whom they could be valuable. That is, unless you bring in to the
equation an external arbiter of value in the form of God; secular altruism justified
in terms of ‘the equal value of all human beings’ seems to me completely baseless;
without God, they simply aren’t.
Well. Even Julia and Jeff set a limit on their giving,
allotting themselves a minimal allowance which does give scope for occasional unnecessary
treats. They have to do this to avoid madness, to escape analysing every tiny
action in terms of its effect on their ability to give, to erect a boundary
against the limitless need of the world which will otherwise crush them,
because, as we said above, there’s always more you can do, always another
sacrifice you can make. It’s just that they set that limit at a different level
to most of us, even those of us who do choose to give away a proportion of our
income.
I don’t feel able to criticise ‘extreme altruists’ too much,
because I know I am a bit of a sociopath. In my case, Christian ethics does
provide a prod to be more charitable and altruistic than I would otherwise be,
and a significant part of my journey as a Christian has been coming to
understand the sufferings of others far more than I am inclined to do –
especially those around me, rather than abstract and notional human beings far
away. But I feel nothing like the guilt that motivates Julia, and find it
perfectly, and worryingly, easy to forget that other people are hurting. Last
night, work over, I sat and watched a film received from the rental company I
subscribe to, drank a glass of wine, had a slice of bread and jam for supper.
None of these three things were necessary to my existence, they were merely
pleasurable. All of them, strictly analysed, cost money which I could have
given away. Yet I don’t feel particularly bad about it; the knowledge, the
absolute knowledge, that as I enjoy my pleasures other people somewhere are
suffering, doesn’t overly disturb me.
Ten per cent, the Bible suggests. Jesus tells one rich man
to ‘give all you have to the poor and follow me’, but he doesn’t say it to
everyone. He commends the wasteful pouring of expensive perfume over his feet;
he goes to a party and, entirely unnecessarily and un-ascetically, keeps it
going with a miraculous transformation of water into wine. He is both
unsentimental and unhaunted. There is no hint in his life that superfluous
pleasure is bad, which reassures my sociopathy. And yet: surely the inability
to forget the suffering of others, even when it occurs in an unbeliever, is not
far removed from the experience of God. Individuals so burdened do not deserve
castigation; they are needed to drive society forward.
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