Practical Selfishness and Public Good

      W. H. Auden notes the selfishness of "the normal heart" in his great poem, "September 1, 1939." The "error bred in the bone" is our craving for what we cannot have: 'Not universal love / But to be loved alone." This is Original Sin--as a fact anyway, if not the Edenic myth. Nobody's perfect, and that's just for starters. In fact, as Augustine illustrates in the almost silly second book of his Confessions about stealing pears as a teen, we're worse than self-interested. We can be vicious. As sure as we live, someday we'll hurt somebody for the worst of reasons, not for real benefit--not, in Augustine's example, stealing food out of hunger, but stealing to feel superior, to get by with mischief. Starting with this kind of shoddy material, this all-hungry ego, we've got some deep plowing to do if the commandment to love neighbor as ourselves is to bear fruit. But, even in a Christian community that makes much of sexual peccadillos, you won't hear much apology for breaking this really huge commandment, the one on which hang "all the law and the prophets" (Matthew 22:40) and the one necessary to "inherit eternal life" (Luke 10:25).

Recently, a company has been holding hearings to built a solar farm in our county. Now, I understand that hardly anybody objects to replacing fossil-fuel power with solar, and that the proposed location was not on good farmland (at least, I didn't read that objection in the news). What I did understand was that the folks objecting to the farm in hearings lived near it and objected to the construction mess and the solar panels they might see from their land. Now, what I'm about to say is obvious, so obvious it may need saying. Would these same folks have objected if they had lived in the next county? Of course not. And if they succeeded and the solar farm moved to the next county, would they continue to object? Nope. They would celebrate the screwing of a next-county neighbor as they did not want to be screwed themselves. Even though they had thus openly sinned, publicly failed to love their next-county neighbors as themselves, they would no doubt go to church in good conscience and be congratulated on their victory.

Such violations of the Great Commandment are like the air, invisible and taken for granted, partly because they are on a spectrum blending imperceptibly into legitimate self-interest. The commandment assumes an elevated love of ourselves as a basis for love of others. Without self-love, neighbor-love disappears. Consider the case of two men in the water after their boat sinks in sight of a distant shore. Suppose that you're one of them and happen on the sole life preserver, while the other man desperately treads water a few yards away, sure to drown without help. What are you called to do? If the life preserver can't support two, you don't have to give it to him. You're to love him as yourself, not more than. It's an even call, so you may paddle to shore. Of course, Christian ethics do allow you to surrender the float in loving self-sacrifice (John 15:13), but that's optional. However, if the life preserver can support two, you're a monster if you don't share, and you're a murderer if he has the one-man float and you snatch it away. On the other hand, it's justifiable self-defense if you find the float and fight off his attempt to take it. Unfair? Sure, but we take our choices as we find them. Happily, real life cases are usually more nuanced. Maybe there's honest doubt whether the life preserver can support two, maybe one of you is a strong swimmer, or, if maybe you see a floating log nearby, so you only have to suffer a few minutes in frigid water to push it over to him.

This last instance, I think, relates to the solar farm. Avoiding inconvenience isn't a sufficient reason to promote dirty energy. It's trivial, like pushing a log to a drowning man. The solar panels have to be in somebody's backyard, and welcoming them to mine--absent serious threats to my health or solvency--is an easy way way for me to love millions of "neighbors." That said, there is a limit to how much inconvenience a person can stand. It's like that joke: a woman admits she'd have sex with a man for a million dollars. He offers her twenty bucks. "What do you think I am?" she asks. "We've established that," he says. Now we're haggling over the price." This is silly because differences in degree, if large enough, become differences in kind. A puff of cotton is light, but a falling bale can crush you. While a response to a single A-or-B choice may be easy to calculate, neighbor-love in real life quickly becomes incalculable because nothing exists in isolation and so everything is more than just A-or-B. Only a monster would pollute the world to avoid a trivial inconvenience, but, hey, we can't avoid a little harmless pollution, and too damn much annoyance, like a bail of cotton, can crush a guy. Ethical calculus at best props up love: it you have to think much about it, you're probably doing it wrong.

So we fall back on attitude, openness, readiness to act on empathy. Maybe it's best to keep rules simple and go with feeling. The Tin Woodman, emperor of the Winkies in L. Frank Baum's The Tin Man of Oz, explains that he has no real duties because "the people of Oz have but one law to obey, which is: 'Behave Yourself,' so it is easy for them to abide by this Law" Chapter 3). I look around me at the human beehive, at three lanes of traffic behind stoplights and then moving when the lights change, and realize that it's not about complicated laws--nobody is reciting the Rules of the Road in driver's test booklet. Except for a few road-rage nuts, it's about a mutual agreement to roll down the road without getting in each other's way, to share the pavement with stranger-neighbors as we wish it to be shared with ourself. If that isn't love, it'll have to do until the real thing comes along--and it flows like fog close to the ground, untouched by law, wherever people flock together, a collective harmony of strangers countering Auden's "error bred in the bone."

Jesus summarizes "the law and the prophets" twice in Matthew's gospel. The two formulations--one in the Sermon on the Mount, another in a dialogue with critics--operate at two radically different levels: the first condenses the law; the second names its spirit. The first is the Golden Rule: "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 7:12). Notice that this addresses behavior. It is a basis for ethical calculus, but it says nothing about motive. Of course, I can make it my guide and practice it voluntarily, even out of love, but I also follow with the Golden Rule when I comply resentfully with a just court order--or even behave at gunpoint. A business owner may despise his customers but treat them as he would like to be treated to earn good reviews on Yelp. Three lanes of city traffic obeying a stoplight may be the Golden Rule in action, but it's no love-in. Most of us are happy to find a faster lane and pull past neighbor cars. Whether you stay in your lane for fear of the police, fear of an accident, fear of disapproval, fear of a road rage, fear of a just God, or even just lazy habit, your motive is selfish. The Golden Rule, like the one law of Oz, may just prescribe fair treatment in a practical world, not spiritual development.

Jesus' second summary of the law, is quite different: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39). This addresses attitude, not behavior. Of course, behavior follows from it: if I love you, I'll treat you as I like to be treated. This implies the Golden Rule, but it stands in quixotic defiance of human nature like much of Jesus' teachings. For instance, he says that if you look at somebody lustfully, you have committed adultery and if you grow angry, you have committed murder (Matthew 5:22, 28). In the same rigorous equating of unacted thought with overt act, neighbor-love doubles down on the Golden Rule to prohibit even wanting to break it. It demands a purity of motive that--taken literally anyway--is impossibly high. Martin Luther distinguished between temptation and obsession: "You cannot keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair." Settled, conscious, selfish attitudes can be detected, fought, and compensated for--not allowed to build nests in our hair--but it's impossible to control passing thoughts. Seeing this, we may read Jesus's words as hyperbole aimed at the possible: lesser purity of deliberate intent. He has a way of raising impossibly high standards, stars to guide, not destinations. In this spirit, I may admire a beautiful woman but not fantasize copulation, feel anger at an injury but dismiss vengeful thoughts. At this practical level, it's possible to take the call to neighbor-love as a slogan for a way to social good.

"We must love one another or die," W. H. Auden also wrote on the terrible brink of war, and, a few months later, E. M. Forster firmly disagreed. "Love in public affairs does not work," he declared, proposing in its place the "boring" virtue of tolerance. He has a point, of course. It may work to demand that two angry children quit fighting--or, even better, to separate them--but good luck telling them to love one another. Obviously, tolerance is a quicker and more efficient way to end a conflict and, therefore, "the quality which will be most needed after the war." But tolerance and love are different orders of things--the first one operating like the Golden Rule at the level of mere behavior. Though Forster calls it a "state of mind," tolerance is more properly a category of inaction. It's a do-not rule. Of course, I may tolerate you more readily because I have put myself in your place, what Forster calls "a desirable spiritual exercise," but that sounds a lot like a halfway house to love, which tolerance need not have anything to do with. Like the Golden Rule, tolerance is perfectly compatible with hate and can be imposed on the unwilling by force. I may tolerate you while resenting that I have to and hoping for a chance to kill you later. Of course, that's not all bad as long as it lasts. It's better than intolerance, but it has nothing to do with love. Love is not a category of inaction, but rather an energy of spirit. Love is either voluntarily chosen or mysteriously inspired, but it can't be forced. The reason tolerance works "in public affairs" while love does not is that, unlike love, it can be forced.

While tolerance may be the best basis for a post-war truce, it seems that Jesus has another objective in mind: the Kingdom of Heaven, not a Potsdam Agreement. Suppose that I act in a neighborly way, such as holding a woman's place in line while she changes her screaming baby's diaper. Does it matter to her what my motive is? I may act for any number of selfish reasons: because my wife (or God) is watching, because the Golden Rule is part of my self-image, because I want bystanders to admire me, because E. M. Forster has convinced me to tolerate, and so forth. In each of these cases, I act on a basis other than the law of love. Who benefits (or even knows) if I act on the one unselfish basis: loving the harried mother as myself so that I am happy for her even if she takes the last item at the window and I go home empty-handed? Nobody but me, I submit.

Jesus was a spiritual teacher, and his commandment is not primarily, I think, about civil order, stoplights, and solar farms, but about a path to personal liberation--non-attachment, grace, peace, salvation, wholeness--call it what you will. Only if I can let go of the illusion that whatever I desire is good, refuse to ride into my grave the grim wheel of competitive profit and loss, can I free myself to see clearly and live life in its fullness. It's not about passivity--I can still stand in line and savor whatever is given out at the window--but it is about letting go of anxiety over past and future, life and death, and living gratefully in the gifts of the Eternal Now, which is the only time that has ever really existed. The great religions all teach this.