I’ve never been able to get over the stark contrast of my 1st world life and the desperation of many abroad. Or, perhaps my issue is that I could fix so much in their lives but I don’t. “Then why not help more?” is the clear question, but equally clear is the next difficulty: “How much is enough?”. If one mouthful of happiness and one night of peace is worth the same in my life as anyone else’s on the planet, then the logical, generous thing to do is shift spending into donation until I’m down to subsistence levels and a number of others are raised to subsistence levels. The massive disconnect between that life path and my own is something I carry with me.
I think it all started on a family trip to India when I was 13. Beggars without legs rolled up to me and I found it heart wrenching. My parents said amputee beggars often had their limbs removed just to make more money. I reflected on this as I fell asleep in 3-4 star hotels, digested heavy Indian curries and waddled through temples. Where was the logic? How could it make sense for me to enjoy while they suffered when the same dollar amount could buy more happiness for them?
I tried on this optimization, the most marginal happiness per dollar, and quickly felt overwhelming complexity and fear enter my mind. Everywhere I turned it felt like the good things in my life had no justification. It’s as if the supporting waters keeping my happy life afloat was a sea of justifications, unfathomably deep, and considering this optimization had pulled the cork out of the drain on the sea floor and water was rushing away. First my frivolous purchases where beached and inaccessible, then my very travel to this place was on dry land and now unjustifiable. I could see most of the rest of my life sinking fast and so I quickly replaced the stopper and let my life and its premises float freely again, albeit at a slightly lower level.
I’ve left that stopper in, using phrases like:
“It’s their life, I can’t be responsible for everyone.”
“It’s impossible to be happy if one considers others’ happiness co-equal.”
“Will my friends call my a hypocrite or worse if I live differently or raise questions?”
“If I can be considered generous by my peers, that is enough.”
“Some of us need to be rich so we can innovate for everyone, poor included.”
I look around and everyone else seems to have many happy things floating on their seas and things are going great. It makes me wonder what possessed me to pull the cork at all. Perhaps it’s something wrong with me. Maybe the inadequacy complex of western society combined with my family’s survivalist, never-quite-okay approach has resulted in me finding a complex external problem with which to justify my internal disconnection. That is certainly a component J. Yet still I feel there is a truth and a logic in these feelings when one takes what we hold dear to a natural conclusion.
I think the difficulty is in finding a middle. Optimizing for self and close connections is natural. Giving self totally to the needs of others has a quiet, logical wholeness to it. However, considering the needs of self, those close and those far is overwhelming. At least with the tools currently at our disposal. But I’ve gone on long enough and can post on new emotional tools next time. What are your thoughts on this stark contrast?
“A Brief for the Defense”
Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Great post, thanks for writing. I struggle with this dilemma all the time, often feeling extremely guilty about it. One thing that I find useful to think about is short-term vs. long-term effects. Pulling my own cork to help fill another’s barrel provides immediate help and feels right, but its impact is so limited that its futility sometimes depresses me even further. I think real long-term change comes not from reshuffling the seas we currently have access to, but rather from finding ways of making significantly more water available to all (and coupling that with systems that decrease the relative disparities between those with the most and those with the least).
In business language I’ve heard this idea referred to as the “exploding pie.” Figuring out how to fairly divide up a pie (eating) is often much less effective than figuring out how to make a much bigger pie (cooking). Dwelling on how big or unfair our slices may be is only helpful insomuch as it helps us focus on the real value we have to offer — spending our time building better kitchens. Make sure you’re doing that, and the balance will show itself.
Thanks for the responses Andrew and Mark, both very deep. You both touch on how important it is not to get lost in focusing on the pain and negativity, while still acknowledging the reality of the situation. I agree this is better for the sanity of those viewing and experiencing the pain and, in the end, leads to a better world for all.
One of the general problem resolving techniques this reminds me of is the focus on the positive as a method of addressing the negative. Children have been shown to respond better to positive reenforcement than negative disparagement. Sometimes I think that maybe negativity is like a vaccine: only helpful in small amounts that you can recover from and be slightly stronger.
I think some knowledge of the pain of others helps you, perhaps, decide how to make the pie explode. I think there is an amount of awareness and focus that is helpful and then a greater amount which is unproductive.
One conclusion I’ve come to is that beyond growing the pie and splitting up the pie, there are some professions that even make the pie smaller, taking capital from poor people and deploying it more poorly. I’d say examples include predatory credit practices, spammers, etc.
Thanks for the responses. I will continue to seek methods that are real yet healthy.
Great stuff.
“I think there is an amount of awareness and focus that is helpful and then a greater amount which is unproductive.”
I read a book on yoga once (http://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Quest-True-Self-Stephen/dp/055337835X) which talked about two sides of the spiritual path as Wisdom vs Compassion, or Awareness vs Abiding Self. Awareness is seeing things as they truly are, and Abiding Self is the part of you that says at a certain deep level, everything is “OK”. You want to stay in balance… too much abiding self with not enough awareness is naive. Too much awareness without enough abiding self is depressing.
I think you hit the nail on the head – you want to have enough awareness to know what to do and to galvanize you into action. But if you get overwhelmed to the point of feeling helpless, you need to switch gears and focus for a while on positive things.
Great point Jordy. I think you’re right and I find it incredibly interesting that deciding where to focus can sometimes be more focused one’s own feelings and NOT the reality of the world. I think this is the entry point to a much deeper discussion about what percentage of our thoughts/beliefs attempt to avoid overwhelm and what percentage attempt to match truth. I many people think that it’s mostly about truth, but I think self-management is the majority of our cycles and dominates discovery of truth.
There are obviously many different causes of poverty, but it seems to come down to availability and consumption of resources. The western world had lots of resources and not so many people. Places like India seem to have the opposite. That, or at least the resources are undeveloped or controlled by the few (making it partly a cultural issue). But then again, the western world has poverty too, so it’s not strictly cultural. What seems perfectly clear to me, however, is that the world will not be able support everyone that is being born into it. I think that places like India are feeling that pinch sooner than the west. We’ll get there too, someday. We need more resources (distributed well), or fewer people. I don’t think we can escape the laws of supply and demand, or the cycles of population ebb and flow with respect to available resources.
“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure.” — Agent Smith
I wonder if there visualizations of poverty vs population vs resource density/availability.
To answer your question, however, I think that by pulling the stopper, you would just be delaying the inevitable. Handing out wealth will not cure the cause of the problem, it will just alleviate the suffering of some, but then how do you chose who is most worthy? You can’t save everyone.
Hey Ian, thanks for the comment! I agree that:
- There is only so much and even with better distribution, people will lack
- Population is the biggest enemy of increased quality of living for all
I used to think this made the battle against poverty unwinable and thus a fool’s game. I still think it’s very, very tough, but I see a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of:
- Birth rates falling in emerging economies as living standard increase. This, combined with the below-replacement rates in Japan, Hong Kong and other 1st world areas, resulting in the UN estimating that population will reach a maximum around 2050-2100 of ~9B people. This isn’t soon, but means that if we are increasingly able to provide for people, then one day that increasing rate will be higher than the increase in the number of people, and we have a shot at increasing the welfare of all living beings.
- Getting 9B people to the current US standard of living doesn’t seem feasible, at least not soon. But getting them to a lower rate of poverty, getting them more connected, lowering childhood death, etc seems doable. The UN Millenium Goals I think are a good start that have shown some progress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals
And you definitely can’t save everyone. But then, you can’t eat everything either, and I have a damn good time eating what I do.
If we set the goal as getting people to a lower level of poverty, that, I think, is probably doable. Education and development assistance (real assistance, not seeds they have to re-buy every year) are the real wins. You want to create a system that grows positively, with just an initial investment. Education spreads because knowledge can be duplicated and passed along for free. The same goes for crops that can produce offspring.
I still don’t think that handing out wealth is the answer — what happens if a solution comes along, but you are no longer able to pay for it because you handed it away? That is my worry.
I totally agree. Finally, more people in the development community are thinking like you. The general theme I get out of it is: still give, but with a requirement of some sort. “Conditional Cash Transfers” or CCT’s, are one of the ways this is happening: http://poverty-action.org/work/projects/0018
I really like the idea of stepped-handout-levels, so that someone can get a lot of help for cheap, but they have to “earn” it in some way.. This builds in the expectation of a market system of meeting expectations to get something worthwhile and it allows aid to be distributed to those with the most discipline/time/probable ability to use it. At the same time, it lets you still give and improve a life without having a standard as high as a raw laissez faire market would create, which few would meet and be helped by.