Leo Tolstoy has once observed that a person must choose between “conscience and life.” Tolstoy’s pithy remark sometimes haunts me though I am not totally confident that I understand its meaning. What I think Tolstoy means is that we are all confronted with an existential conflict. On the one hand, we have a biologically based impulse to live, as do all living things. But, as distinctly human beings, we also have a conscience that makes a claim on our choices and our behaviors. Our conscience is that internal voice which mandates that we abide by what we believe is both true and morally correct.
But what if we exercise our conscience to the extreme? What if we strive to comport ourselves in such a way that our conscience is rigorous, unbending and absolute? In other words, what happens if the standards of our judgments and decisions about ourselves are applied by us with unbending moral rigor, and the criteria we use to guide our actions are based on unbending truth? What would happen to our will to live if we were to apply the standards of an absolute conscience to ourselves?
For example, if the standard I use to travel through life were one of absolute fairness, I might conscientiously feel compelled to never exercise any advantage that might come my way by accident, on the moral grounds that I do not deserve it, and it is morally wrong for me to avail myself of an advantage that other people, who may be equally worthy, do not have.
Our moral reasoning tells me that all people are equal. But then for the sake of love and friendship we confer special privileges on our family and friends, not because they are more morally worthy than others, but simply because they are among our circle of intimates, and we know them and like them. From one perspective, playing favorites with our family and friends is simply morally arbitrary. In a situation where there is limited food, and we had access to some of it, most of us would choose to feed our family first and let strangers starve, rather than the other way around. Yet, if we are moral rigorists, it might be argued that this favoritism is simply unjustified, for our children are inherently no more deserving to live in critical famine situations than anyone else.
When it comes psychologically to our own sense of ourselves, I think that we all bend the truth, at least a little bit. We affirm life, that is, our life, over the absolute demands of conscience. What I mean is that we are all a composite of strengths and weaknesses, of virtues and vices. If we walked around all the time with a strictly truthful assessment of ourselves, our capacity to succeed in life, our ability to affirm life, would suffer from the burdens of laboring under the proverbial wet blanket. We would suffer from the oppression of a thousand doubts and inhibitions. But in the service of life, I think we all of us are endowed, mercifully, with a little bit of narcissism. We smooth over a thoroughly disinterested evaluation of our flaws in order to feel better about ourselves in our own eyes, and thereby maximize our abilities to move ahead. In order to make our way through life we need to believe in ourselves. In order to support this belief there is usually something in us that tells us that we are better than a rational, coldly objective, absolutely truth-bound assessment would make us out to be.
The imperative to live propels us to want to maximize our options and take advantage of opportunities for the sake of practical goals that will enable us to live more fulfilled lives. But sometimes the demands to be rational, truthful and moral, born out of our conscience, runs interference with the biologically propelled desire for survival and fulfillment. If we choose conscience, we may inhibit the impulse to live fully. If we choose life, we may, at times, have to bend the truth.
The philosopher David Hume, who was certainly committed to the importance of truthfulness, once said that when we are engaged in after dinner story telling, we normally permit ourselves and our guests a little bit of exaggeration for the sake of enjoyment, for establishing repartee and smoothing out our relations with our friends. In a broader sense life is like that. We allow ourselves to exaggerate ourselves in our own eyes, we clothe our basic selves with a little bit of narcissism, for the sake getting ahead in life. And there is nothing wrong with that. But in order to do so, we need to take liberties with what truth and conscience would strictly demand of us.
I don’t mean to suggest that conscience and life are always in stark and painful conflict with each other. If we are maturely socialized people, then we might often feel, and rightly so, that to act truthfully, rationally and morally is to affirm -- and not deny -- our lives as distinctly human beings. And this is assuredly true most of the time. But sometimes in rare moments of insight we might come to the realization that to act on the moral part of ourselves, to act on conscience, does involve at some point suppressing our happiness, and the unbridled impulse to gratification and self-affirmation.
I recently gave the keynote address for an award given by the New York Society to David Kaczynski, the brother of the Unabomber, for his chairmanship of the New York State Committee to Abolish the Death Penalty. Everyone knows the excruciating ethical dilemma David Kaczynski faced when he realized that the Unabomber was probably his brother Ted, and he needed to decide whether to turn him in, or not.. Yet, in his acceptance speech, David Kaczynski mentioned what objectively seemed like another dilemma: what to do with the more than one million dollars in reward money he received for identifying his brother as a serial killer. . As a social worker making a modest salary, I suspect that million dollars could have bought Dr. Kaczynski a lot of fulfilling experiences. But conscience and ethics demanded a different course, and David Kaczynski chose to give it all away to the victims, and the families of the victims whom his brother had maimed or killed.
I provide these insights in order to lay the groundwork for this problem as it confronts us on a broader canvass. We are Ethical Culturists and at the heart our faith is the belief that all human beings possess worth, whether they are rich or poor, whether they are strangers, or happen to be among the small number of people with whom we are acquainted and with whom we happen to live out our lives. Our abiding commitment to the worth and dignity of all people implies a type of egalitarianism. It is coextensive with the intuition that all people are in important respects like ourselves: that they feel pain, that they long for happiness, that they dream of a better future for themselves and for their children. It is this realization that is also the wellspring of compassion. To the extent that we permit ourselves to think about it we are disturbed and disquieted by their suffering and wish to see it redressed.
As humanists, most of us entertain a second article of faith. Namely that the social condition of human beings can, in some sense, be made better; that most of the great oppressions that the masses of humankind suffer from especially hunger, disease, even war are ultimately overcomable conditions, and need not be. In other words, we are progressives who are passionately committed to creating a better world, and we believe that our commitments are not idle or foolhardy – that we can actual reduce the amount of human suffering even if we cannot overcome it completely. Most of us would resonate happily with the observation made by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has spent 25 years on the grounding studying the conditions that make for extremely poverty in various cultures around the world. Sachs begins his book, The End of Poverty with the words “This book is about ending poverty in our time. It is not a forecast. I am not predicting what will happen, only explaining what can happen. Currently more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Our generation can choose to end that extreme poverty by the year 2005.”
The problem I pose in the starkest sense the following: Here we are, mostly middle class people, who because of sheer accident are born into the wealthiest society that has ever existed. Even the most economically modest among us are probably among the economically most privileged people who have ever lived. With our life expectancy of more than 75 years, with our access to higher education, which in many cases is exceptionally elite education; with our ownership of comfortable homes overflowing with labor saving devices, and being bombarded with consumer goods or all types; having access to leisure and vacations, despite the expanding workweek, and despite its monumental problems, access to excellent medical care, we contrast dramatically with those people in developing lands, more than two billion of them, who subsist, if they do at all, on less than two dollars a day, for whom what we have in life-enriching experiences, possessions, and opportunities might as well place us on Mars. The moral problem is enhanced when we further consider that we enjoy an opulent life-style at the expense of the struggling poor in others countries. As often noted, the United States comprises 6% of world’s population but owns over the 30% of the world’s wealth, a situation kept in place by economic imperialism and a system stacked in favor of the have over the have-nots.
I remember taking three hours by bus, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, from the center of Mexico City to the outer boundaries of what is the world’s largest metropolis in which more than 20 million people live in destitution. You pass by mountain after mountain, on which are built ascending shantytowns and innumerable tarpaulin and tin shacks that resemble in their density and disorganization human junkyards with people so destitute that they probably survive on barter and are too poor to walk into the cheapest discount store the city’s commercial districts. Since their opportunities for education are very spotty, and Mexico has no sizable middle class into which to climb, I was forced into the abysmal realization that for these teeming millions of poor souls, the very circumstances of their birth was indeed their fate. With few exceptions, they will live out their lives and die as they were born.
Moreover, despite the horrors of 9/11, we the citizens of the United States still live in a safe and secure country. If we were residents of Bosnia, in which a quarter of millions people were killed in the mid-1990s, or were Rwandans in which 800, 000, countrymen were hacked to death by machetes in four months of government subsidized slaughter in 1994 or were the people of Darfur today, or lived in the Congo wherein upwards of four million people have been killed by war in the past five years, - a destruction of life too worthless for the media to even notice - I suspect we would have a very different outlook on life. Our lives and realities would not we shaped by the frustrations that accompany a middle class existence, but traumas almost too horrific to imagine, to speak about or endure.
So here is the question. If we dare to look at the human condition with eyes wide open, and if we take seriously, really seriously the idea that all human lives are equally worthy, how are we, in our relative privilege to live with ourselves? How do we go about our lives not overcome by despair or paralyzed by guilt? How can we remain reasonably cheery and hopeful when so many of our fellow human beings, who are as worthy as we are, live in abject misery, die young of wasting diseases, are traumatized by war and eke out their days with no realistic hope that their misery will every be substantially relieved.
I suspect that if we were committed fatalists our psychological task would be much easier. We could reason with a clear conscience, that this is the way it is and this is the way must be and always will be, The poor will always be with us, gross inequality is built in the very nature of the human condition either as the will of God or as a product of inexorable fate. If things are the way there are because they must be that way, then there is simply no moral problem with which to burden ourselves.
But, if, we as humanists, do believe that the human condition can change for the better, that the ability of people to live in peace in some places suggests that people can live in peace in every place, and as Jeffrey Sachs suggests, that we have sufficient resources to end global poverty and do so in only two decades, then the gaping moral disconnect I am sketching becomes that much wider, and potentially more burdensome.
Clearly what saves us from despair and paralysis is that these problems seem far away from us and out of direct sight. It would be very difficult to feel good and pursue your pleasures if you were literally sitting in a lifeboat while in the water five feet away people were drowning right before your very eyes. It would be much more difficult to enjoy a sumptuous meal if every time you sat down to eat you were joined at the table by 20 people who were on the brink of starvation. These discontinuities became very vivid for me when I was in Bombay, and walking down the street I would be literally surrounded by half a dozen beggars, some them little six year old girls in filthy, torn rags carrying their naked infant brothers or sisters, with their little hands outstretched and mournfully pleading “no mommy, no poppy, hungry.” One’s feelings oscillate between being harassed and outright compassion, if not pity, compounded by the realization that I have those rupees in my pocket, and many to spare, whereas they have nothing. I suspect that not wanting to confront these realities is one reason many Americans refuse to go to places such as India.
There are many protective psychological strategies, defenses and intellectual rationalizations people employ to keep the moral conflict I am describing from bothering them. The most pervasive, I assume, is simply to keep one’s field of vision very narrow. For the vast majority of people (and this is true to all people to varying extents) their interests in life are governed by their most proximate needs and anxieties. What should I wear today? What shall I have for lunch? Will I please my boss? Will I get the promotion I want? Will I lose my job in the upcoming layoffs? Will my boyfriend call me and ask for another date? Am I too fat? Am I too thin? What time do I have to pick up the kids from soccer? Have I offended anyone with my thoughtless remark? And so on and so forth. Our mental life and our interests are overwhelmingly governed and circumscribed by our individual needs, anxieties, aspirations, frustrations, as they impinge on our personal lives, and there is certainly nothing wrong with this. When it comes to bigger issues out there, such as the suffering of people who are out of sight, and the moral problems wrought by inherent inequality, ignorance is bliss. Mention genocide in Rwanda, a place which sounds so strange and exotic, that the realities of the place never leach their way onto the radar screen for most people. Most people are so absorbed by their immediate interests, including those engendered by the mind-stultifying atmosphere of consumerism in this culture, that they do not, and do not care, to look.
Other people may invoke an argument that appeals to a relativism and subjectivism of human pain and suffering in order to make the moral problem go away. They might argue that suffering is suffering and who is to say that the pain felt by the middle class American who didn’t get a much wanted promotion, or who is distressed because his teenage daughter won’t talk to him is not greater than the person in the developing world who lives in chronic poverty.
I don’t buy this argument. Though suffering certainly is highly subjective, I don’t believe that it is infinitely subjective or elastic. No one would want to be chronically hungry, or lack medicine for a painful illness or be victimized by torture or war, and at some point this argument lapses into a self-serving obscenity.
But for those who, for whatever reasons, do set their sites more broadly and allow themselves to be troubled by the ethical problem I am defining, there are a variety of responses. Though, in my view, the dilemma I am sketching is an existential one that can never be totally resolved. As long as these gross inequalities exist, or any inequality exists, there can be no total or perfect solution for the person with a sensitive conscience. But some solutions, I think, are better than others.
One way in which a very few exceedingly conscientious people have tried to resolve the problem would comprise what most would probably find an extreme but perhaps highly laudable response. There are some individuals who are so sensitive to, indeed afflicted by the difference between their own privilege and the deprivations of the poor, that they attempt to resolve the problem by giving up their privilege and wealth and joining the ranks of the poor themselves. One thinks perhaps of the commitments of people like Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Workers Movement, or the French ascetic Simone Weil, who during World War II committed herself to a life extreme deprivation on the rationale that she did not want to live more comfortably than the most deprived member of the French resistance. Or, perhaps, one could name Leo Tolstoy himself, who began his life as a count, but spent his last years in voluntary poverty living among peasants and pig farmers, in accordance with his own deeply held Christian principles. In the conflict between conscience and life, Tolstoy himself seems to have come down on the side of conscience.
Though the psychology of such self-renunciation is no doubt complex, I assume it does permit the renunciate to feel a strong sense of solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged. If successful, I suspect it enables the person to overcome a sense of hypocrisy, if not guilt, by divesting herself of privilege, and if religiously motivated, achieve a type of spiritual integrity and moral well-being.
But there are arguments against this approach, as much as we might at the same time applaud its saintliness. After all, this person has put his money where his mouth is, and has taken a very difficult step which few of us are willing to take. One contrary argument might be that by giving up one’s wealth and privilege, the person may also be yielding the very resources he could productively employ to help overcome, to whatever extent, the very problems that he is concerned about. The person so committed may save his soul, but also give up much of his ability to empirically redress the very real suffering that inspired his identification with the poor to begin with. Perhaps
But there is a midway position between remaining ignorant and uncaring about the plight of those who suffer from the worst oppression, and giving everything away in the service of the demands of conscience. This midway position is suggestive of the values at the basis of Ethical Culture, which is one reason I find our philosophy so appealing.
Even if a person is unwilling to divest himself or herself of all but the barest necessities, one can still give part of it away to help redress the scourges of poverty, hunger, disease and so forth. All the great religions in the service of morality suggest or require the giving of charity to those in need. Felix Adler founded an organization for the most devoted of Ethical Society members, and one of the requirements for affiliation with what he called the “Union for the Higher Life” was the pledge to give 10% of income to charity.
Especially in an age of over consumption, and diminishing resources, all of us for moral, spiritual and aesthetic reason would be well served to consider on how we can live on less. On the national level, Jeffrey Sachs, whom I mentioned a moment ago is a strong supporter of the UN Millennium Goals which would require that the rich nations each contribute .7 % of their gross national product to foreign aid.
But the problem I raise is one of our underlying orientation and values. What outlook and values can we personally adopt, if not to resolve the gap between ourselves and the disadvantaged, at least to narrow while affirming our own lives at the same time? Again, the values of Ethical Culture are suggestive.
Dr. Adler once said that “we must dedicate ourselves to humankind.” It is this dedication that must frame and inspire our direction in life, and from which we can derive life’s meaning. His edict presupposes a sense of obligation, and responsibility. And, in turn, that sense of obligation is based on an understanding that all people, whether known to us, or strangers, are part of the human family, and we are bound to them by a common destiny. In a globalized world grown much smaller, the observation has become truer than ever. Chronic hunger and oppression in the world’s poorest countries, threaten to create the instability which in times may come back to hurt. It is both morally right, and prudent that we dedicate ourselves to others, in a growing appreciation of the universality of the human family and the human bond.
Our own salvation, so to speak, is to be found in action. By working to redress the world’s injustices and oppressions, by giving part of ourselves to this work, even if we are not prepared or able to give all of ourselves, we, I believe can find the relative peace of mind that comes only through the active assertion of ourselves, not through wishful thinking or good intentions alone, but through actually labor and dedication. Working for a better world has its spiritual rewards. If not a complete step, it is an important and honesty step in redressing the guilt and disquiet that comes from privilege. It is an effort to honor both conscience and life.
Also, what’s needed is a sober and realistic appreciation that our own individual power to redress the world’s suffering is exceedingly limited. Injustice is virtually infinite, but our own powers and very finite. Thus, to preserve our sanity and our sense of optimism, we need to be selective with regard to those aspects of the human condition we wish to dedicate ourselves to, and have the faith that other people of good will be be dedicated to other areas which move them. No one person can do everything. To assume that one can, is not only to embrace an attitude of adolescent omnipotence, it is also most likely a guarantee for failure and greater despair
Finally in the face of humanity’s great problems we need to retain our faith in progress. Whether humankind has at bottom really achieved social progress seems to be infinitely arguable. For every advance, we seem to be able to point to areas in which humanity has taken a step backward. But if we are humanists, we must continue to believe in an open future. As Camus once remarked, “We may not be able to create a world in which no child is tortured. But we can create a world in which there are fewer tortured children.” And such a world is worth working for. If we can eradicate hunger in some places, then we can eradicate in more places.