Altruism is best practiced selfishly.
When I was growing up, my dad had posted a big sign on the door from our basement:
NOTICE!
Close this door behind you.
This means YOU!
He was fresh out of the army, and had that way of commanding attention. Where have you seen a sign with a big, bold, uppercase NOTICE at the top, followed by some text? I think of them on doors of closed businesses these days, official notices about the closing, the disposal of contents, perhaps the new location. I think of driving past wooded areas in the country, seeing them on dozens of the trees facing the road, letting hunters know that hunting there is not allowed. The signs say NOTICE because most of us usually don’t. They try to grab our attention from wherever it is, to focus it on something important.
As we look at the Good Samaritan story and Howard Gray’s see-feel-help-change model of becoming more human, more ourselves, there is an almost ironic twist. While we are helping someone else, it is awareness of how we ourselves feel that sustains us, encourages us. University of Detroit Mercy is one of 28 Jesuit colleges in the U.S., and one of 18 in the tradition of the Sisters of Mercy. The founders of the Jesuits and Mercys, Ignatius of Loyola and Catherine McAuley, began their work by helping others. Ignatius, the son of a wealthy Basque family in northern Spain, realized that he felt better with the poor than with the rich. It took a broken leg to stop him so that he noticed. For Catherine McAuley it was the potato famine in Ireland; one could not fail to notice the starving women on the street, but Catherine noticed that it was the pain inside herself when she could not help that was her motivation to step out into the middle of it to help.
The scale of the impact of these two people who noticed their feelings might suggest that helping is not self-denial or self-sacrifice, but applied self-awareness. Just as it is noticing how we feel when we see someone in difficulty that moves us to want to help, it is noticing how we felt while we helped that keeps us going. In Look Away, Look Away, Look Away…we saw that aversion, looking away, was our common attempt to evade growing through helping. We were afraid to look at the other. But to sustain altruistic behavior, to be the kind of person who seems tireless in their helping, we need to look in too. We need to step back and reflect on what is happening inside ourselves while we help.
The teachers at UDM who require their students to do service in order to learn course material say again and again that “They go out there kicking and screaming; they hate the idea of having to do service off campus. But by the end of the course, they’re so glad they did that many of them decide to keep doing it after the course is over. They love it.” It does feel good, doesn’t it . . . if we stop and think about it? I found this snippet of wisdom on an old and untrackable discussion string when I looked for the connection between endorphins and altruism:
"Happiness" is a vague emotion, like love, not an objective, short-term, measurable one, like calm, contentment, or excitation. However, all states of happiness usually share in common a factor of endorphin release.
Endorphins are basically one of two basic mechanisms for "fitting" data in the brain-as-neural-net, with the other being pain: pain is the reinforcement mechanism that trains your neurons to not do that again, while endorphins tell your brain to do please do that again. People are "happy" (have endorphins) when they're doing things that their body encourages them to do. To be happy is simply to be one with your body's material desires (though note that your brain is part of your body, and it has material desires of its own, for things like friendship.)
Next time you help, notice what is happening inside you. It keeps you going, keeps you helping like the endorphins that keep the runner running. Our bodies know that we need to help, because it just feels right. Our feelings are helping us know what it means to be human . . . if we NOTICE.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
John,
ReplyDeleteSometimes I "love" helping and sometimes not. Sometimes I "know" it's the right tbhing to do, but that doesn't always mean that I "feel" good about it. Sometimes during the past few days' reflections, it seems to me like you've tried very hard to make it seem easy, almost biologically automatic, to do the right thing. I'm not so sure.
As I've heard it said, acting on faith means that we are aware that we are not absolutely right. And, truth told, there are few absolutely right or wrong activities that I engage in. Most are, to use an Ignatian term, a toss up between two goods. That really confuses me and my endorphins. Sometimes I act on faith...and feel lousy, guilty, scared, uncertain. I wish your recent reflections would allow a little more room for those feelings. They, too, accompany my doing of the right thing. Sometimes more often than not.
Bill