I. AT THE HIGH EDGE OF ALTRUISM
THE WORD ALTRUISM WAS COINED in 1830 by French philosopher Auguste Comte, who derived it from vivre pour autrui, or “live for others.” An antidote to the selfishness of living for ourselves, altruism became a new social doctrine based on humanism rather than religion. Altruism was an ethical code for nonbelievers, one detached from dogma.
Those who act from the purest form of altruism are not looking for social approval or recognition, and they are not looking to feel better about themselves. A woman sees a child she doesn’t know wandering into the path of a car. She doesn’t think, Saving this child would make me a good person—she just rushes into the road and grabs the child, putting her own life at risk. Afterwards, she probably doesn’t praise herself too much. She thinks, I did what I had to do. Anyone else would have done the same. She feels relieved because the child is alive and well. As this example illustrates, altruism is a step beyond ordinary generosity; it entails self-sacrifice or physical risk.
In 2007, Wesley Autrey (not far from autrui), a construction worker, jumped onto the Manhattan subway tracks to save Cameron Hollopeter, a film student who was having a seizure and had fallen from the platform onto the tracks. Autrey saw the oncoming train and leapt down to haul Hollopeter out of the way. But the train was coming too fast, so Autrey threw himself over Hollopeter in the foot-deep drainage trench between the tracks. As he held down the seizing man, the train passed over them both, grazing the top of Autrey’s knit cap. No thought to self, just an unmediated impulse to save a fellow human’s life.
Later, Autrey seemed bewildered by all the attention and praise he received. He told The New York Times, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.”
I see Autrey’s story as an example of pure altruism. We all have altruistic impulses, but we don’t all act on them at all times. Other people on that subway platform no doubt saw Hollopeter seizing and recognized the need to help—but they also understood that they could get killed in the process. Altruism happens when our impulse to serve others overrides our fear and our instincts of self-preservation. Thankfully, Autrey was resourceful enough to save a life and to survive as well.
All over the planet, every day, people are acting from unmediated altruism to serve one another. Like the unidentified Chinese protester who stood resolutely in the pathway of the tanks heading toward Tiananmen Square. Like the doctors in Africa who so courageously treated Ebola patients. Like the Parisians who opened their homes to those escaping the 2015 terrorist attacks. Like the three thousand courageous Syrian volunteers who serve as first responders rescuing survivors after the bombs fall on civilian neighborhoods. Like Adel Termos, who tackled one of the suicide bombers heading toward a crowded mosque in Beirut the day before the Paris attacks in 2015. When Termos caused the bomb to detonate away from the crowd, he lost his own life—but he saved the lives of countless others. Like Ricky John Best, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, and Micah David-Cole Fletcher, who fearlessly intervened in a racial attack on two teenage girls riding the MAX Light Rail train in Portland in May 2017. Ricky and Taliesin lost their lives; Micah survived. As Taliesin was bleeding out, he offered these words: “Tell everyone on this train I love them.” In our fraught world, I feel that it is important to hear stories like these to keep our faith in the beauty and power of the human heart and to remember how natural altruism is.
Self, Selfish, or Selfless?
Let’s return for a moment to the woman who pulls the child out of traffic. If she later thinks, I’m a good person for doing that, does this self-congratulatory thought negate the altruism of her action? The strictest definitions of altruism do not allow for ego involvement, either before or after the action. Altruism is characterized as an act of selflessness that is about benefiting others, free of expectation of an external reward (such as gratitude or a quid pro quo), and free of internal rewards like higher self-esteem or even better emotional health. Pure altruists have “no gaining idea,” to quote Zen master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi—they gain nothing from their beneficial actions. They are fundamentally unselfish.
Great contemplative practitioners and some naturally compassionate human beings have the kind of boundless heart that is open to serve in all circumstances. No self, no other; just unbiased goodness toward all. But most of us are merely human, and it’s very human for us to feel some sense of fulfillment from serving others.
Whether pure altruism even exists is a subject of debate among psychologists and philosophers. According to the theory of psychological egoism, no act of service or sacrifice is purely altruistic, because we are often motivated by at least some small feeling of personal gratification, or we feel a little ego enhancement after helping others. This theory might hold that in the real world of human psychology and behavior, there is no such thing as pure altruism.
Buddhism takes a more radical position; it says that altruism and its sister, compassion, can be totally free of the ego, the small self. Altruism can arise spontaneously and unconditionally in response to the suffering of others, as it did for Autrey. Buddhism also suggests that selfless concern for the welfare of others is part of our true nature. Through contemplative practice and ethical living, we can resist the pull of selfishness and come home to the place inside us that loves all beings and holds them in equal regard; the place that fearlessly aspires to end their suffering and is free of biases.
Thích Nh?t H?nh writes, “When the left hand is injured, the right hand takes care of it right away. It doesn’t stop to say, ‘I am taking care of you. You are benefiting from my compassion.’ The right hand knows very well that the left hand is also the right hand. There is no distinction between them.” This is the kind of altruism that is non-referential, meaning that it is not biased toward family members, friends, or other in-group affiliations.
A poem by Joseph Bruchac conveys this deep and humble sensibility to care for all beings equally:
Birdfoot’s Grampa
The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our lights and leaping,
live drops of rain.
********
The rain was falling
a mist about his white hair
and I kept saying
you can’t save them all
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.
But the leathery hands full
of wet brown life
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass
he just smiled and said
they have places to go
too.
Here, the grampa is a good example of a living bodhisattva, in Buddhism, someone who freely saves all beings from suffering. Grampa keeps stopping to rescue those toads, though it means scrambling along the rainy, dark road. Smiling, he seems to be experiencing what Buddhists call “altruistic joy,” joy in the good fortune of others.
Altruistic joy is considered to be a truly nourishing quality of mind. In this way, Buddhism agrees with Western psychology that feeling joy about the good fortune of others is good for us. I know I feel better mentally and physically when I am doing good things for others, although feeling better isn’t what motivates me. Recent studies in social psychology suggest that being less self-centered and more generous is a source of happiness and contentment for the giver. One study showed that very young children, even those under two years old, tend to experience a greater sense of well-being when they give treats than when they receive them. Another found that adult participants who spent money on others experienced greater satisfaction than those who spent money on themselves. And the neuroscientist Tania Singer has discovered that compassion (a close companion of altruism) triggers the brain’s reward centers and pleasure networks. She believes that humans are wired for kindness. When we act from kindness, we feel aligned with our deepest human values. We take joy in our actions, and life feels more meaningful.
Conversely, when our actions harm others, we don’t feel well; we often lose sleep, become irritable, and worse. With more and more research documenting the positive health outcomes for people who help others (e.g., enhanced immune response and increased longevity), we might soon face a wave of pseudo-altruists who help others just to live a longer and healthier life. Of course, this might not be a bad problem to have.
Forgetting the Self
For me, one of the most moving examples of altruism is the story of the late Englishman Nicholas Winton. In 1938, as the Nazis were in the process of occupying Czechoslovakia, Winton organized the transport of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia to Britain. He ensured their safe passage through Europe by train and found a home in Britain for each and every refugee. This was an incredibly risky, selfless act. He didn’t even tell his wife for fifty years. He wasn’t interested in fame, though in the end he did become famous when his wife told the BBC about this extraordinary endeavor, after she discovered his scrapbooks when cleaning their attic in 1988.
That year, the BBC invited Winton to the airing of a show called That’s Life. Unbeknownst to him, people whom he had saved, now in their fifties and sixties, had also been invited. The presenter said, “Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton? If so, could you stand up, please?” Everyone in the studio audience stood up. Winton hugged the woman next to him and wiped away tears.
We can ask if we can really know Winton’s precise motivations, and whether his actions may have reified his sense of self in some way. In 2001, when a New York Times reporter asked why Winton did what he did, Winton modestly replied, “One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that. Why did I do it? Why do people do different things? Some people revel in taking risks, and some go through life taking no risks at all.” An interesting personal assessment of his extraordinary courage.
Winton saw the need, saw that he could serve, and had an appetite for positive risk. If he felt any “fulfillment” from his actions, would that change the way we regard him? I think not. Saving the lives of 669 children earns our profound appreciation. His actions had such a powerful long-range effect, through generations, that we simply rest in the wonder that this happened, and that so many people benefited. Winton lived a long life, passing away in 2015 at age 106.
As Auschwitz survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said, “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself.… The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is.”
II. FALLING OVER THE EDGE OF ALTRUISM: PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM
IT’S SOMETIMES CHALLENGING TO KEEP altruism healthy; as we stand at this cliff’s edge, we can be vulnerable to falling into harm. When we help excessively and ignore our own needs, we can begin to resent the person we are helping and the situation in general. I knew a woman who cared around the clock for her cancer-ridden mother. Worn out, frustrated that she couldn’t do more to alleviate her parent’s pain, and feeling guilty for being so frustrated, she ended up turning anger toward her mother, and then later toward herself. She felt she had lost heart and failed both her mother and herself.
When our altruism shifts out of selfless goodness into obligation, duty, or fear … or we simply feel burned out from giving, we may start to churn with negative emotions. I remember listening to a schoolteacher who was angry at himself for spending “too much time” helping a needy student. And a nurse who came to resent her patients, then felt ashamed for feeling so negative toward those whom she had once enjoyed serving.
We may also believe that helping a patient, student, or relative gives us permission to offer unsolicited advice or to control their actions. Once, when I was in the hospital very sick with sepsis, I became the recipient of so much kindness that I was almost done in. Finally, one of Upaya’s chaplains wisely advised me to have a sign put on my door: “No visitors.” Struggling through fever and chills, I was hosting an overwhelming number of visitors who were giving me copious counsel on how to recover my health. These kind people had taken time out of their day to visit me and were trying to be helpful—but clearly, I needed my own energy to heal, and not theirs. I couldn’t even mentally track what they were saying, my fever was so high. Their need to help seemed to overwhelm their capacity to feel into my situation and to realize that I could not be receptive. Altruism’s edge in these situations can easily crumble when our anxiousness or need to fix take the lead.
If we can learn to view altruism as an edge, we will become more aware of the risk and peril of this geography, and can realize what’s at stake: harming others, ourselves, and even the institutions in which we serve. If we find ourselves on shaky ground, we can learn to sense when our actions are likely to send us over the edge. In the best of circumstances, we can pull ourselves out of precarious situations and move back to solid ground.
Help That Harms
When altruism goes over the edge and into the abyss, it becomes pathological altruism, a term used in social psychology. Altruism that is sourced in fear, the unconscious need for social approval, the compulsion to fix other people, or unhealthy power dynamics easily crosses the line into harm. And there can be tough consequences, from personal burnout to the disempowerment of entire countries. It is important to unmask situations where we see pathological altruism operating, whether in the lives of parents, spouses, clinicians, educators, politicians, aid workers, or one’s self. Recognizing and naming this phenomenon has opened the eyes of many who have found themselves slipping down the precarious slope of good intentions gone awry.
In their book Pathological Altruism, Dr. Barbara Oakley and her colleagues explore help that harms. They define pathological altruism as “behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.”
A familiar example of pathological altruism is codependency, in which we focus on the needs of others to the detriment of our own, often enabling addictive behavior in the process. I knew a married couple who let their twenty-five-year-old son, alcoholic and unemployed, live in their basement for a while. They didn’t want to kick him out onto the street with no job or home—but his presence strained their finances and, as their resentment grew, tested their marriage. They tried to make him go to AA and to inpatient rehab, and they found temporary jobs for him, but their attempts to control his behavior and modulate his addiction always backfired. For their son, having a free place to stay wasn’t a good thing either, because he had no incentive to change his situation.
Alongside codependency, Dr. Oakley cites other manifestations of pathological altruism, including animal hoarding and “helicopter” parenting. We all know the cat lady who can’t say no to taking in one more stray, and the father who makes a federal case to school administrators about his son’s well-deserved C in chemistry class as a way to “help” his son.
In my own work, I have observed many people who are caught in the grip of pathological altruism: a nurse who worked too long without food or sleep in order to care for her dying patient; a social activist who camped out in her office so she could be on call 24-7; the CEO of a social relief organization who was chronically jet-lagged from flying all over the world; a volunteer helping refugees in Greece who experienced empathic distress from all the suffering she was witnessing.
Parents, teachers, health care professionals, employees within the justice system, and activists working in crisis situations are especially at risk of pathological altruism from exposure to others’ suffering. The consequences can manifest as resentment, shame, and guilt, and also as the toxic sides of the other Edge States: empathic distress, moral suffering, disrespect, and burnout.
Also, viewing ourselves as “saving,” “fixing,” and “helping” others can feed our latent tendencies toward power, self-importance, narcissism, and even deception of ourselves and others. A particularly troubling story of pathological altruism involves an organization which claimed to be doing health and humanitarian relief work in Asia and Africa. The organization not only misrepresented itself to its funders about the scope of its work—it also failed to pay their local staff in various countries. Ethical violations like this are sourced in self-delusion. My hunch is that in the beginning of their work, they probably wanted to be of service, but they eventually got caught in the need to represent the organization as doing good in order to raise money. Of course, the funder finally realized what was going on and the funding stream stopped, but in the meantime, there was harm all around.
Pathological altruism on a systemic level occurs when helping actually harms the organizations or peoples who are supposed to be served, such as in situations of foreign aid gone wrong. There are abundant examples of this—from my experience, they include clinicians doing medical service in refugee camps where there is no incentivizing or training of local people to offer follow-up care, so refugees become dependent on outside sources for medical help; NGOs that bring in Western products or services rather than giving grants and training to local entrepreneurs who could meet the demand; and “toxic charities” that give money without providing opportunities for skill development, creating more dependency on outside sources for support.
When we Westerners think we can save the world, we might do so not only from a place of goodwill but from hubris. Writer Courtney Martin notes that from afar, other people’s problems seem exotic and easily solved. She says that while this tendency is not usually malicious, “it can be reckless. There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity.”
Martin urges us instead to “fall in love with the longer-term prospect of staying home and facing systemic complexity head on. Or go if you must, but stay long enough, listen hard enough so that ‘other people’ become real people. But, be warned, they may not seem so easy to ‘save.’” Bearing witness to the problems of another culture, and really listening, may be the only way to stay on the healthy side of altruism.
Some people become so obsessed with helping others that their own well-being is compromised. In her book Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar profiles American “do-gooders” who make helping strangers their life’s mission. Her subjects forgo everyday luxuries such as restaurant meals and concert tickets so they can send the money to families in developing countries, tallying up how many lives they are saving through their frugality. MacFarquhar examines this phenomenon without judging it; she documents uplifting moments of generosity and disturbing moments of pride and guilt. Some of her subjects are part of the effective altruism (EA) movement, which uses data analytics to predict where donations will have the greatest impact on people in need. EA urges its followers to divorce their giving from emotion, arguing that “sentimentality” gets in the way of financial efficiency.
Copyright © 2018 by Joan Halifax
