Philosophy/ Life

Is Altruism Real?

Greta Christina14 Comments

There’s been a discussion — okay, a tangent that Ive gotten sucked into — over at Daylight Atheism. It’s about whether altruism is real… and since I’ve had rather a lot to say about it over there, I thought I should come say it back here as well.

Donaldtrump
I’ve always been bugged by people who insist that there’s no such thing as altruism; that everyone is basically selfish, and only they themselves are honest enough to admit it. The core of the argument seems to be that even the most altruistic acts — running into a burning building to save people, devoting your entire life to medical research or social justice, driving to shithole towns twice a month to take care of prisoners with HIV, etc. — are done for reasons of one’s own. They’re done to make yourself feel good, to make people like you, etc. Therefore, the acts are selfish — and therefore, there is no difference between the selfishness of, say, an Albert Schweitzer and that of a Donald Trump.

So here’s my problem.

Dictionary
If you’re going to define the word “selfish” as any and all behavior that benefits you even in the slightest — even if that gain is only that you get a marginal increase in social status, or that you get to privately feel like a good person — then that makes the word “selfish” pretty much meaningless. It’s basically re-defining the word “selfish” as “voluntary.” (Tip o’ the hat to Tim Walters for this catchy phrasing.)

Let’s take a look at the definition of the word “selfish,” shall we? According to Merriam Webster Online, “selfish” means:

1: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others

2: arising from concern with one’s own welfare or advantage in disregard of others (a selfish act)

Please note that the definition doesn’t say “concerned with oneself; seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being; arising from concern with one’s own welfare or advantage.” Doing those things does not make you selfish. Doing those things makes you sane. The key words are “excessively or exclusively,” “without regard for others,” “in disregard of others.” That’s what defines “selfish.”

Albert_schweitzer
This is a useful word. It’s a useful idea, a useful distinction to make. And it draws a clear distinction between the “you’re just doing that to feel good about yourself” kind of selfishness, and the kind of selfishness that’s what most of people mean when they use the word. Between, if you will, Albert Schweitzer selfishness and Donald Trump selfishness. These are different concepts. They’re different experiences. The experience of, “It makes me feel ecstatic and connected to make a contribution to humanity” is significantly different from the experience of, “Screw you, Jack, I’ve got mine.” It’s absurd to try to call them by the same name.

But there are other issues here, and they’re more than just semantics.

Purity
I am troubled by the idea that human beings are “really” any one thing. Human feelings, human motives, human nature itself, are all a big, complex, self-contradictory mess, and I find it very troubling when people insist on denying one part of human nature simply because we have another part that contradicts it. In particular, I’m troubled by the idea that, because our motivations are often a mixture of selfishness and altruism, and because altruism has a selfish component to it, this somehow negates the altruism, and only the selfishness is real. (And I find it interesting that the people arguing this don’t consider the possibility that this conflict negates the selfishness, and only the altruism is real.)

And perhaps most importantly:

Arguing that altruism isn’t real isn’t just unethical. It’s also factually inaccurate.

Dnasplit
There is, in fact, increasing evidence that altruism is an essential part of human nature. Literally. It seems to be hard-wired into us genetically. As it is in other social species. (As is selfishness, of course. Both qualities exist, in pretty much everyone.) Denying its existence is like denying the existence of social hierarchies or sexual desire.

I never cease to be amazed by people who insist that everyone else really experiences life exactly the way they do, if only they’d be honest and admit it. And in particular, I never cease to be amazed by selfish people who insist that everyone else is fundamentally selfish, too, and just won’t admit it. It’s so obviously self-serving that it’s laughable.

No, there’s probably no such thing as “pure altruism.” Any completely self-sacrificing tendency would have been selected out by evolution in a hurry. But the fact that it isn’t pure doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Altruism_equation
If people want to behave selfishly — i.e., concerned excessively or exclusively with themselves without regard for others — I doubt that I can argue them out of it. I just wish they’d stop fooling themselves into believing that everyone else is really just like them and simply won’t admit it. If you genuinely lack altruistic feelings… well, everyone else is not just like you. There are people in the world who care about other people, who have empathy for them, who want to make the world better for everyone and not just for themselves. And the world is a better place because of it.

Yes, the care for other people is mixed with self-care. But that doesn’t negate it. The fact that you are missing out on a fundamental human experience is no reason to deny that experience’s very existence.

Is Altruism Real?
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It Isn’t Like That

Greta Christina8 Comments

Ingrid and I are going away for our 10th anniversary. (No, we’re not going to the French Laundry — we decided on the Madonna Inn, where we had our fifth anniversary, and where we got engaged.) I won’t be back on the blog until Tuesday.

While I’m gone, I wanted to leave you with this. I wrote this piece about ten days after my first date with Ingrid… and I’m astonished at how true it still is, ten years later. I still can’t get over how lucky I am.

It Isn’t Like That
by Greta Christina

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…”
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

Sun
She is not the sun and the moon and the stars, and she is definitely not my sole reason for living. I wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night for many reasons, of which her existence is only one. She is not all I can think about; I spend time thinking about work, and friends, and what to have for dinner, without too terribly much trouble. I don’t feel the earth move or the sky fall, although I do feel a bit like I’ve been conked on the head by a giant vaudeville rubber mallet. I can talk to other people when she’s around, and I can keep my hands off her if I have to. I don’t feel that every minute spent without her is wasted, and there is at least some sunshine when she’s gone. I do not believe we were destined to meet, or that my life would be empty, or hollow, or even incomplete, without her. And her eyes, while large and lovely and the color of the ocean on a dark day, are, in fact, nothing like the sun, except in that they are big and round and bright. It isn’t like that.

Feet
It’s just that I grin and giggle and blush when I think of her, and sulk when she’s far away. It’s just that I feel a cold terrified rage at the thought that anyone, myself included, might hurt her. It’s just that I feel brave when I’m with her; not brave enough to slay dragons, but brave enough to feel what I feel and say what’s on my mind, which for me is plenty brave. It’s just that she knows what I mean, and I know what she means; not always, not as if we were soul-sisters or psychically linked, but enough, and much more than enough. It’s just that so many of the things that are good about her are things that are good about myself, things I would be happy to have grow stronger from being in her presence. It’s just that there isn’t anyone else, not even gorgeous movie stars, that I’d rather have in my bed. It’s just that a part of me that is hard and cool and distant, a part I rely on but don’t much care for, turns into oatmeal when I think about her. It’s just that I feel that my life is not entirely in my own hands, and, rather uncharacteristically, am not feeling that this is a problem. It’s just that she’s smart and funny and sane and thoughtful and cheerful and playful and good and sexy and beautiful, and it feels like a miracle — not a huge miracle, just a small one — that she seems to see me the same way.

I like it this way better. Much.

It Isn’t Like That

Rain and Feet

Greta Christina2 Comments

I don’t plug consumer products very often in my blog (unless you count books and dirty videos as consumer products). But the rainy season has started with a vengeance here in the Bay Area, and just about everybody I’ve mentioned these to has gone, “Oo! Oo! Oo!” So I thought I’d spread the word a little wider:

Crocs_georgie_2
Crocs makes rain boots.

You know Crocs, right? Those ridiculously comfortable, kind of silly-looking plastic shoes with the holes in them? The ones that come in eight million clown-shoe colors?

The people who make them make rain boots. Totally comfy (although not quite as comfortable as the regular Crocs). Keep my feet totally dry, even when it’s pouring buckets. And the black ones are actually pretty stylin’, if you like that “big stompy boots” thing, which I do. (Ingrid tried to convince me to get them in red, but big red rain boots with my bright yellow rain slicker would have made me look like Christopher Robin: a look you can pull off when you’re twenty, but not when you’re 46.)

Anyway. Crocs rain boots. If you’re searching for them, they’re called Crocs Georgies. (FYI, I did have to search for mine, since the Crocs store was out of the size and color I wanted.) And no, I’m not getting any kickbacks from the Crocs company. I just think they’re cool.

Rain and Feet

The Meaning of Death, Part 2 of Many: Motivation and Mid-Life Crises

Greta Christina6 Comments

Part 2 of an ongoing series on the meaning of death in a godless world. The basic idea: In a world with no God and no afterlife, death — like life — doesn’t have any purpose or meaning except the meaning we create. So what meaning can we create for it?

Sports_car
When I was forty, I went through a classic mid-life crisis. No, I didn’t buy a sports car or have an affair with a much younger woman. Instead, I quit a high-ranking position in a lucrative career that demanded an enormous amount of my time and energy… and took a lower-paying job, with less stress and shorter, more flexible hours, so I could concentrate on my writing.

The only thing that wasn’t classic about my midlife crisis (apart from the lack of sports cars and younger women) was how conscious it was. I wasn’t deluded about it; I wasn’t trying to fool myself into thinking it wasn’t happening. I knew exactly what was happening. In fact, I ran with it.

Clock
What happened was that I hit 40 — and realized that I didn’t have an infinite amount of time to get my writing career off the ground. Of course I’d known before this that I was going to die — I’m not an idiot — but there’s a difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it viscerally, having it shoved in your face. I hit 40, and I became aware — vividly, unignorably aware — that I was going to die someday… and that I didn’t want to be on my deathbed at 70 or 80, wondering if I could have had a serious writing career, and regretting that I’d never really tried to make it happen.

I’ve been doing professional freelance writing, mostly as a sideline, since I was in my twenties. I’ve known for a long time that writing was what I wanted to do with my life. But it wasn’t until I turned 40 that I got serious about making it a priority. Not just in theory; not just the kind of “making it a priority” that involves telling everyone you know what a high priority something is for you. It became an actual priority.

Empty_change_purse
It became the kind of priority that involves making sacrifices. The kind of priority that means missing parties and movies and concerts because you have to spend that time working. The kind of priority that involves staying up until four in the morning to meet your deadlines, sometimes for several days in a row. The kind of priority that involves taking a job for less than half your previous pay… with all the sacrifices of comfort and pleasure and security that go along with that.

And I never would have done it if I hadn’t had my mid-life crisis wake-up call. I never would have done it if I hadn’t started to get panicked about how little time I had left to do it in.

In other words, I never would have done it without death.

Remote_control
I’d love to think that I’m the kind of person who would spend immortality doing marvelous things: writing novels and learning Latin, working in soup kitchens and becoming a championship ballroom dancer, reading all of Dickens and traveling to Madagascar. But I know that’s bullshit. I’m the kind of person who would spend immortality sitting on the sofa eating chocolate chips and watching “Project Runway” marathons.

Heck, I’m immortal. I’ve got all the time in the world. I can do all that Dickens and Madagascar stuff next week. Next year. Next decade.

I’m a very deadline-driven person. And death is a deadline.

I won’t lie. If I could magically be given immortality, I’d take it. I’d know without a doubt that it would be a terrible, unwise decision… and I’d take it anyway. The instinct to survive is too strong, too deeply-ingrained, for me to pretend otherwise. So I’m not saying that, given a choice, I’d choose death.

Gravestone
What I’m saying is this: Given that I don’t have a choice, given that death is an unavoidable and final reality, I’m finding ways, not just to accept it, but to use it to give my life meaning. The finality of death is giving my life motivation and focus. It’s driving me to accomplish things that I’d put off indefinitely without it. Death has turned me from a happy-go-lucky slacker chick with some vague creative goals but no real plans for reaching them, into an ambitious, determined woman with a clear sense of what she wants to do with her life and what she needs to do to make it happen.

And for that, I’m grateful.

The Meaning of Death, Part 2 of Many: Motivation and Mid-Life Crises

“Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds”: Bringing Up Kids Without God

Greta Christina38 Comments

This one’s for everybody. But it’s especially for (a) godless parents, and (b) people who were brought up by godless parents.

It has to do with how to teach children about godlessness.

Argue
My parents were both agnostics. (A fact for which I am more grateful every week… whenever I read the sad and awful stories in the atheosphere about fights and rifts between atheists and their religious families. Both my blood relatives and my in-laws are non-religious, and while of course we have our conflicts, the fact that I’m a loud, outspoken atheist blogger isn’t one of them — in fact, it’s a source of family pride.)

Making_up_your_mind
But back to my parents. My dad actually became an atheist years before I did, my mom’s been dead for a long time so I don’t know what she’d be now — but when I was growing up, they were agnostics. And when it came to bringing us up, they were very much of the “let the kids make up their own minds about religion” camp. They were pretty clear about their own lack of belief — but they didn’t teach their non-belief to us in a dogmatic way; they exposed us to a certain amount of religion (occasional church with grandparents, mostly); and they made it clear that religion was something that was up to us to decide for ourselves.

All of which I’m grateful for.

But they also did something that I now think was a mistake. I’m sure it was well-intentioned, I can understand why they probably did it; but I do think it was a mistake.

They never explained to us why they didn’t believe in God.

Talking_with_kids
We barely discussed religion at all when I was growing up. (It’s not like it was a taboo topic or anything; it just rarely came up.) So I never really found out why my parents didn’t believe in God; what they had been taught as children, and why they left it behind. I knew they didn’t believe in God (they called themselves agnostic, but it was clearly the “you can’t be 100% sure of anything” version of agnosticism) — but I didn’t know why they didn’t. They never taught us that.

Crowleythothdeck
And I think that left me vulnerable to woo.

I’d picked up a natural resistance to conventional religion from my parents. But I didn’t have any natural resistance to Tarot cards, to reincarnation, to synchronicity, to trickster spirits, to the idea that the Universe arranged itself to teach me lessons about life.

Breakingthespell
Because while I wasn’t taught religious or spiritual beliefs, I also wasn’t taught critical thinking about religious or spiritual beliefs. I wasn’t taught about confirmation bias; about assuming the thing you’re trying to prove; about contorted apologetics and the human ability to rationalize just about any belief; about our tendency to see what we want/ hope/ expect to see; about our tendency to see patterns and intentions regardless of whether they’re there; about the problem with ideas that not only haven’t been tested but can’t be.

Capricorn
And so while I didn’t grow up believing in God, I also didn’t grow up understanding why belief in God — or Tarot, or astrology, or free will in subatomic particles, or whatever — was problematic. It took me years — many, many years — to figure out that, “God/ the soul/ etc. can’t be definitively disproven” didn’t mean, “It’s okay to believe anything I want.”

Years wasted believing an embarrassing assortment of stupid woo bullshit.

Dogma
Alas, I can’t ask my parents now what they were thinking back then, or why they did things the way they did. My mom has been dead for many years, and my dad’s stroke has left him pretty much incommunicado. But my guess would be that they didn’t want their godlessness to be dogmatic. They didn’t want us to be godless just because it was what they taught us. They wanted us to decide for ourselves.

All of which is admirable. All of which I get. I don’t think atheism should be taught to kids as if it were a fact they shouldn’t question, another true thing that your parents know and that you just have to trust. I think my parents were totally right about that.

Swimming_pool
But I also think that if you want kids to decide for themselves, you need to do more than just throw them in the deep end of the religion pool. I think that if you want kids to decide for themselves, you need to give them tools for critical thinking. I think it’s not enough to let kids make up their own minds about religion.

I think you have to teach them how to do that.

Brain_question_mark
But maybe there’s a fine line here. Maybe there’s no way to teach kids to think critically about religion without teaching them to be non-religious. Maybe there’s no way to teach kids, “It’s not okay to believe an idea that can never be tested” without teaching them, “It’s not okay to believe in religion.” And if you believe in letting kids make up their own minds about religion, I could see not wanting to do that.

So I’m curious. If you’re a godless parent, how do you handle it? If you were brought up by godless parents, how did they handle it — and how do you feel about it now? This is on my mind; I don’t have kids and don’t plan to, but I have kids in my life now, and I’m starting to think about it.

“Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds”: Bringing Up Kids Without God

When Life Hands You Cliches…

Greta Christina8 Comments

Life handed us lemons this week.

Lemons_2

In a very literal way. We get a weekly delivery of organic groceries and produce from Planet Organics (a service that we love, btw), and normally we custom order to get the particular produce we want. But this week I forgot to custom order, so instead we got the produce that they picked for us.

Which included four lemons.

Lemons that we didn’t really want or have any use for. Also, we have a lemon tree in our backyard, so they were superfluous as well as being unwanted.

So there was really only one thing I could do:

I made lemonade.

Lemonade

Hot honey lemonade, to be precise. What with the weather being so cold and all.

I mean, what the hell else was I supposed to do? Life had handed me lemons. I don’t really see that I had a choice here. The opportunity was just too perfect.

When life hands you lemons, you damn well make lemonade.

And when life hands you cliches, you gas on about it in your blog.

When Life Hands You Cliches…

A Feminist Pioneer in the Digging Industries: My Past Life Diagnosis

Greta Christina2 Comments

Very silly meme up on Pharyngula, one that tells you who you were in your most recent past life based on the day you were born. Several of the Pharyngula commenters got to be prostitutes born in 750, but I got stuck with this:

Shovels

I don’t know how you feel about it, but you were female in your last earthly incarnation.You were born somewhere in the territory of modern USA North-West around the year 1850. Your profession was that of a digger, undertaker.
Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Person with huge energy, good in planning and supervising. If you were just garbage-man, you were chief garbage-man.
The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation:
You are bound to learn to understand other people and to meet all difficulties of life with a joyful heart. You should help others by bringing them a spirit of joy.
Do you remember now?

So let me get this straight:

I was a female gravedigger or ditchdigger born in the Pacific Northwest in 1850.

Hm. Didn’t think there were too many of those back then. Even now, I believe the grave- and ditch-digging industries are fairly male-dominated.

It does suggest an enticing second career, though.

But then we have this:

“You should help others by bringing them a spirit of joy.”

Wouldn’t that fit better with the prostitutes born in 750?

I’m just sayin’, is all.

A Feminist Pioneer in the Digging Industries: My Past Life Diagnosis

The First Good One

Greta Christina2 Comments

This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog. Please note: This piece talks a lot, in some detail, about my personal sex life and sexual history. Family members and others who don’t want to read that, please don’t.

Say_anything
We talk a lot about The First Time. As a society we’re a little bit fixated on it. Losing your virginity, and the person you lost it with — it’s a rite of passage that we’ve made important to the point of making it a fetish.

But as rites of passage go, the loss of virginity can be dicey. It was for me, anyway. Sure it was important; but it was also awkward, depressing, and anticlimactic. Emphasis on the “anticlimactic.”

And I think that experience is not uncommon.

So I want to talk about something else. I don’t want to talk about the first person I had sex with

I want to talk about the first person I had good sex with.

And on the wild off-chance that he’s reading this, I want to say Thank you.

His name was Adrian. I honestly don’t remember his last name, although I do remember that he was Number Four (at least according to how I was defining “sex” at the time). He wasn’t a boyfriend, or even a friend; he was just someone I smiled at on the street who stopped to talk, someone I had ice cream with that afternoon and went home with that evening.

It could have been disastrous. I look back on it sometimes and think, “What the hell was I thinking, having sex with a guy I picked up off the street?” He could have been an axe murderer.

But he wasn’t. He was amazing.

He was the first person I had sex with who liked to experiment and try lots of different things, just for the fun of trying them.

He was the first person I had sex with who was playful about it; who didn’t think being passionate meant being deadly serious at all times, and who was willing and even eager to find humor and laughter in what we were doing.

He was the first person I had sex with who was sexually knowledgeable without being arrogant, pushy, or assuming that his greater knowledge meant that we should do things his way. He knew a lot about sex and sexual variations, but if I didn’t want to try something or if something wasn’t working, he accepted it with good grace and moved on. And he was the first person I had sex with who was just as happy about trying the things I wanted to try as he was about the things he wanted to try.

He was the first person I had sex with who made sure that I was having a good time. Not just that I was coming — I’d had at least one sex partner before who tried to make sure that I came — but that I was feeling happy and relaxed, excited and curious, safe and taken care of.

He was the first person I had sex with who didn’t make me feel like the fact that I was having sex with him meant either (a) that I was a skank, or (b) that we were in love. He was the first casual sex partner I had who made me feel respected, and who acted like my horniness and eagerness were appreciated.

He was the first person I had sex with who wanted to keep having sex — and having it and having it and having it — even after he’d come.

And when I look back on it now, I think he had a much greater impact on my sexuality than the guy I lost my virginity to.

Because after Adrian, I knew. I knew what was possible. I had my sexual ups and downs after this, of course; but after Adrian, I knew what the ups could be like… and I knew that the downs didn’t have to be that way. I’m sure that door would have opened for me eventually — I’m a very sexually motivated person, I wasn’t going to put up with bad sex for long — but it opened early for me, and that made a difference.

And I’ve always wanted to say “thank you.”

University_of_chicago_seal
Adrian, if you’re reading this: You were a grad student at the University of Chicago, and in the summer of 1979 you met a girl on the street, a girl who had just graduated high school and was about to start college. She smiled at you and you stopped to chat; you bought her ice cream and invited her home; and you fucked her brains out in sixteen different ways over the course of about three days.

You asked if I’d pose like a Penthouse photo that you liked, next to the photo so you could see us both, and I said yes. You asked if I wanted to try being spanked, and I said no (a decision I’ve always regretted, by the way). We played out a rape fantasy that I’d asked to try, and I got freaked out, and you immediately picked up on that and backed off. And we just did it, with me on top and you on top and from behind, in the bed and on your desk and in the bathroom, with our mouths and our hands and your cock and my cunt, until the skin of your dick was rubbed raw and I could barely walk.

You were great. It was almost thirty years ago, and I still remember you, better than I remember most of the people I’ve had sex with.

Thanks.

The First Good One