Does altruism exist?

Is there such a thing as altruism? It’s an old question, with a contact high from so many dorm room debates and jittery after too much time in coffee shops, but I’m wondering if you can help me with it.

All of the earnest high schoolers writing “Volunteer work in Costa Rica” on their college applications, remembering the joy of going to that beautiful country, having so much fun with their friends, and helping those people build that library. Are they inspiring examples of how the precious few lucky enough to be born into sufficient affluence and power can help share the gifts of their birth? Are they ambassadors towards a better tomorrow? Are they exploitative colonists using the Third World for their own gain?

The kids were doing just fine at smiling before we ever
showed up... But hopefully we helped with a few more?

I remember an Australian I met a couple weeks before K and I went to Africa to lend a hand. With that beloved Australian gift for plain talk, he said with no malice or scorn “You’re not going there to help those kids. You’re going there because it makes you feel good to do it.” He leaned back to wait for my response.

I wasn’t sure what to say. “For starters, I don’t know how much help we’ll really be, but I hope we can do a little something useful. And yes, I do expect it will feel good. But I don’t think that invalidates anything. I think it’s okay for someone to feel good about helping others.”

Me, in dire need of a haircut, trying to be helpful by
rewiring the toaster oven.

He nodded and bought me a coffee the next morning, but the issue of exactly who was benefitting the most never did sit easily in me, and it feels extravagant and uncomfortable to use the word “altruism” when talking about myself.

Tomorrow I have an interview about a position teaching English to refugees. I’m not going to lie, a big part of why I want the job is to feel like I’m doing something useful, and to get out of my stale routine. I will benefit from the classes. Will they? I’m not sure; it remains to be seen if I can be an effective teacher in those circumstances. What if they don’t learn much? Does it matter if I feel good about helping? Are we all just using each other? (I look forward to your comments.)

Where to find, where to miss, and how to kill the divine

My view that morning

The coarse wool of my djellaba was scratchier than the sand blowing against my bare legs. Maybe the other way around. One does not customarily wear shorts in the desert, but I welcomed the contact, the tactile connection to this landscape where the life stayed hidden and the death stood obvious. The sun was still under, but the wind was up, slowly burying me in Sahara. The steady movement, as I stayed immobile, reminded me of Pacific beaches, where outgoing waves slowly sift you into the sand, a memory from this place’s opposite twin, the sensation’s antipodal kin.

Everyone else still slept while I climbed the tallest dune around our sheltering valley to watch the Saharan sunrise. Seated on the ridge, as the last of the stars dissolved in the growing blue and the curves of this sere place consented to my eyes, I felt an unexpected stirring.

Of course churches can be beautiful.
Reminiscent of the divine even.

I’ve long known myself as a disciple of the ocean and devotee of the redwood forests where my soul was born and my body grew up, places where I felt the presence of the divine far more than I ever had in any manmade coffin of stone or wood, but now, here, on the other side of our galactic rock, I had found another holy place, built of dry textured grains, saturated in burning and freezing, the dust of bones from the places where humans began, but had abused into infertility. And it was undeniably holy.

On a sand dune in Morocco, as in a surf swell in Monterey or a sylvan glade in Mendocino, it was clear to me, illuminated by more than the morning sun, that religion is an improper response to the divine.

Beautiful churches, reminiscent of the divine

The divine is fundamentally unknowable, and religion claims to write it down. The divine is essentially personal, and religion wants all to abide by a standard doctrine. The divine is eternally changing, and religion tries to spike it to a stationary cross. In the end, that's what religion does to the divine: it crucifies it. Impaled on nails of dogma, bound to a fixed position, delineated in an X marks the spot. But the divine does not work that way. The divine is cosmic wind, ocean currents, spring growth and autumn shedding, and now, I added, the migration of Saharan dunes.

I looked down from my moment’s seat atop a slow-sliding deity at the camp below, where my fellow short-lived humans gathered, and thought That is a church. A mosque, a synagogue, a temple, a cathedral, a tent: these are where we upright monkeys find mutual support, shelter, and community. These things are important. Crucial. Beautiful. Even holy, in their human way. They are to be respected, enjoyed, and cherished.

Beautiful churches

We gather together in these places, seeking to know the divine, but over time we grow fatigued of looking at mystery, which never seems to change, never speaks, never seems to notice us, and eventually our vision shortens, and we find ourselves mistaking the setting for the goal.

When we have forgotten the point so completely as to think that our rituals and forms ARE the divine? When we take that confusion as a justification for violence, spiritual or physical, against other seekers (and we are all seekers, even and perhaps especially the Atheists and Agnostics) that is when we have taken a misconception and made it truly blasphemous.

It is not blasphemy to disagree, it’s when we inflict that disagreement on others.

Gaza

This all seemed very clear, in the quiet howling wind of a Saharan morning, and it was easy to think I was the only one listening. But I was not. Talking heads encourage me to believe that Islam and Christianity are at war, but they are not. Some Muslims and some Christians are, minorities both, but those are the squabbles of the sleeping, the martyring of the misled. Religions are just windows, and fanatics can only break them.

We're all just standing in the same tent, trying to understand the sensual slopes outside, the benevolent menace and looming placidity of an incomprehensible power outside. Some might push and shove, thinking they have the best views, telling others what to see, but in the end, we need to leave the confines of the tent and walk the slopes for ourselves.

Yikes, don't read this one unless you are really bored.

I was lying in bed just now, full of that Thai food from the last post (the one with the red curry burps) and was thinking about regrets.  Or maybe Disney.  Or maybe large automobiles, I don’t remember, but however it came about, I remembered driving through Africa this summer with K and our friend Lisa.

K and I disagree on some things, but demographically we are pretty darn similar.  We have interesting conversations of course, but we share enough assumptions that there are a number of areas we don’t really wander into.

At work I have conversations with M (look at me, being all circumspect and shit) who was a cop in Detroit before serving in Afghanistan for a year.  A conversation about gun ownership or US foreign policy is more interesting with him than with…I dunno…a mirror.  (You get the point.  It’s late, okay?)

It seems clear to me that one of the fundamental problems with the US and the world today is that we are unable to have actual productive and respectful discussions with each other.  I doubt I would be able to be in a room with Sarah Palin for more than 20 seconds without having an aneurism or breaking something.

The word “argument” immediately brings to mind shouting and airborne spittle, instead of exchange of opinions.  Saying something like “one could make an argument that Top Gun is the most homoerotic movie of all time” sounds almost out-dated in it’s use of the word to refer to simply an interesting notion, not adrenaline-based emotion.  (I am wilfully ignoring the awareness that anything touching on homoeroticism will inevitably rile up certain folks cuz I’m being optimistic like that.)

Shit I am off track.  The point was that it is good and right and necessary to talk to people with different fundamental ideas than oneself.  That’s what I meant to say, and it’s late enough that I just don’t feel like editing, okay?  Fair warning.  (Albeit too late.)

One of these different-assumptions-people for me is Lisa (from way back in Africa and the beginning of this mess) who wholeheartedly embraces a certain zone of Christianity and its associate edicts.  Not to simplify her entire belief system into a single demographic label (because that is what pissed me off in the first place) but in a blog already long enough that I don’t actually expect anyone to read it, it serves the purpose.

During those hours and hours of driving across Botswana we could have been talking about any number of interesting topics, but instead we just sort of zoned out most of the time, then the frustrations and irritations of having spent days of low blood-sugar in an automobile with the same people further limited discourse so that when the topic of Disney came up one evening, I had zero energy or enthusiasm for expressing my opinions, and I didn’t particularly care about the 1% representation of them.  I just wanted to enjoy the sunset and keep a watch for mosquitoes on my ankles.

Lying in bed just now I was thinking about Disney, it’s portrayals of yellow-jacket-shaped females (are they generally wearing Victorian intestine-crushing corsets below their relatively voluminous bosoms and insanely large Maybelline eyes?) or its reliance on tired racial stereotypes (that stuff about all the “Arab-looking” guys in Aladdin are the villains and the Tyler-Perry-esque one dimensionality of black people) or the possible links between Disney/ABC (www.disneyabctv.com) and the military-industrial complex (way too big of a topic to mention off-handedly, but in a couple minutes of googling I show $14,598,158 in contracts since 2000 between Disney and the Department of Defence & Homeland Security at http://www.usaspending.gov/) but now I realize there are a million-and-one term papers about each of these things, and it really isn’t the point.

Not that I have a point.  It’s 23:37 and I have been typing this up for the better part of an hour on top of the dirty laundry hamper in the bathroom to avoid disturbing K, who has a cold and is having trouble sleeping tonight, and the only seat available is the Porcelain Throne and my thighs are cold and sore and when I stretch my back it sounds like chewing gravel and I really don’t remember what I thought might be worth getting out of bed for, and like I said I don’t feel like editing or worrying about coherency, because my true purpose is to make myself tired enough to sleep and you just had the bad luck to stumble into my midnight stream of consciousness.

So yeah.  I wish I had had better conversations with Lisa, and I suspect Disney is a massive modern octopus of corporations with tentacles in unsavoury things (Gasp, right?  Who’d a-thunk it?) and they could do a better job of not perpetuating our culture’s bullshit and I think, judging by the ache in my upper thighs, that I am ready for bed.

Damn, and I didn’t even get to the part about my other coworker and race identity.  But I don’t have the energy for the disclaimers so maybe we’ll talk about it some other time.

Man I love Thai food.  Man I love food.  Did I mention I am trying to plan a trip to Thailand and radically alter my life again?

Good night.