As far as I have seen, people are naturally self-interested—given appropriate direction, I believe this is a good thing. We protect from danger both our physical bodies and the fundamental ideologies that give our Selves meaning and worth. If a part of our identity is threatened, we tend to band together with individuals who share a common endangered trait to effectively protect everyone who is being persecuted. In such a situation, we are not thinking altruistically—we are thinking selfishly: I feel threatened and so does my neighbor. Therefore, in order to protect myself (and perhaps my ideology, which my neighbor subscribes to as well) I must join forces with my neighbor.
That bond, though perhaps unfortunately born from powerful fear, expands one’s circle of moral obligation to include other people who serve as extensions of the self. Looking at the aftermath of September 11 in the United States as an example, American citizens felt threatened and palpably came together in a surge of nationalistic spirit. The atmosphere was one of greater kinship between Americans and resolution to protect one another from the external force that threatened both our physical wellbeing and our Western ideology. Essentially, we became particularists. We concentrated our efforts on making this country more stable and recognized the importance of Americans standing by one another.
Yet, only a few years later, we quickly forgot ourselves as a collective and returned to being individuals who, however naively, believe that we are just like everyone else in the world. We again have the privilege of living in a relatively protected nation in which our bodies and our identities are not constantly being challenged. It seems that universalism, or loving everyone in the world to the same degree, is an ideology only available to those who live in nearly complete security. Conscientious citizens look at the world and see all the pressing problems that exist in distant countries and ask themselves whom they should help. It is as if individuals have the option of closing their eyes, pointing to a spot on a map and, upon opening their eyes, packing a bag and understanding the situation with enough clarity to make a massive positive change. While we wish that this exercise worked in real life, we (at least intellectually) recognize its impossibility.
On Saturday, as part of the Social Justice Leadership Conference (SJLC), I listened to Kennedy Odede speak about his founding of the Shining Hope for Communities project in his hometown of Kibera, Kenya. He articulated the details of how to make a project successful, explaining a system used by residents of Kibera to generate income and maintain the school, which involved selling chickens and utilizing specific skills of community members. Only someone like Kennedy, who understands the particular conditions of the community, could spearhead such a project. Furthermore, there was no question in Kennedy’s mind regarding whom his project is meant to help. Kibera is in danger, and, being a resident of the neighborhood, he holds a responsibility to promote its improvement.
As I listened to Kennedy, I thought about what SJLC keynote speaker Geoffrey Canada said in his speech on education Friday evening: there are so many problems in America, right in our own neighborhoods, that we don’t need to look far to find ways we can help. Canada, much like Kennedy, found his inspiration for founding his school in his own troubled childhood. They similarly view their neighborhoods as extensions of their Selves so much so that inaction would be an affront to their fundamental identities. Their communities are threatened by social inequalities, poor public policy, and bad education, and they have a particular moral responsibility to act.
I found it interesting how Canada brought us, people who do not inherently share his same identity (and thus commitment to the people of his extended self), to invest in his project. He asserted that the state of education in Harlem was troubling to us as Americans, and if we love America and its purported values, then we must work to bring better education to poor neighborhoods. Not out of selflessness, but out of selfishness—that in fact these children are extensions of our Selves too, and so fall under our own moral responsibility.
We tend to think that primarily caring for ourselves is a negative trait that we must strive to overcome. By donating time and money to charities, we try to convince ourselves that we are giving completely altruistically. I do not think this is necessary. Perhaps we should really be cultivating our natural tendency for particularized relationships to recognize the problems in our own communities and work to rectify them. In order to sustain ourselves in the hard task of working toward social justice, we need to be so personally invested that giving up would be to give up on ourselves—and, being as selfish as we are, we will not stand for that.
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