The Problem with Dogooderism
A Critique
Let’s start with a first principle: We don’t know how we got here.
I mean, the historians tell us a little bit of the lead-up, but they seem to only know a slice, and they always seem to be disagreeing about the details.
The science types tell us there was a big bang, and then they drop the mic, as if that answers even one of the interesting questions about our existence. They’re quick to add that just because something banged and then we started breathing does not mean this was all an accident. Got it? We’re also told that life forms evolve, which seems fairly-obvious, and that we, like the animals (and probably the plants, too) are motivated by survival. This last last point is highly-underrated in our endless, sociological explorations of human behavior, but it seems far more valuable as a psychological observation than as any explanation for how we got here.
The Christians tell us that God made the earth and human beings in seven days. The Genesis story ought to be read widely, in my opinion, but one problem it produces is that it seems to lay the blame for existential problems at the feet of…human beings. Rather than, you know, the God who we’re told put us here. This is a curious cause-and-effect, given that we did not choose this life and that we’re also being told that God is both all-powerful and knowing.
Norman Mailer’s answer to that in the interview book, On God, is that God is more like an artist, always creating, but sometimes failing, sometimes moving on to the next project before finishing the one at hand, and so on. God, in other words, makes mistakes like the rest of us. It’s an intriguing hypotheses, but it’s likely to go over like a screeching chalkboard in church.
I have not been shy on this blog/newsletter about airing my complaints about 1990s and 2000s Evangelical Christianity, but I do still believe in God on most days, which is to say that I think that if there was a big bang that resulted in planets and grass and trees and dinosaurs and eventually fish and lions and human beings with capacities for sex and language…there must have been some sort of Artist involved, no? I have no idea where said Artist came from or how Such A Being came to exist in the first place. I would also say that I’ve had some pretty interesting spiritual experiences, some of which hinted at God, though the relationship of those events to the rest of life has been plenty confusing enough as to not be staking any cultish claims on them.
The most formal of religious folk—and actually I think we’re all “religious,” meaning we develop habitual rhythms and habits that come out of our metaphysical guesses, whatever they may be—seem to want to be able to stop thinking beyond preferred religious texts, if they can even agree upon how to interpret them (and usually, they can’t).
So given this astonishing amount of ambiguity in the lives we lead, how in the world do we get so confidently to morality, to the “shoulds” we so often evangelize to anyone who will listen? One answer to that has to be that we feel—that we have a physiology somewhat in common is thankfully something we seem to mostly be able to agree upon—though one’s person’s disgust can be different from another person’s, and perhaps that has something to do with the uniqueness of individual experience, and/or maybe we’re just inclined differently by temperament. There’s some interesting academic work in this direction that explores the psychology of partisan differences within the field of political science.
The pop-Buddhist thinks this dilemma is solved by the lowest-hanging-fruit of “Do no harm,” though any serious undertaking of that mantra gets to the reality that how we define “harm” is going to be both important and difficult, and then of course we’re going to get around to dealing with the many conflicts that prioritize undoing Harm X while causing Harm Y, and now we have discovered trade-offs, ta-da!
Does this mean that I’m not a moralist? Well, Postmodernism has certainly done its work on this soon-to-be middle-aged Millennial, but even I cannot be fully anti-moralist. I remember many years ago being in a reading group of sorts—we were exploring a passage in the Old Testament, actually—when someone I liked and respected in the group claimed that, ‘There is no right or wrong, only better and worse.’ Or something like that.
I am not always a very patient disagreer, as people who know me know, and so naturally I looked at him, and said: “Rape?”
Silence.
I could have just as easily said: “Nazi Germany?”
Or: “Chattel slavery?”
There are, it seems, some absolutest “Though shall nots” we mostly agree upon. Not to mention that lives that leave legacies behind, ones we admire and remember, seem to stumble their way to some kind of fire and mission, whatever it may be or come from.
Even so, I would like to make the case that the aforementioned moral no’s are the easy ones, and that most dilemmas are more complicated than we care to admit. Some of them are even just preferences that we try to force upon each other to soothe our own fragile identities.
Take the poor, single mother, for example, who shoplifts. Obviously we need laws against stealing; they are, in general, a good idea. But do I blame her for the survival instinct she acts out, on her own behalf and on that of her children? No, I do not.
Let’s keep going with more examples. For years I have been that person who shows up to the grocery store with canvas bags rather than partake in the “evil” of more plastic bags. Until recently, that is, when I learned how many times a canvas bag has to be used (about 7,000) in order for it to become a net environmental win. Turns out that canvas bags require a lot more energy to make than plastic one do. This may not be a total slam dunk in terms of resolving the dilemma, but it’s at least enough to make me think maybe the convenience of not lugging those gross things around all the time is a legitimate value to consider.
To go in a different direction while making a similar point, there was recently an important, but barely-noticed publication of a meta-analysis study (“Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses”) put out by the reputable Cochrane Library. The study explored the efficacy of health and political interventions for respiratory viruses, including Covid-19. Here’s a sentence pulled right out of the “Main Results” section: “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.” Wait, what?! All that confident bullying and righteousness harassment…for what, exactly?
It should be noted that if people want to shop with canvas grocery bags while wearing a mask, they should be able to do so. Their choice in doing so is little inconvenience and certainly no “harm” to someone like me. But the moralism that got attached to these behaviors—no matter how short-term—is a different matter. It says something important about us. Why is it that we’re so quick to anoint cultural trends? I suspect because they make us feel righteous more than because the acts themselves actually make the world better.
Our dogooderisms may start as safety concerns—survival again—but at our worst, they almost always devolve into battles for control. We develop sophisticated rhetoric about the altruism of collaboration, but really we’re just trying to tamp everything down, to convince people to get in line with our preferred stance or behavior. And what we invariably tamp down the most is our ability to feel and desire, to try things and takes risks, our ability to experience, and receive, life.
“Sacrifice” is a word that our most martyr-like dogooderism throws around like candy at a parade. But why are are we so convinced that giving has to be an “expense” to the giver? Why is it so difficult for us to imagine giving that is mutual, among equals—perhaps not in function but at least in value? When I choose my best “yeses” and “no’s,” in other words, and really mean them, I give with an awareness and perhaps even an acceptance of life’s uncertainty, and yet the processes of the commitments themselves flow as much inward as they do outward. I’m not giving anything “up” by being who I am, and my energy flow reflects this.
What is better, morally-speaking: playing the piano wholeheartedly or feeding the homeless out of moral duty laced with resentment? I know my answer. “When I run, I feel (God’s) pleasure,” says the Olympian Eric Liddell in the film, Chariots of Fire. It’s the same difference, I suspect, that Jesus was pointing out in his exchange with Mary and Martha.
And so I’d like to offer up an alternative to all our attempts at doing and being “good,” which are all too often thinly-veiled conformity campaigns: If we can just get everyone to agree and to act the exact same way on this very-important matter then we can finally make the world better.
How about, instead, we shift the goal to something more like being or becoming more alive? More open, more willing to feel and experience life. That’s a place where love can break out, and without it, as Paul writes in 1st Corinthians, life is like a clanging symbol. When aliveness is the direction, goodness can rightly take its place as a byproduct.