ALTRUISM THE POWER OF COMPASSION BOOK REVIEW

Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard is a hugely popular and esteemed read.

What does he mean by altruism? Here is the answer he accepts:

For the altruist, the only thing that matters is the goal for the other person. It is not about you or how you feel or what you desire. Kristen Monroe (University of Irvine, California) spoke of how we must mean one thing only by the altruism word - doing things to help others and expecting or looking for nothing back and taking a risk of loss for ourselves to help that person. Good intentions are not enough - the goal of how you are supposed to help must be very clear and the clearer the better.

This is actually commanding you to do good and not just to do it but to do it and make the choice to keep any benefit to yourself out of your mind. It does not say why it is wrong to help x so you can feel you are a hero. We are never told the why. Altruism becomes a matter of being commanded by some authority - typically a human one which is why it backfires so much!  Altruism tells you to help for the other person needs it but anybody thinking they can just command altruism only leads to people wanting to feel they are obeying a law and are good.  That is not altruism.  If a person needs help you don't care what authority says you should or shouldn't help for it is not about you showing how great you are by keeping a law.

Divine authority is no help. There are those who say they have the authority to speak for God. It's back to human authority again. This is nothing more than roundabout dependence on human authority.

To help the goal of the other may help the other but it is still about helping the goal. The goal is not the person. It's not very personal or human. And why their goal and not yours? Goal is goal. If altruism is about the other person this is not altruism.

Pity can pose very well as altruism. But it usually is just a feeling and no action to help is taken. It is a game to look caring. Pity is hypocrisy for if John was suffering we would not take the suffering if we could instead of John on the basis that somebody has to take it. We would not say, "Better for me to take the suffering for John if I can for he does not want it and at least unlike him I can consent to it. Better to suffer out of choice than not to." Pity is pity.  If you stand by and not help while feeling "sorry" or if you help, it is by luck that you help.  Pity is about you not the other.

The book argues that the suggestion that human nature is just selfish protects itself from evidence that it might be wrong by explaining away altruistic actions. For example, the soldier may die for his comrades for he wants to be thought of as a hero. [If an atheist soldier did this, maybe he feels there is a life after death or a God. I said feels not believe. Even his thinking God would approve of him would mean he was seeking the reward of being considered great. You cannot really show if any hero really was as sacrificing as it seems].  The view that human nature is mainly selfish though not entirely cannot be refuted by any example of altruism for mainly does not mean always.  It may be the truth is pretty close to always.  Thus there is no valid evidence or rational difficulty with deciding that human nature is more or less about what it can get for itself.

If somebody has a theory or doctrine, in this case about if humans are naturally self-centred, selfish or sacrificing, and there is no way to show it is false or unlikely then it is clearly not just unscientific but anti-scientific. It is an ideology. It is about serving the idea not the truth.  Observation shows that human nature clearly does selfish things, particularly it will not speak out very well against the harm done to the innocent, and it does this most of the time.  The good deeds often hide far from noble instincts.  You will never see the real motives except occasionally.  If you were just assuming that human nature is mainly unselfish even if it may be a very confused way of going about being unselfish and protecting that from evidence that would be ideology too.  The same can be said if you assume that human nature is mainly spiritual or about a desire for God even if it is not conscious or detected.

Clearly ideology is bad, that is certain. It is self absorbed in a bad way.

If we need ideology to decide if human nature is mainly selfish or non-selfish that is actually proof that we should assume the former! To use a bad thing to show people are caring and genuine is proof that they cannot really be regardless of how they act.

He asks an important core question: Are we selfish because we respond to our own desire to help others? Are we selfish then?

Many say yes.  But he answers in poor English and with a terrible quote,

"According to this argument, we are selfish because we act out of our own desires: when we act freely, in the end we do only what we want; consequently we are selfish.  In other words, in order to be altruistic, an action should not have been desired by the agent who performs it, which is absurd.  Norman Brown, a philosopher at Cambridge University, refutes this argument, explaining that it 'amounts simply to saying that a man is motivated by his own desires, a statement which is irredeemably trivial; for it is not praiseworthy but logically impossible to be motivated by someone else's desire, seeing that a desire is just the agent's tendency towards action'."

This prose is so flowery that it is clearly hiding something.  I'd write it this way.

"Selfish is if one chooses to care only about self.  Self-centred is if we have a condition that makes us too much ourselves.  If we are not made selfish by nature, we could be made self-centred.  If we act because we want to, and we act freely, in the end we do only what we want so we are self-centred if not selfish.  For an act to be altruistic and about the other person, we should not desire to do it.  Are we arguing that because you cannot have a desire that is in somebody else, and because the desire that leads you to act for the person is yours that you are making it about you?" 

Surely being motivated by your own desire does not mean your desire is about you when you benefit another with it?  The argument is absurd.

We are creatures that need to act.  Thus doing something is its own reward.  If you need to see, then looking at something, anything, is doing something for you.  So we act because we are creatures who act and it is about that and it just happens to be bad or good or whatever.

Is your desire to please yourself by doing something in competition with the person you help?  This looks silly for the person is really helped by you.  But is it silly?  Giving a bride a wedding ring does not mean you are marrying her.  What if it is acting?  Back to the person needing help.  You would not do them a kindness without the desire.  Not wanting to do it and doing it means you want to do it enough under the circumstances and enough to act.

If you say yes he says you are being ridiculous for it amounts to saying that if you don't want to help and the more you don't want to do it then that is all the better if you assist them. Is that really ridiculous? What are you if you have the desire but act not because of it? You are taking care to avoid being deceived that it is more about you than you seem to experience.

Do we not admire the oppressor who suddenly forces himself or herself to change just for a minute to help us? You have wants and needs that are hard to shift and are just there. Overcoming them even if just for a second to help others makes you a hero as much as you would be if you had to break out of a burning house with a child. It may be your fault the straitjacket of self-interested emotion is there but it's not your fault that you cannot get rid of it instantly. You can't just make the past vanish in an instant.

Acting but not out of a desire to help that is there or acting in spite of an urge that makes it all about you are both altruism. The latter is the strongest most determined and most heroic form. He wants you to answer no to his question and thus shows he is not really a promoter of altruism.

We see now how judgemental his understanding of "altruism" actually is. It is not the loving thing it pretends to be. It is not altruistic towards the person who fights themselves to help and who may use a superhuman effort. It denigrates that person and by extension the people they help.

The reason the feeling you want to help is encouraged is that everybody knows there will be few good works if any done without it. That shows the manipulative side of the altruism preachers. The other reason is that you can feel you did not act on a feeling to help and be wrong. We suspect that we all in fact act on some feeling.  We want to get some bit of self-fulfillment from acting.

Suppose you will not help unless you feel like it. Many see us as self-centred rather than selfish there. They say self-centred is you making it about you but selfish is what you would be if you were helping them in a way that makes you see them as inferior or beneath you. So self-centred is close to selfish and selfish is just approaching others in a way that has no true respect for them. The problem with self-centred is that though it allows for respect for others that respect is diminished. If you and the other are equally valuable then you have lost sight of that and see your own value only.

It is argued that helping because you feel like it and want the pleasure and discipline of doing so means you have to listen to what the desire is saying and act without acting for the desire.  But then you act for another desire, the desire of self-mastery.  Self-mastery may not look like a reward but it is for who wants to be controlled by passions bigger than themselves?

In other words you do want to help for your emotional buzz but you bypass that temptation and help for the person. That takes huge self discipline. It is about trying to make it about the other person not what you desire or feel. In this you end up doing it for your sense of self-control so you end up doing it for a DIFFERENT DESIRE OR FEELING!  You cannot win.

Other critics say you can only be motivated by your own desire to help and not by the other person's desire to be helped. This seems to define motivation as desire but it's not the same thing. You can be motivated to do something that is necessary but which you absolutely hate doing.
If I am motivated to help x for myself or desire to help x for myself in both cases there is self-interest. One is about my motivation. The other is about my desire. X is an instrument. Motivation self-interest and desire self-interest are self-interest.

A tendency to act and a desire to do it are not the same thing. A motivation is a reason for acting and is more about seeing what needs to be done not about how you feel about it.

Joseph Butler said that human nature cannot be pure selfish for whether you wish good for others or bad in both cases you are still interested in others and what is going to happen to them. So even the vindictive person is thinking of others - just not in the right or best way.

But since when is me thinking about my fat bank account showing I am not selfishly hoarding up money? The way I think is what makes me selfish!
If there is no good then nobody can do it to me. The good I want cannot exist unless I and the rest of humanity let it or make it. So if I do good to others is that because I want to make good and further it? Is my motive that I am doing it for me by doing it for another? A selfish person may give John medicine so that the medicine can be medicine for if there is no medicine or it does not work the person will not have it available for herself or himself. Good in a sense does good for us. Is that what it is all about? Yes. We all know that. So no matter how unselfish you are, you are trying to make and channel good. ME ME ME is there underneath it all.

As for the rest of the book, it is about how terrible things happen if people are not altruistic.  Well even he would agree that if there are altruists there are not enough of them and we are still here.  Such arguments are just from bullies who want you to affirm that altruism is good and valid out of fear.