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October 2000

Flee from Fleet!
Recent mergers harm consumers.
by Shai Sachs

The Death of Winter
Global warming: scarier than you thought.
by Julia Silvis

Napster Got My Gnuts
The mp3 debate gets out of hand.
by Brad Hershbein

Talkin' $acrifice
Americans don't appreciate public service.
by Nikhil Jaikumar

Feelin' Important!
PERSPECTIVE's voter registration guide for Election 2000.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

Introspective
Starvation Chic
by Liz Thornberry

Salmagundi

Scraps

Backpage
Scooterdo's (and don'ts)
by Julia Silvis

This summer I worked at a medical lab, which every week killed about a dozen rats, using them for neurological research. Following scientific custom, we referred to the rats as being "sacrificed." This terminology worked its way into our common parlance; I remember discussing, the fur industry one day, over lunch. One of my lab mates was lamenting the way animals are killed with leg hold traps and concluded with, "Yeah, I wish the minks and foxes could be ‘sacrificed’ more humanely." Another girl who worked in my lab suggested that the term ‘sacrifice’ for her evoked images of Baal-worshippers cutting the throats of helpless animals.

The word "sacrifice," then, connotes a variety of things to different people. I wonder how many people, when hearing the term, see it in its broadest sense—the sense of voluntarily giving up something important to us so that others may benefit.

Silence on Sacrifice

Sacrifice is not a term that’s commonly used in our everyday discourse, or in the language of our politicians, who seem to think that appeals to people’s self-interest can win them more votes than appeals to their consciences or their ideals of fairness. Though to some extent politicians may be telling us what we want to hear, it’s worth remembering that campaigns are a two-way street, and that what politicians offer us does affect what we think about and what we decide to vote for. Our leaders seem less and less willing to ask people to give up their money, their time, or their comforts for the sake of less fortunate people or nations. Among all the world’s net donors of foreign aid, we give the least as a proportion of our income, and much of the aid we do give flows largely from strategic, not humanitarian, considerations.

Even within America, our lives and our political discourse have come increasingly to revolve around self-interest rather than altruism. Annual charity donations from the average household, in the midst of a supposed economic boom, have actually decreased by 225 dollars since 1989. Our prospective president has set the example for us in this regard; in 1997 Gore and his wife donated 353 dollars to charity, out of an income of almost $200,000.

I don’t think this means that America is an inherently selfish nation. On the contrary, many Americans still do contribute significantly to worthy causes, and 93 million Americans volunteer for social service every year. Still, our society doesn’t strongly encourage the ethic of sacrifice, nor does our media select as its heroes those people who do choose to give up pleasure and comfort for the service of others.

The problem with this - leaving the choice to donate one’s money, time or labor solely up to the individual - is that the desires to gratify oneself and to be altruistic often coexist, and too often the first turns out to be stronger. I think it would be much easier for most of us to overcome our inertia and discipline ourselves to be activist and socially concerned if there is some sort of social pressure on us, even if this pressure takes the form of unenforceable "expectations." I first became involved in athletics and community service in high school because these things were (to a degree) compulsory; and by the end of my last year, they’d become a part of who I was as a person. But I doubt I would ever have explored these things had I been ‘free’ to do whatever I wanted throughout my teenage years, or if I’d relied solely on immediate self-satisfaction as my only guide.

What Here??

According to the social anthropologist Mona Rosendahl, in Cuba sacrifice is viewed as one of the most important moral qualities that a person can display. "Sacrifice is seen as something commendable in itself. This can mean being disciplined and doing voluntary work, but also by attending [political] meetings [or] surviving with minimal consumer goods." To realize this ideal of giving up one’s time, effort and comfort to help address the needs of others, Cuba has put into effect an effective voluntary service program. Adults from varying professions are also asked to contribute their time to tasks such as sweeping up the streets, construction, or picking coffee during the harvest season. They aren’t required to perform this service, though they may receive rewards such as the chance to buy goods inexpensively. One might argue that extending privileges to those who do volunteer work detracts from pure altruism that such altruism is the result of bribery, not free choice. The argument might also be made that in a society with as many restrictions on public free expression and anti-government activity as Cuba, people may volunteer for service out of fear that not doing so might win them suspicion of being a disloyal traitor.

These objections may be true to an extent, but let’s not lose perspective. First of all, while we may object to Cuba’s repression of dissent and extreme concern with loyalty to the state, people are not imprisoned for refusing to perform voluntary labor, and therefore this kind of fear is probably not a factor. No doubt it would be easier to determine what Cuban citizens really feel about idealism and sacrifice if the government was more open and tolerant of dissent. But given that caveat, the available evidence suggests that while fear of social pressure may play a part, idealism is also an important factor. A number of Cubans who chose not to volunteer spoke openly to Rosendahl about their reasons for refusing, typically stressing the ‘inefficiency’ of volunteer labor; they didn’t speak as though they feared for their lives. Of course this is not to imply that fear of social pressure, as well as idealism, may play a part in encouraging Cuban citizens to sacrifice. There may be social pressure to perform volunteer labor, but social pressure to choose certain behaviors and values exists in every society. Secondly, many Cubans, municipal officials for example, are specifically ineligible for the ‘privileges’ that are offered as a reward for volunteering one’s labor. The fact that they, too, participate enthusiastically in the ‘sacrifice’ of time and energy, presumably out of pure altruism, indicates that much more is involved than either fear or a simple mercenary impulse. Moreover, it may be unrealistic to ask everyone to invest their time and energy into doing something that will bring us no benefit whatsoever, although there are certainly people who are willing to do this.

The Wages of Sacrifice

For many of us, even when we freely ‘volunteer’ our time, we often do so for the sake of feeling virtuous or gaining social approval. For example, more Americans say they would volunteer to donate blood if they could tell their friends about it than if no one were allowed to find out.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; to deny it would be unrealistic. People’s "altruism" in fact often represents a mixture of pure charity with some measure of rational self-interest. But we still should not treat all choices the same. Someone who furthers their self-interest by receiving privileges for long hours of volunteer work need not be seen as morally equivalent to someone who furthers it by selling medicine on the black market.

The political philosopher G.A. Cohen points out that a progressive ethic does not necessarily imply total self-denial. "In…non-market motivation I produce because I desire to serve [others] and to be served by them. Such motivation implies an expectation of reciprocation, but it nonetheless differs from market motivation. The marketeer is willing to serve, but only in order to be served. He does not desire the conjunction (serve-and-be-served)…." We can still applaud those people who choose to identify their own self-interest with courses of action that involve short term sacrifices and working for the good of others; and we can also applaud social systems which tend to foster such identifications.

As J.S. Mill said, "Everybody has selfish and unselfish interests, and a selfish man has cultivated the habit of caring for the former, and not caring for the latter." Cuba, with all its many faults (including a lack of free speech and political democracy) seems to have effectively encouraged people to work for the good of others, even if some measure of self-interest is present in some, though certainly not all, of these encouragements. When Cuba becomes a more open and pluralistic society, we will be able to tell more accurately what are the limits of this idealism, and whether or not social coercion also plays a part. But the available evidence suggests that idealism, and not self-interest or coercion, is the most important factor motivating Cuban citizens to work for the well-being of others and of society.

Buying Peace of Mind

This suggests an important caveat. Sacrificing certain things, especially in the short term, need not necessarily be seen as self-denial, and working for society doesn’t have to rule out achieving something good for ourselves as well. Many of us want a fairer and more just social order, as well as a cleaner environment; lowering average American levels of consumption, while it might mean a loss in terms of physical pleasure and convenience, would allow us to be more comfortable with the state of the world, and this would certainly be a gain. It would also give us more international credibility; countries like Malaysia currently laugh when we ask them not to cut down their rainforests, pointing out that the average American consumes far more of the world’s natural resources than the average Malaysian.

Cohen has argued that accepting a more equal and less exploitative social order is ultimately good for all of us, rich as well as poor; the wealthy among us will benefit from having a clearer conscience at the same time that they lose their material advantages. If we want to move towards a fairer, more equal society, one that is sustainable in the long run, wealthy and upper middle class Americans will have to reduce their consumption and perhaps their standard of living in several important ways. To take just one example, America currently uses up a quarter or more of the world’s resources, while constituting only five per cent of the world’s population. Given that America’s own level of consumption is not sustainable in itself, being largely based on nonrenewable energy sources and on practices that severely degrade environmental quality, it is inconceivable that the rest of the world could achieve the same standard of living; there aren’t enough resources for everyone in the world to eat as much red meat as the average American, for example, or to drive as many cars. This is even more true when we remember that the world population will most likely increase from 6 to 11 billion by the middle of next century. If we want a more equal world, as I suspect most of us ultimately do, we are going to have to voluntarily accept a drastic reduction in our consumption of at least certain luxuries.

Flaming Sacrificers

Let’s not make the mistake, though, of dismissing all sacrifice as stemming from self-interest. Biologists have demonstrated that in most animals, apparent ‘sacrifice’ is ultimately ‘selfish’- not from the individual animal’s point of view, but from a genetic viewpoint. But while this may be true of other animals, and of nature in general, the capacity of humans to reason means that our behavior needn’t be subject to evolutionary dictates. There are various degrees of sacrifice, some of which can reasonably said to coincide with our long-term rational self-interest, and others of which we can’t. While it may be unrealistic to expect people to ‘do the right thing’ even at the cost of their own life and happiness, let’s not forget that there are many people among us who do choose this path. Some kinds of self-sacrifice can never be described as stemming from self-interest, and these radical acts of pure altruism command immediate admiration, especially when they involve the ultimate sacrifice, loss of one’s own life. Admiration for the voluntary sacrifice of one’s life for a good cause has been an aspect of many religions throughout history, dating back at least to Hindu legends that told of a man who cut flesh off his own body to feed a hungry bird.

My history teacher in high school once described how as a youth during the 1960s he saw pictures of Buddhist monks in Vietnam burning themselves to protest war and oppression, and that this alone made him question the assumptions about the nature of the South Vietnamese regime that he had taken for granted. When [American] Roger Laporte burnt himself alive to protest our involvement in Southeast Asia, James Carroll writes that he wondered "What did Laporte know about war, about religion, that I didn’t know?" The simple depth of such a commitment, if nothing else, asks that we consider the person’s viewpoint seriously and extend some special respect to their action; after all, how many things do we care strongly enough about that we would consider giving up our own lives?

Even if we ate never faced with this kind of momentous choice, such people provide examples of what sacrifice can become in its most demanding form.. Of course, most of the sacrifices that we have to consider making in everyday life fall far short of this grand commitment. They often take smaller, subtler manifestations, but are no less important to building a decent society. While some sacrifices can reasonably be made in the knowledge that they will eventually benefit us as well, it’s worth remembering that not all sacrifices fit this description, and that those which don’t shouldn’t be shunned or denied for that reason. The example of those who willingly sacrifice their lives shows that while we may be fortunate in that our ‘sacrifices’ for others benefit us in the long run, many sacrifices can never be to our benefit and must come out of pure altruism. That some people, from Roger Laporte to the French worker-philosopher Simone Weil, have been willing to choose altruism even under those circumstances shows us that both that its’ within human capability to choose the welfare of others over life itself, and should also encourage us to be willing to sacrifice in smaller ways- if they could give up life itself, how can we refuse to give up money, material comforts, or time, whether or not it’s in our ultimate interest? As American residents, we represent a privileged slice of the world population, and as students at one of the world’s best universities, we have been even more fortunate. For most of us, sacrifice means not giving up our lives, but rather portions of our material comforts, our money, or our time. Given that good fortune, we will need to be prepared, in the coming years, to face the choice between keeping what we have for our own comfort, and giving it up for the sake of answering social need, and let’s all hope that we’ll have the strength to make the right choice.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu