Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.
A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there’s no way to proceed.
So it was revealing to watch all of these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.
In case you’ve been under a rock recently, in the early 2010s, several organized child sexual assault rings got busted in Britain - but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Muslim and busting them might seem racist. A recent legal dispute got them back in the news recently, and since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before. Now the entire Right is demanding investigations, heads on pikes, and (in some cases) the American invasion of Britain.
Obviously this is extremely bad and they’re right to be angry. I criticized the media for not covering the Rotherham gangs more at the time, and I’m glad they’re finally getting more attention. But since everyone else is talking about the criminal aspects of it, I hope it won’t be too inappropriate for me to make a philosophical point: all the people who claim a principled commitment to not caring about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries suddenly care a lot about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries.
Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that capitalism solves every problem and since your solution isn’t capitalism you’re an idiot to even be considering it. I have heard zero demands that people who really care about grooming gangs have to stop talking about immigration policy or police malfeasance and focus on, I don’t know, investing in a startup working on better rape whistles. Once people care a lot about a problem, they naturally understand that - as great as capitalism is - you can’t leave everything to the free market.
Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that every well-intentioned attempt to help another person will always backfire and end up causing incalculable harm. This is pretty impressive, because the official position of the British government is that any attempt to investigate or act against the gangs will backfire and cause incalculable harm. All the experts are begging you not to do it! But once people care a lot about a problem, they naturally understand that a vague possibility of poorly-spelled-out secondary consequences isn’t an excuse to tolerate atrocities.
Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that if you help poor people with no particular skills, you’re a cuck who hates human greatness and wants to force the talented/deserving to spend all of their time in forced emotional subservience to their inferiors. Once people care a lot about a problem, they realize that you can try to help people who are suffering without it being some kind of demonic attack on everything noble and glorious in mankind.
Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that if you ever acknowledge anything is bad and that we should act against bad things, your life will necessarily be destroyed by a crushing burden of obligation that requires you to spend all of your time and money (beyond that necessary for bare subsistence) on fighting evil. Once people care a lot about a problem, they are able to fit activism on that problem - even if it’s just a tweet expressing disgust, a petition against the people involved, or a small donation to victims - into their everyday lives without further disruption.
I’m not attacking these people’s position on grooming gangs. I think their position on grooming gangs is spot-on. I’m attacking their position on everything else.
I don’t think anyone is, deep down, a based post-Christian vitalist. It’s fun to LARP as the Nietzschean superman, but ask Raskolnikov how far that gets you. I think we all have the same basic moral impulses, and that for most people - including most people who deny it - those potentially include caring about poor people you’ll never meet, suffering in far-off countries.
I admit that we also don’t have moral impulses for a lot of other things. It’s hard to get as angry about kids suffering from some unpronounceable disease, as about kids suffering because a scary-looking person rapes them - even if the disease is horribly painful and disabling and terrifying, and realistically worse than the rape, and most people would pick the rape over the disease if they got a choice.
(if you’re going to get hung up on whether the suffering is because of a human bad actor or a natural cause, then can I interest you in donating to Bedari, a charity that prevents domestic abuse in the Third World? Most of their operations are in Pakistan, so you don’t even have to leave your comfort zone of being against Pakistani abusers in particular!)
My point is not that everyone starts life as a perfect altruist and later has to ineffectively repress it. My point is that we all start with a host of pretty similar albeit contradictory moral impulses and a drive to reconcile them, and our moral philosophies - rather than being handed to us by our genes - are downstream of the reconciliation process. You cannot do the reconciliation process through sheer logic (though logic helps), or through “doing the right thing” (since the process is upstream of knowing what the right thing is). All you can do is try to hit your intuitions off against each other and try to figure out what best maintains your dignity as a human being and doesn’t feel like you’re trying to excise chunks of your soul. In the end, I think your choices are something like:
- Give up on ever being more than a bundle of incoherent preferences. Treat an issue as the world’s worst atrocity one day, and a nothingburger the next, depending on the level of media coverage, the exact wording of the story, and whose politics are getting flattered.
- Keep coming up with more and more finely-sliced rules that you hope will separate the things you care about and the things you don’t into two different categories. “Well, I care about people in my country, but not in other countries - oh, wait, the grooming scandal was in Britain but I still care about it - well, fine, I care about things done by bad people but not by Nature - oh, wait, ordinary domestic abuse is done by bad people - well, fine, I care about . . . “ [I can’t predict what comes next, but nobody who tries this has ever run out of slices.]
- Come up with arguments for why, miraculously, you have found yourself in the most convenient possible world, one where every attempt to help other people just makes their lives worse, and so you are forever excused from trying.
Resolve the contradiction by ceasing to care about child sexual assault victims or anyone else.THIS IS NOT A REAL OPTION, SORRY.- Admit, kicking and screaming, that you might be a good person. Do some moral philosophy to see if this implies anything. If you find that it implies things you don’t want to do, or don’t have enough willpower to do, admit that you might be a sort of good person who is vaguely in favor of good things, but doesn’t have infinite willpower, and realistically will not be carrying them out most days (this is approximately everyone). Keep doing moral philosophy and testing it against your values and motivations until you reach reflective equillibrium (haha, as if).
I think the straining and lying and knots come in when you try to deny that part and say “Oh, no, who, me? I definitely don’t care about the suffering of the world at all” and hastily bury your heart bursting with wisdom and compassion for all mankind under the bedsheets so we don’t see it.
