2. Plan for it systematically to those who need it most
“Paying it forward” is my preferred way to express gratitude. Born originally to a Christian background, I was raised in the generally Abrahamic tradition that doing good things to others out of simple reciprocity, is not necessarily authentic gratitude or authentic generosity. I assume this is something taught in non Abrahamic faith traditions as well, but I’m simply less educated about them. I believe it’s a universal value of altruism, likely even found beyond humanity. We get that someone who only shows gratitude through direct repayment is not fundamentally an altruist- they’re just someone who knows where their bread gets buttered. In my view, universal human ethics should ask us to look up to people, or aspire to be people, who can channel gratitude for Person A, into kind actions towards Person B. To me, that is what gratitude should be.
What I see, or hope for, is the kind of thinking discussed in longtermist and effective altruist circles. Last blog, I brought up the book What We Owe The Future, by William MacAskill for the first time. I read it over a year ago, and it sparked a lot of my rethinking about what I was doing with my own life. I still have a long way to go to discover my new role(s) within this, but for starters I knew I needed to engage more with the world- and I knew I needed to roughly codify these principles that I felt intuitively from my own ethics. (Side note, another site from this area of thought is https://80000hours.org/ where you can brainstorm your next steps- whatever life stage you’re in- if you want to use your career to accomplish longtermist goals.)
The longtermist and effective altruist schools of thought are populated by thoughtful, yet practical people trying to elucidate fundamental human truths (what is a “good,” what is a “bad,” what kind of metrics can we apply to what counts as a good life, a fulfilling life, etc?) Far from being about the navel gazing of personal self-fulfillment, the movements are generally focused on raising the floor, the bottom percentiles, of human misery, topic by topic, issue by issue. They also concern themselves with global risks like nuclear war, climate change, and artificial intelligence- and also start to dive into the ethics of animal treatment, value of inanimate things like art, democracy, and diversity.
It’s a real risk that if the world consists of only direct reciprocal relationships, it will continue down a path of in-groups, tribalism, or simply generally inward-looking people. In contrast, Charles Darwin postulated that our general trend is to expand the size of our tribe- I’ll quote him here verbatim since it’s important people see this if they haven’t yet-
“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason* (my emphasis, see note at end) would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.” – Charles Darwin
This is an ingenious hack. Since we are unlikely to ditch our tendency to do good things only for our in-group any time soon (since it’s such a baked-in feature of our evolution,) the quicker fix is just to change our definition of in-group. With complex enough brains, we can use language to make this leap, sooner than our gut decisions might. Seeing as we sympathize with hideous fictional aliens like E.T. or the thoughtful but wholly alien heptapods of Arrival, I have hope that we are ready for real frontiers when it comes to gratitude, non-reciprocal altruism and the like. We can only hope that we can apply those lessons at close range, as well as far- and on short timelines.
Some people attack altruism as incongruent with Darwinian evolution- or attack Darwinian evolution as inconsistent with altruism- yet I think they’re complimentary and just require a level of mathematics we haven’t perfected yet. Most nations have defense budgets to the tune of 2-4%, while individual organisms have similar investments in personal “defense budgets”- like how often an herbivore must look over its shoulder for a predator, or invest in horns, hides and the like. I’d be interested to know if we can quantify the caloric and metabolic costs of these defense budgets, and think about how real, true altruism, through careful lockstep evolution, can reduce the size of individual defense budgets. Before even bothering to tinker with the genetic code, and getting into extended-phenotype-related behavior, the first changes can happen through hormone regulation and other flexible options already on the proverbial painter’s palette. That is to say, being nicer, even to completely unrelated species- frees up metabolic expenditure for reproduction and resource accumulation that can benefit any species able to make the leap. In a nutshell, we’re talking about self-domestication- an existing well-documented phenomenon.
Speaking of, I believe part of the next stage of human evolution is to accept that “thank” should be an intransitive verb- no need for an object (accusative or dative in most languages). I don’t even need to invent agency or tautological leanings to the universe, Gaia, physics or what have you. Physics neither wants me dead nor alive, yet I can be grateful that its laws have resulted in me being here. I can be thankful for or about things, but needn’t thank anyone or be thankful to anyone in particular.
Out of all the skills I had to build post-religion, managing the emotion of gratitude while not always being sure who it was towards, if any, was one of them. More than before, I usually know exactly who I should be grateful for and I directly tell them. And if there is no direct agent to thank, I can be simply grateful. It’s a funny emotion to have and takes some practice to manage it but it’s worth the exploration. Either way, I can use words to express the gratitude- but I’d rather see myself spend my money, resources, or time paying forward, rather than paying back.
After all, the person(s) who help me usually did so because they’re already “doing okay” by global standards. I think saying this explicitly can sound cold and calculated but I think it’s worth thinking about. If most of our giving relationships consist of reciprocity towards people in the same (comfortable, safe, reliable) boats as us- both relatively and metaphorically speaking- then moving the world forward will have to consist of thinking beyond that.
That’s not to say we never show kindness to someone else who is “doing well,” in global terms, of course. It’s just to say- it shouldn’t be constantly in direct reciprocity. Random kindness towards or from a fellow person of privilege should be a constant, a given- that fuels the both of you to think towards others less privileged. Being instinctually kind and generous with everyone, yet giving targeted kindness to those who actually need it most when you’re actually plotting and scheming long-term, are basically what I see as the best options.
So, whenever I think about the things that have been done for me- support from parents, siblings, relatives, friends, I feel the best thing to do is to go beyond and see who in most need I can pay it forward to. I’ve been raised in a privileged wealthy nation where the relative wealth is through the roof. I understand that by global standards, I’ve been given a generous launch platform for a reasonably good life. I certainly have my criticisms of how my own particular wealthy country is going, but in terms of my ability to pay it forward, I still have it pretty good.
I don’t always know how this reasoning is received by those people. I usually try to convey my gratitude with words, and in some cases, I can directly say, the help rendered to me is enabling me to do far more in other contexts. I wonder if I can take this too far, and I do think about it frequently, but I hope it mostly works. I don’t want to think I did a good thing to someone simply because I owed them. Instead, our privilege- our state of being an inflow point of good things and actions, should power us to pay forward to others who are unlikely to be able to pay us back in any sense of the word- whether in goods, services, or kowtowing to us in gratitude.
A quick aside- I’ve seen a viral internet trend these days of “paying it forward” that is not at all what I mean. I’m referring to the viral trends of people paying for the car behind them at a drive through, usually for a $5 coffee at Starbucks. While one can hope that it sparks a deeper thought to a more profound change, this is not the kind of action that can change our planet. First, it barely clears the basic hurdle of not being directly reciprocal. A chain of vehicles going through, A paying for B, B for C, etc, just leads to a net zero change in the world other than brief warm fuzzy feelings. People fortunate to have running vehicles and a budget for $5 coffee, all probably living within a 10 mile radius together, have all just engaged in a parade of helping each other over trivial matters. I don’t know what exact metric or rubric we need for pay-it-forward styles of gratitude, but I’m sure that the prior scenario has little utility.
I hope that the things I do are not only not repaid to me, I am not even going to wait around for a thanks. I really hope I can maintain that perspective over time. Some people in the most dire need of help may be too hard up to be focused on gratitude, so even the “thank you” may never happen. A deeper ethics requires us to move beyond that and act anyway. I experienced that in real-world terms in Poland, where the people we helped were often not around, or not in a position to thank us. Worlds turned upside down by violence and hate, they weren’t about to bug us while we were installing tile in their communal kitchen for them. And that was fine by me. It should not be done for those reasons. Of course, it felt good to see them smile or show interest in the work being done on their behalf- we are not robots after all. It was rewarding to see those forms of gratitude. But ideally, an ethical person should not wait on or rely on those things to continue doing the right thing.
With reasonably agreed-upon frameworks and metrics, we can start to talk about how a person goes about having a more impactful life to accomplish this floor-raising, or threat aversion. I like the ideas that are forming in longtermism and effective altruism- they feel exactly like the kinds of universal ethics we need in our world of diverse beliefs. Critical to these schools of thought are valuing the future lives at stake- not yet born, or not yet with literal or figurative voting power in the world- as much as we value current lives.
Also critical- and hopefully obvious- these schools of thought also value all current lives equally, and debating your desire to acquire luxuries comes head to head with what that money could do elsewhere in the world. Call that the lateral consideration of your brothers and sisters in creation already in existence to your left and right.
Some people who get involved in the movement quit their high-paying jobs and look for impact directly in world-changing sectors. Others intentionally seek out high-paying positions in unrelated work and start tithing, heavily, from a humanist framework- reasoning that being excellent in their specialties and earning as much as they can, and donating to high impact charities is their best route. People start brainstorming oblique ways to do similarly, such as working part time or seasonally in high-paying situations, and using the rest of their time as they see fit. Some seek radical ways to cost-cut-, such as privileged people intentionally shacking up to save housing costs, cutting bills and frills, and living lean so they can donate more time or money elsewhere.
Critical to the effectiveness of the movement, is that it avoids what I call navel-gazing (not my own term, but I use it frequently and in some ways that may be unique.) Calculating your personal carbon footprint, or your tithing, is all fine and good, but it’s very easy to let these personal metrics become the end-all-be-all. In contrast, the real goal is substantive change on a societal level- not a personal cleaning-up or calculating of your ledger of sins and virtues. You could say, in Christian ethical terms, the movements are not about personal salvation but rather community salvation. I grew to have a deep dislike of navel gazing as I’d witnessed it within evangelical Christianity- and I’ve learned to see it in other movements too. It’s a phenomenon that exists across all creeds. Anywhere where personal orthodoxy (personal measuring of correct beliefs) takes precedence over community orthopraxy ( communal doing of correct actions)- that is navel-gazing. Sitting and pondering where your ledger lies, versus calculating the community-shared goalposts you have set for real change.
In my time volunteering, I’ve seen people use a wide range of tools to do what they do. I’ve seen someone with a comfortable high paying job in a Western democracy, using their 6 week paid vacation to do impactful work abroad and at home. Someone else, living a cheap vagabonding life on a shoestring, also finding a way to do the same work but from a totally different path. There are many ways to do it and it’s fascinating.
Even volunteering itself is up for questioning as the most effective way to change things- that’s something that is interesting to ponder as I spend a gap year doing so. I believe strongly in the projects I’ve done, but in the world of get-er-done ethics of longtermism, we have to constantly ask if it’s as effective as it could be, and if not- what do we change. For me, I do know that in the volunteering I’ve done so far, our international teams of volunteers have genuinely uplifted spirits of the often-tired local NGOs and volunteers. I saw it in the many Polish civic organizations we worked alongside in Poland, and within the Turkish organizations in Turkey. Our impact was not just in the 40-48 hour work weeks the volunteers put in, or the free or cheap materials that All Hands and Hearts donated, but also that morale factor. How to quantify that- that’s impossible- but it’s real and it’s a big part of why I stay involved.
That’s not to mention the morale change that comes to the target population. When faced by the hatred or indifference of a violent invader (like Ukrainians’ experience of Russian violence), or the cruel indifference of acts of nature (Turkish and Syrian experiences of a horrific earthquake,) the actions we take in putting in a few workweeks, could shape that person’s life outlook until the end of their life. Permanently wounded people- emotionally wounded people- may never recover to the point that they watch out for anyone other than themselves ever again. Radical intervention at a key time can remind them of good in the world- and set them on a path of healing that gets them back in the fight sooner- becoming agents of altruism or good, once their time of healing and grieving has allowed it. That’s what I hope for in volunteering.
Common to all I’ve talked about here is that these actions come from genuine gratitude, a recognition that you’ve received something that not everyone else gets, and that you didn’t particularly deserve it nor not deserve it. Knowing that good and bad can be randomly distributed (but not evenly distributed), we can work for a better future. Full equality of both opportunity and outcome are not likely ever possible, but we can tighten the shape of the bell of the bell curve so that the extremes of human misery are pulled up, and the extremes of hedonism and waste wither away as we build a global culture that agrees it’s in bad taste, if not criminally excessive, to live in insane luxury while others suffer.
*To me, this echoes the US Declaration of Independence’s opening clause, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Stylistically, I love these kinds of opening clauses- something I learned about in my university days in the Model EU and UN. Opening clauses are meant to be a source of unity- you bring up the commonly agreed background knowledge and beliefs that are the underlying foundation of the proposals you’re making. In Robert’s Rules of Order-like situations, they often start with whereas. We are establishing de principio that it’s quite obvious and not up for debate in reasonable circles.
The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach) 
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