Selfish selflessness-or just what is altruism?

I was still wiping the sleep out of my eyes when I read HaiXia's email:

"Would you tell me why do you help others who are strangers even if they are foreigners? If some people say that you doing good things to people because you want to get praises and you are selfish, is it true? If it is not true, how do you look on they?"

Of course, we're all selfish devils. The whole human race. But, still, I was pretty sure I knew where Haixia was coming from, what the project is she's working on, and why she suddenly found herself questioning the very thing she intends to advocate. Just what does it mean to be a volunteer--or for that matter do anything supposedly altruistic? Are we ever without selfish motives? Is there any such thing as altruism?

Haixia and I aren't exactly the first ones to be thinking about altruism. Pick your philosopher, your theologian, throw in Darwin and all the game theorists, and you'll have a lively conversation. But what struck me was that Haixia's question came the day after I stumbled across these two websites: Global Volunteers and World Teach. Oh! I see! You can go somewhere for a week or two and be a TEFL teacher. Ouch! I've lately been thinking a lot about fly-in-for-a-week experts and helpers.

And, yet, suppose those week-long TEFL teachers don't have top notch certification, so what? I've often thought that what matters most about teaching in the humanities is intellectual curiosity and dedication. Some of the young handsome guys up the hill from me have no background in TEFL or English, but they're doing a great job teaching conversational English here in Beibei and are beloved by their students. And those week-long teachers, so what if they are on feel-good vacations? Is that any worse than any other kind of vacation?  Ultimately, they're participating in cross-cultural exchanges, which, if the dialogue is two-way, I have believed in my whole life.

Teaching, cross-cultural exchanges, even vacations--they all can be defended, I think, whatever size package they come in.

But Haixia is going for something else. Chinese skepticism about volunteers is warranted, not only philosophically, but also because of China's own experience with foreigners. Legions of missionaries have come--and still come--to China to teach English via hymns and Bible stories and so on. The hegemony of English and Western customs is justifiably questioned. The "white father" do-goodism of Peace Corps and all those "baby Peace Corps" organizations has been justifiably questioned when the assumption is "we have something better to give you"--even though that decidedly is not the assumption driving most of my fellow volunteers' work here.

What is in it for us? Among my fellow volunteers are writers, adventurers, and travelers who may have their own ulterior motives. Some are aiming for careers in the foreign service, international studies, or foreign language teaching, so the experience is a step--decidedly relevant--in their own career development. But most are also somewhat idealistic--they believe in the value of service, of doing something that at least isn't harming anyone and is not directly for material gain.

So, while there are indeed the selfish motives (there always are), I think there also is some of the thing Haixia is asking about, somewhat selfless service, altruism. What motivates it, if it exists? I wonder how any of you would answer.

Even if you think altruism exists, you might not want to risk explaining, but I was asked and I'll try. I think it has most of all to do with little choices. More on those in a second. But I'm also guessing that the desire to act for the good of the whole is not unique to any particular culture, and we're all animals who figured out a long time ago that the whole benefits from a little bit of sacrifice on everyone's part. And just about every cultural and ethical system has some version of "the Golden Rule."

But how those choices get translated into practice may vary. So, even as China is hurtling headlong into a market economy, it is still a thorough-going collectivist society. Making choices still matter—especially if “choosing” makes the difference between ethical decision-making and simple rule-following. But if the larger culture is serving the common good, at least in principle, then the role of agency may be somewhat deferred.  When everything in your bones is for the common good, when you are duty bound to see yourself as only part of a larger family and culture, then there is no need to go out of your way to serve the public good, the common cause. You've been doing it since you took your first breath. In collectivist societies, you express somewhat selfless acts constantly. But, that said, the difference between being an ant in ant colony or a bee in a beehive and being a moral person in China is still exercising the choices one can make, exercising agency where one can, and Chinese people do it every day. In Western cultures, singular acts of serving the common good are perhaps more conspicuous and therefore risk being taken as naive, hypocritical, or patronizing--and often are, especially if not integrated into a whole set of little acts, but I'd like to think that, well, we can still just do our dogged best, whatever that is. And in any culture, I think it's the pattern of little choices that probably matter most.

So, I'll spare Haixia this long ramble and answer her simply that, first of all, I see my volunteerism as a form of cultural-exchange more than service and, if she wants me to, explain why. But as for altruism, even though I think, of course, it's always coupled with other motives, I believe it is  possible--and not even unusual--to want to do things for the common good. Most Chinese people do that every day.

Letting it all hang out

If Shanghai is the most populous city in the world (by some measures it is, although Mumbai and Tokyo might say otherwise), it's probably one of the worst energy hogs in the world. But think twice before you blame the Chinese for wasting energy on clothes dryers! A five minute walk in downtown Shanghai tells this story . . .

But what does "let it all hang out" mean? Have you ever thought about the splitting headaches English speakers give the rest of the world with that damned word "hang"? There may be more verb phrases with "hang" in them than there is Shanghai laundry . . . hang about, hang around, hang a left, hang a right, hang back, hang fire, hang five, hang in, hang in the balance, hang it up, hang loose, hang on, hang out, hang tough, hang up. Yep, please hang in here with me and be patient if you want to know . . . what the past tense of "hang" is.

  By the way, those energy-saving folks in Shanghai can't outdo my neighbors in Beibei . . . or anywhere else in China. Laundry dries in the sun everywhere.

What was that thirteen year old thinking?

What was that thirteen year old thinking, that adolescent named Qin? Surely, planning one's funeral is not on the minds of most teenagers, most of whom are still psychologically immortal. But before exploring Qin's fears about mortality and his insurance plan for immortality, consider this tyrant's imagination, an imagination that has in turn captured the imaginations--and cameras--of millions of us around the globe.

Jim Curley photograph

 He was just an ordinary king among the warring states for most of his teenage years, but he declared himself emperor of China (the name of which is arguably derived from his - Qin/Chin) in 221 BC. In just 15 years he brutally squashed whatever might be in his way, but he also did utterly amazing things to unify and establish the nation of China. (I wonder, does it take a tyrant to do things on such a grand scale?)

• establishing the first imperial dynasty in China after unifying the country
• starting the Great Wall (and asserting control over a massive labor force to do so)
• standardizing currency
• standardizing units of weight and measurement
• standardizing the width of an axle to complement the building of a national roadway
• establishing new norms for language

 But what has fascinated millions of people in the last fifty years is his insurance plan for his death--the necropolis for his tomb in Xi'An and the four pits around it, three of them containing thousands and thousands of life-sized, individually crafted terracotta warriors. But we're told that he wanted entertainment as well as protection in death, and he arranged to have acrobats, musicians and strongmen in other pits. To produce these individually crafted figures on such a large scale required not only the technology, but also management--including what must have been mass production of the arms, legs, and eight or so general faces, each of which were then individually finished with particular features. These warriors, some standing near their horses, were placed underground with real weapons, including steel swords plated with chromium to keep them lethally sharp--to this day.

But suppose you weren't a megalomaniac--just an ordinary person imagining a little world to accompany you to the hereafter. Would you think to have rivers (flowing with mercury to look real)?

Two millennia later, Xi'An is still an amazing place. A wall that once encircled the medieval dynasties is still there, enclosing the ancient buildings and shutting out new Chinese architecture on steroids. The wall is wide enough to cycle around on bikes, from which one can look through turrets a thousand years old to see plenty of those metal cranes populating every modern Chinese city.

 Above and below tour members pause for pictures atop the wall.

Jim Curley photograph.

Today Xi'An offers the best jiaozi I've yet had--look closely (above) and you'll see the little ducks. Below tour members wait on a shawl for the train from Xi'An to Beijing. (All this was over two weeks ago.)

Ulrike Klaus photograph

Carriage Eleven

My three American buddies became a speck in the rearview window of the taxi as the taxi driver and I hurtled toward the Beijing West Train Station. Behind me was a good holiday, one where Qin negotiated all of the travel details and I could be a sheep if I wanted to; ahead of me was the 28 hour train ride across eastern China—and a new case of ordinary terrors. I now had only myself to negotiate whatever mayhem might be between me and Beibei.

Although it wasn’t yet seven on a Saturday morning, the sidewalks were already packed with people wheeling suitcases around human beings stretched out on newspapers. It wasn’t entirely clear to me at first which of several cavernous buildings inhaling and exhaling people was my destination. Eventually, though, I was guided through the right set of turn stiles. Inside signs clearly identified which of several sub-stations I, a passenger on K819, should hang out in.  But from then on it wasn’t a problem of understanding the written signs; it was a problem of understanding the unwritten code that everyone else seemed to know. For example, we had assigned seats—so why were nearly 300 people pressing into each other in the northeast corner of the cavernous room forty minutes before blast-off? Once the doors were opened, there was no choice but to be moved by the human tide.

My last two train rides had been on hard sleepers, with two sets of triple bunk beds in each bay; this ride would be on a luxurious soft sleeper, with only two sets of double bunks. The fold down table between the bunks sported a white tablecloth and teapot; the beds had quilts in fresh cotton duvets. And people. A seventy-ish man sat across from me, smiling and mute, intently watching a five year old who was busily opening and closing every possible fixture—including the door, which he regularly locked. Two thirty-ish women and a three-year old came and went, unpacking and stashing all kinds of food and getting all settled. Where did all these bags come from? One thing was clear: four beds didn’t mean four passengers.

For a while I was the white elephant that everyone ignored, then gradually the questions came. Where was I from? What was I doing in China? How did I like China—and the food? And, inevitably, how old was I? Would I please take a biscuit?

For the first hundred miles, the scenery outside was as inspiring as the Illinois flatlands—corn and scrub and an occasional factory. Once in a while some deserted blocky buildings flashed into view—old collectives? Ghost towns. No matter—the action was here inside Carriage 11, where the three year old with helium fingertips swayed in time to the train muzak, playing her imaginary saxophone when so moved. Her pigtails were but an inch long and her baby teeth were smaller than the gum above. Her mother was calmly and proudly attentive—she rarely admonished the toddler who was never more than inches away, but with one firm hand might remove something or just move the child as if they were still one organism. Even when seemingly reading email on her smart phone, the mom’s radar was up. If, I, for example, struggled more than a nanosecond with a plastic food wrapper, the mom would reach over and open it for me.

Both children accepted being fed like little birds, sitting calmly and happily, mothers feeding them with chopsticks one peanut or noodle at a time, wiping their mouths with their free hands. Again, I found myself pondering the mother-child bond in China. These two mothers were not the least bit tiger-ish or draconian—both the moms and children seemed calm, content, alert, happy—but, again, mom and child seemed at times to function as a single organism, even the five-year old and his mom.

But is this so different from parenting elsewhere? I pondered, as I wobbled down the long aisle to the end of the car with the hot water tanks and toilets. The squat toilet on the last train had been easy enough to use—even though I could see my pee whizzing down to the train tracks below and I couldn’t find a waste basket for toilet paper.  But now I had a dilemma: Was it crazy to take all my earthly belongings with me every time I used the toilet—everything? Even in the night? Last time, I had friends to watch my backpack and laptop when I had to pee—now I’d get to introduce all my worldly goods to the squat toilet with a very wet floor. Was there a hook strong enough to hold my backpack up off the floor? Nobody else seemed to take anything other than toilet paper with them--so did I strike my roommates as paranoid? Perhaps. It turned out this the squat toilet not only had a good hook, but also a functioning drain—it didn’t just open to the tracks below. Emptying the closed drain was another matter. What I thought might be a flush button didn’t budge at first, and I'd just emptied a very full bladder.

Oh, well. I figured it out, and no other terrors awaited me on this trip. In our little set of bunks   conversation ebbed and flowed easily, children leaned on any spare body part--including mine, and soon there was just the hissing and groaning of the train coming to one depot after another through the night.

Morning came and with it the verdant terraced countryside with which I'm most familiar in southwestern China, largely unspoiled. I was grateful that train tracks and simple lanes and footpaths hadn't been completely supplanted by motorways and parking lots.

Three Gorges (a placeholder)

Our merry little band of Brits, Kiwis, a German, a Congolese, my three buddies from the US, and our Chinese guide are still traveling with limited wifi access . . . so here is a two-picture placeholder taken on the Yangtze (Chang Jiang), winding through the Three Gorges.