We can all think of examples of actions that have seemed perfectly selfless to us. A single anecdote by itself qualifies as a testimonial, but an accumulation of anecdotes that reinforce each other, like the ones that follow, ends up having something of the value of a proof.
A bassoonist in a New York opera company, Cyrus Segal was waiting for the bus on a Manhattan sidewalk when his precious instrument, which he had set down next to him, was stealthily snatched away. Cyrus had been playing that instrument for twenty-five years; even though it was insured, he was devastated. Each bassoon has its own personality, and he knew he would never again find exactly the same companion. A little later on, a homeless man walked into a music store and offered the bassoon for the modest fee of ten dollars (whereas it was estimated to be worth more like $12,000). The salesman, who came from a family of musicians, could easily picture what the owner must have been feeling, and decided right away to buy the instrument, not without first bargaining the man down to three dollars! Then he asked all the musicians who visited his shop if they had heard about a colleague who was the victim of a bassoon theft. In the days that followed, the news reached the ears of Cyrus, who quickly went to the shop and recognized his beloved instrument. The salesman, Marvis, didn’t ask for any reward, and even refused the three dollars that Cyrus tried to repay him.1 That may not be as brave as jumping into freezing water to save someone from drowning, but it obviously constitutes a fine example of a generous, selfless act.
In 2010, Violet Large and her husband, Allen, who lived in Nova Scotia, won over eleven million dollars in the lottery. Instead of buying a new house and living more luxuriously, the couple decided “it was better to give than to receive” and distributed 98% of the sum to local and national charities. “We didn’t buy a single thing,” said Violet, “we didn’t need anything.”2 To which Allen added: “You can’t buy happiness. That money that we won was nothing. We have each other.”
British-born Stan Brock, a former cowboy in British Guyana, was an adventurous naturalist and conservationist who spent years in the Amazon forest among the Wapishana Indians, a twenty-six hour walk from the nearest doctor. He saw so many people die from lack of medical care that he vowed he would bring medical aid to the region. After becoming famous on the Emmy Award–winning TV wildlife series Wild Kingdom, which showed him on horseback catching wild animals with a lasso and fighting in a swamp with an anaconda, he said to himself that all this had no meaning and it was time to do something worthwhile. Stan gave away everything he owned to start RAM (Remote Area Medical Foundation), a charity that delivers free medical treatment to Guyana’s jungles and other very remote lands.
He later settled in the United States, where he was galled to see so many US citizens deprived of health care, especially dental and ocular care. He decided to organize traveling medical clinics that would provide treatment to thousands of poor patients. Thanks to its hundreds of volunteers, RAM has now treated over half a million patients in the United States. Using old airplanes, he also goes back to Guyana to bring medical supplies to remote regions. Now seventy-seven, Stan has made a vow of poverty and owns neither a house nor a car; he has no bank account, nor any kind of property. He sleeps on a rug that he unfurls on the floor of his office. To a BBC journalist who remarked during an interview, “That must be quite miserable!” Stan replied: “Not at all, I enjoy every moment of it.”
These are only a few examples. We shouldn’t rush to conclude that they’re rare simply because they’re remarkable. There are hundreds of similar stories, and they all say more than long arguments.
The selfless quality of a person’s behavior can be demonstrated by experiments.3 The psychologist Leonard Berkowitz asked a group of volunteers to make paper boxes under the direction of a supervisor. Half of the volunteers were then told that their performance, although anonymous, would influence the way the supervisor was graded.
It turned out that the participants of that group worked better and for a longer time than the members of the other group, who had been told nothing about the supervisor. The former acted anonymously for the good of a supervisor they would never see again. So one cannot attribute their behavior to the hope for any kind of reward.
Moreover, sociologists have shown that the frequency of altruistic actions diminished when they were linked to some material reward. A study carried out on a large number of blood donors revealed that less than 2% of donors hoped for payment for their donation. Almost all the donors simply expressed a desire to help those who needed it.4 What’s more, a famous study carried out in England revealed that rewarding donors made their numbers fall. Offering remuneration degraded the quality of their altruistic action, so the usual donors were less inspired to volunteer.5 In fact, the quantity of blood donated in relation to the number of inhabitants was, until then, clearly higher in England than in the United States, where donations are paid for.
When we sincerely offer a real gift to someone, the beauty of the gesture stems from the wish to bring happiness to the other, and not from a hope for something in return. The other person receives your present with all the more joy since he knows your gesture is not prompted by any calculation. That is the difference between a gift offered wholeheartedly to a person one loves and, for instance, a commercial gift, which everyone knows has strings attached.
Two American researchers, Nancy Eisenberg and Cynthia Neal,6 worked with three-to four-year-old children, with the assumption that it wasn’t very likely that their answers would be influenced by hypocrisy or by an intention to manipulate their interlocutor. When the nursery-school children observed by these researchers shared, unprompted, what they had with others or when they comforted a sad or upset child, the researchers sought to learn the reasons for their actions by asking questions like, “Why did you give that to John?” In their answers, the large majority of children explicitly referred to the fact that the other child needed help: “He was hungry,” for example, was the answer from one of them who had shared his snack. The children never mentioned a fear of being punished by the teacher or reprimanded by their parents if they didn’t help their comrades. Only a few replied that they hoped for something in return, like being well-thought of, for instance.
Lucille Babcock, who received the Carnegie Commission medal for “acts of heroism,”7 didn’t feel she had deserved it: “I was not ashamed that I got it, but I’m self-conscious about it, because I don’t think about myself that way.” The same goes for men and women called the “Righteous Among the Nations,” who saved Jews during Nazi persecutions: the honors they were later accorded were regarded as incidental, unexpected, embarrassing, even “undesirable” by quite a few of them. The prospect of such honors had never entered into the motivation for their actions. “It was very simple,” reports one rescuer, “I didn’t do anything major. I never thought of the risks or imagined that my behavior could lead to rebuke or recognition. I just thought I was doing what I had to do.”8
So there are situations in which selfless altruism is the simplest and most likely explanation for behavior that occurs constantly in our daily lives. The usual arguments of those who strive to find selfish motivations behind every altruistic action hardly hold up to scrutiny.
The philosopher and moralist C. D. Broad emphasizes this: “As so often happens in philosophy, clever people accept a false general principle on a priori grounds and then devote endless labor and ingenuity to explaining away plain facts which obviously conflict with it.”9
Father Ceyrac, who over sixty years has taken care of thirty thousand poor children in southern India, told me one day: “Despite everything, I am struck by the immense kindness of people, even those who seem to have closed hearts and eyes. It is other people, all the others, who create the fabric of our lives and form the matter of our existences. Each person is a note in the ‘great concert of the universe,’ as the poet Tagore says. No one can resist the call of love. You always give in after a while. I actually think that humans are intrinsically good. You always have to see the good, the beautiful, in a person, never deny, always look for the greatness of people, without any distinction of religion, caste, or way of thinking.”
A critical mind is indeed a prime quality in scientific investigation, but if it turns into cynicism and systematic denigration of everything that seems to stem from human kindness, it is no longer a proof of objectivity, but a sign of narrowness of mind and chronic pessimism. I had proof of this when I mixed for several weeks with a television team that was preparing a report on the Dalai Lama. I interacted with the members of this team in Nepal, the United States, and France, where I helped them as best I could to film various private events in which the Dalai Lama was participating, as well as to obtain an interview with him. But then I finally realized that their main objective was to look for the faults they suspected were concealed in the actions and person of the Dalai Lama.10 Near the end of the filming, I said to the director: “When you deal with some of the great moral figures of our time, people like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Vaclav Havel, or the Dalai Lama, don’t you think it’s better to try to reach their level, instead of attempting to lower them to your own?” His sole response was a slightly embarrassed chuckle.
We are all a mixture of qualities and defects, shadow and light. Under the sway of defeatist laziness, it is no doubt easier to give up becoming better than to recognize the existence of human kindness and make efforts to cultivate it. That is why, when one witnesses this goodness, it is better to be inspired by it than to denigrate it, and to do one’s best to give it a larger place in our existence.