HAPPINESS AND ALTRUISM:
DOES HAPPINESS MAKE US KIND OR DOES BEING KIND MAKE US HAPPY?
The happiest man is he who has no trace of malice in his soul.
PLATO
A man lies on the lawn of the quadrangle of Manchester University, in England, near a well-trod path. He appears to be sick. People pass by. Only a few—15 percent—stop to see if he needs help. Later the same guinea pig lies on the same lawn, but this time he’s wearing the jersey of the Liverpool soccer team, a rival of Manchester’s with many fans among the Liverpudlian students. Eighty-five percent of the passersby who are fans of that team stop to see if their pal needs a hand. At the bottom of the path, a group of university researchers questions the passersby, regardless of whether or not they stopped.1 The study, like many others, confirms the fact that the sense of belonging has considerable bearing on the manifestation of altruism. People are much more inclined to come to the assistance of a friend or of someone with whom they have something in common—ethnicity, nationality, religion, opinion—than to help a stranger to whom they feel no particular connection.
The Buddhist approach is to gradually extend that sense of belonging to all beings. To that end, it is essential to understand at the most fundamental level that all living creatures share our desire to avoid suffering and experience well-being. That understanding cannot remain a mere concept but must be internalized until it has become second nature. Ultimately, when our sense of belonging extends to all living beings, we are intimately touched by their joys and sufferings. This is the most important notion of “universal responsibility” of which the Dalai Lama often speaks.
THE JOYS OF ALTRUISM
What does altruism have to do with happiness? A series of studies conducted on hundreds of students found an undeniable correlation between altruism and happiness, determining that those who believe themselves to be happiest are also the most altruistic.2 When we are happy, the feeling of self-importance is diminished and we are more open to others. It has been shown, for instance, that people who have experienced a happy event in the past hour are more inclined than others to come to the assistance of strangers.
Acute depression is accompanied by difficulty in feeling and expressing love for others. “Depression is the flaw in love,” writes Andrew Solomon in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. More salient yet is the assertion by those who have suffered depression that giving love to others and receiving it is an important aspect of healing. This affirmation agrees with the Buddhist perspective, which holds selfishness to be the main cause of suffering and altruistic love to be the essential ingredient of true happiness. The interdependence of all phenomena in general, and of all people in particular, is such that our own happiness is intimately linked to that of others. As we stressed in the chapter on emotions, the understanding of interdependence is at the core of sukha, and our happiness necessarily depends on that of others.
The work done by Martin Seligman, the pioneer of “positive psychology,” shows that the joy of undertaking an act of disinterested kindness provides profound satisfaction. To verify his hypothesis, he asked his students to do two things—to go out and have fun and to participate in a philanthropic activity—and then to write a report for the next class.
The results were striking. The satisfactions triggered by a pleasant activity, such as going out with friends, seeing a movie, or enjoying a banana split, were largely eclipsed by those derived from performing an act of kindness. When the act was spontaneous and drew on humane qualities, the entire day was improved; the subjects noticed that they were better listeners that day, more friendly, and more appreciated by others. “The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure,” Seligman concludes3—gratifying in the sense of lasting satisfaction and a feeling of harmony with one’s inner nature.
We can feel a certain pleasure in attaining our ends to the detriment of others, but such satisfaction is short-lived and superficial; it masks a sense of disquiet that cannot be suppressed for long. Once the excitement has waned, we are forced to acknowledge the presence of a certain discomfort. Benevolence would appear to be far closer to our “true nature” than malice. Living in harmony with that nature sustains the joy of life, while rejecting it leads to chronic dissatisfaction.
ARE WE NATURALLY SELFISH?
While biologists may be suspicious of the notion of “human nature,” philosophers have no qualms about offering clear-cut opinions. The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was convinced that people are fundamentally selfish and that true selflessness is absent in human behavior. Anything resembling altruism is merely selfishness dressed up in fine feelings. Caught one day late in life offering charity to a beggar, he was asked whether he had not just performed a selfless act. He answered: “That man’s distress distressed me and in easing him I eased myself.” Certainly the concept of original sin, which is peculiar to Christian civilization, and its accompanying sense of guilt are well steeped in such thinking. It has in fact had a considerable influence on Western intellectual thought, and still plays an important role today even with those who do not speak from a religious perspective.
Many evolutionary theorists have long maintained that the genes which prompt selfish behavior have a higher probability of being transmitted to coming generations. Since the carriers of such genes systematically promote their own interests over those of others, the argument goes, they have a greater chance of surviving and reproducing than the altruists. Such stark claims have become more nuanced in recent years, and it is now conceded that cooperative behavior, apparently altruistic, can be useful to the survival and proliferation of the species. For example, Elliott Sober, a philosopher of science, has shown through convincing models that isolated, selfless individuals who come into contact with only selfish and violent individuals will be taken advantage of and tend to disappear quickly.4 Conversely, when such altruists group together and cooperate with one another, they have a definite evolutionary advantage over the selfish people, who also fight among themselves and therefore may slowly disappear from the population.
TRUE ALTRUISM
Contemporary research in behavioral psychology paints a more optimistic picture. Psychologist Daniel Batson writes: “Over the past fifteen years, other social psychologists and I have conducted more than twenty-five experiments designed to test the nature of the motivation to help evoked by empathy. Results of these experiments support the empathy-altruism hypothesis. None of the egoistic explanations proposed have received more than scattered support.”5 Genuine altruism that is motivated by no other reason than to do good for others is, after all, possible.
In order to bring pure altruism into focus, we have to eliminate various other explanations according to which all selfless behavior is merely selfishness in disguise. The experiments carried out by Batson and his team have found that it is in fact possible to identify several types of altruist. The “false altruists” help because they can’t bear their own distress in the face of other people’s suffering and are eager to defuse their own emotional tension. They also help because they fear being judged, or out of a desire for praise, or else to avoid feeling guilty. If they have no choice but to intervene, they assist the person in trouble (provided the price to pay isn’t too high), but if they can avoid having to watch the painful spectacle of suffering or can slip away without incurring disapproval, they intervene no more frequently than those whose altruism is not developed. “True altruists,” on the other hand, offer to help even when they might easily turn away or avoid intervening without being noticed. Research has found that true altruists make up about 15 percent of Western populations, and that their altruism is an enduring trait of their personality.
How can we know whether a so-called altruist isn’t acting merely to experience the sense of pride earned by performing a kindness? We must determine whether she would have been just as happy for someone else to do it. For a true altruist, it’s the result that counts, not the personal satisfaction of having helped. That is precisely what Batson and his team have demonstrated through their sophisticated studies.6
Throughout the real world, instances of genuine altruism abound—think of the many mothers who are sincerely prepared to sacrifice their lives to save their children. This example can be extended even further, since in Buddhism the true altruist learns to consider all beings with the intimacy of a parent.
Dola Jigme Kalsang was a Tibetan sage of the nineteenth century. One day while on pilgrimage to China, he came to the central square of a small town where a crowd had gathered. As he approached, he found that a thief was about to be put to death in a particularly cruel fashion: he was to be made to straddle an iron horse that had been heated to red-hot. Dola Jigme pushed his way through the crowd and proclaimed, “I am the thief!” A great silence fell; the presiding mandarin turned impassively to the newcomer and asked, “Are you ready to assume the consequences of what you have just told us?” Dola Jigme nodded. He died on the horse and the thief was spared. In such an extreme, harrowing case, what could Dola Jigme’s motivation have been other than infinite compassion for the condemned? A stranger in that land, he could have gone on his way without anyone’s paying him the least attention. He acted out of unconditional benevolence to save the life of a stranger. This is of course the exceptional case of someone who was a renunciant, without a family or anyone depending on him for sustenance or protection, but it tells a lot about the potential for altruism present in the human mind.
A more near-at-hand example is that of Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan father imprisoned at Auschwitz who offered to take the place of a family man who, along with nine others, had been selected to die of hunger and thirst in reprisal for another prisoner’s escape. Although the word altruism itself was only coined in 1830 by Auguste Comte as a counterpart to egoism, it is indeed possible to be fundamentally altruistic, that is, more concerned in one’s heart with the fate of others than with one’s own. Such an attitude may or may not play some part in our disposition from the onset, but it can be enhanced. In fact, as the chapter “Happiness in the Lab” shows, recent research conducted with long-term meditators strongly indicates that altruistic love and compassion are skills that can be extensively trained over the years.
It is interesting to note that according to several studies, people who are best at controlling their emotions behave more selflessly than those who are very emotive.7 In the face of other people’s suffering, the latter are in fact more concerned with managing their own emotions, dominated by fear, anxiety, and distress, than with the suffering of others. Here again inner freedom, which releases us from the shackles of conflictive emotions, is won only by minimizing obsessive self-absorption. A free, vast, and serene mind is far more likely to consider a distressing situation from an altruistic point of view than is a mind relentlessly beset by internal conflicts. Moreover, it is interesting to see how certain people who witness an injustice or an attack are more focused on the wrongdoer and on pursuing, abusing, or manhandling him, than on helping the victim. This is not altruism at all, but anger.
GOLD IS GOLD
If we turn our gaze inward and examine the mind at length, we can recognize that its primal nature is the basic cognitive faculty that “illuminates,” in the sense that it sheds the light of awareness on outer phenomena and inner mental events. This faculty underlies all thoughts but is not itself essentially changed by them, as the surface of the mirror is not intrinsically modified by the images reflecting in it. We can also recognize that the negative emotions—anger, for instance—are more marginal and less fundamental than love and affection. They arise mostly in reaction to provocation or some other specific event, and are not permanent states of mind. Even if we are constitutionally cranky and easy to anger, the latter is always triggered by a particular incident. With the exception of pathologies, it is very rare to experience a prolonged state of hatred that is not directed at a specific object. Altruism and compassion, on the other hand, are much more fundamental states that can inhabit our mind as a way of being and endure independently of particular objects or specific stimuli.
Anger can help to overcome obstacles, but it can and must be only episodic. People with a hostile personality, who are always in a state of readiness to become angry, for whom nearly any obstacle, no matter how minor, calls for anger, are highly dysfunctional in society and constantly meet with trouble and sorrow. Conversely, love and affection are far more essential to long-term survival. The newborn would last mere hours without her mother’s affection; the disabled elderly would soon die without the care of those around them. We need to receive love in order to know how to give it. After a fit of anger, we often say, “I was out of it,” or “I was not myself.” But when we spontaneously do some act of disinterested kindness, such as helping a human or an animal to recover its health or freedom, or even to escape death, we have the sense of being in harmony with our true nature. What would it be like to experience that state of mind more often, to feel that the illusory barriers set up by the self have dissolved and that our sense of communion with the other reflects the essential interdependence of all beings?
Destructive mental factors are deviations that gradually distance us from our true nature, to the point that we forget its very existence. And yet nothing is forever and irreparably lost. Even buried in filth, gold remains gold in its essential nature. The destructive emotions are merely veils, superimpositions. Father Pierre Ceyrac, a renowned Jesuit missionary who has cared for thirty thousand children in India over the past sixty years, told me: “Despite everything, I’m struck by the goodness of people, even those who seem to have their hearts and eyes shut. It is other people, all others, who create the fabric of our lives and shape the way we live. Each is a note in the ‘great concert’ of existence, as the poet Tagore phrased it. No one can resist the call of love. We always end up opening ourselves to it. I truly believe that man is intrinsically good. We must always see the good, the beautiful, in a person, never destroy, always look for someone’s greatness without distinction of religion, caste, or belief.”
The relationship between having a good heart and happiness is growing ever clearer. They engender and reinforce each other and both reflect oneness with our inner nature. Joy and satisfaction are closely tied to love and affection. As for misery, it goes hand in hand with selfishness and hostility.
Generating and expressing kindness quickly dispels suffering and replaces it with lasting fulfillment. In turn, the gradual actualization of genuine happiness allows kindness to develop as the natural reflection of inner joy.