Doing for others

The selfishness you don't even admit to is the most deadly. People are all too ready to admit now of the Eighties' excesses. Yes, that Randian view that simply going for your own desires with full force will make everything work out is dangerous. Yet Adam Smith is still right that we do not need butchers who are saints to get food at a fair price. And as America has found, a constitution that does not require or assume goodness in its political appointees has considerably more lasting power than one that does.

It it the new selfishness that alarms me: the one that no one admits to. If the 80s shouted 'ME!' at the top of their voice, the nineties and the noughties whisper '(me me me me me)' in a far more insidious fashion. I call it 'doing for others'. Its core principle is that nothing you do that makes you feel virtuous and altruistic can be wrong, and that this emotion is what virtue is all about. Such first-person-centred, feeling-led charity has no room for unpleasant sacrifice or difficult choices: it is virtue-lite, favoured by dilettantes with no objection to using other people's lives like toys. The archetypical example is giving spare change to a beggar who then goes and dies of an ovedose purchased with your money. The more subtle example would be something like aid to an African nation that hollows out local capacity and entrenches corrupt elites so leaving it worse off than before.

What this 'moral selfishness' forgets is how hard it is to act even in our own best interests. The combination of arrogance and uncertainty in acting for others is perilous in the extreme. But no one seems to remember that old staple of conventional wisdom, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', or the cruel recurrence of unintended consequences. Here, the feeling of virtue justifies, or renders irrelevant, the actual consequences.

It is true that where people only attend to their own interests civil society falters. It is also true that when they use the suffering of others as a means to stroke their own conscience, regardless of the result, they partake in a form of egocentrism at least equally deadly. The best thing to do for another person is not necessarily (why should it be?) what makes us feel good about ourselves. All too often it will remind us of the limits of our power. I think of Wagner's Wotan, in Die Walkure, Act II: 'dem selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen -/Knechte erknet' ich mir nur!' (for the free man has to fashion himself-/serfs are all I can shape!).