Let’s see, selfishness, a word habitually and ably used as a club, or as an obscurantist fog. What’s that you say? the word wasn’t selfishness, but rather hypocrite? Well, technically, I suppose you’re right, but then really if hypocrite is going to have any meaning whatsoever, tell me what you think, it seems to me the word selfishness must be involved.
Really, what would you do with a tippler or smoker who adamented against their own practice? Surly you wouldn’t admonish them for being hypocrites, even if they smoke or tippled in private, excluding substantive hope of being recompensed for secrecy , would you? Wouldn’t you rather call them victims of biology, sociology or some such? Naturally!
Which obviously dispenses with recidivism as well. So in honesty, for many of us anyway, neither contradiction nor habitual transgression is really the cardinal sin of what we call hypocrisy, and as that is belabored lets play with that other club, selfishness.
Oh, wait, some circumlocution is tethering my brain. How is it, for instance, that as a society and culture we feel both aggrieved and pitiful at the plight of smokers and feel them to be victims exploited by tobacco companies and then in the same breath give sanction to, nay demand of our government, that it exploit smokers yet more? Here are these victims of forces beyond their control and yet our response is to take yet more money out of their pocket--they deserve to have their money taken away from them we say--levy heavier taxes still we say--let them pay for our health care those evil creatures, but wait I thought they were victims? And what should we call our selves and our government in this action? Charitable? Certainly not.
And in passing, I might add, though hypocrite seems to lack the bite one might wish with the above examples, that does not mean there isn’t remedy. If so desired we might call such a one irresolute, or perhaps with more bite, weak, and needless to say we can as a function of choice decide that this or that attribute of an individual is such that we choose to not associate with said person beyond what may be absolutely necessary, or conversely, that on the whole, this or that failing is not so much that all association must be broke. At any rate this choice may well rub up against the notion of tolerance, which I think is why so many prefer the word hypocrite, particularly PCer’s, as then one is relieved of tolerance obligations.
So then, to this word selfishness, and with apologies, to further this on the quick I mention the situation of Senator Craig. The specifics have been well elucidated elsewhere and we can leave it at that.
But what I do find of interest is this idea: “Had he simply admitted and acceded to his physical inclinations (whatever those may be) all would be well.”
Really?
“Yes,” they say, because “he was not true to his inner nature, and the retribution for such sinning is nature’s revenge.”
And I reply, “yours is a most terrible god indeed. What could be more debilitating, more terrible than to say the offense was the in-admission of inclination. Had he merely done so ‘all would be well.’ This animating idea that says one’s emotion, one’s mind, one’s own soul should be in service to the physical body. Isn’t that upside down? making a heaven of hell?--Isn’t that a perversion of the proper order of life? of liberty?”
Who believes that? neither you nor I believe that for a moment, not really, or how would we explain suicide by self willed starvation? And wouldn’t such an intellectual position lay waste as farce the idea of self improvement? Or how is it in a nation chalk full of self help books, with a tradition of the New Years Resolution, that is dedicated to the notion of self betterment by means of self assertion by way of the will and discipline; how is it that a strange bizarre hue and cry arose, “hypocrite.” What is it we call that?
“But Jon you say, I thought we were talking about selfishness.”
“Correct,” I say and “therefore don’t you believe that each of us has the right, the freedom, within legal limits of course, to choose to amend our condition in whatever way we deem proper? And so to insist that individuals in order to receive your sanction your sympathy must then confess to being a victim to this or that which is beyond one’s own influence--that is to confess oneself wholly as an object, subject wholly to political exploitation, what could possibly be more selfish?”
And yet, that is what the left world-view is (derived from post-modernism). Submission without recompense. It offers redemption by way of destruction: Destroy the grace of the soul; destroy the reason of the mind; destroy the sympathy of emotion; and finally destroy the flesh of the body--or what else do you believe abortion and euthanasia are? Each ascending understanding is destroyed by recourse of the lower understandings. So that sympathy is used to destroy reason, and reason to destroy grace. In doing so each understanding destroys the very font that gives it sustenance.
But here I must interject, as it happens I was wandering in my reading, as I’m prone to do, and I found myself reading Matthew, yes that Matthew, and I found in Matthew 6 a succinct and extraordinary elucidation of both selfishness and hypocrisy in this short and revealing passage:
“Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men.”
*****
It is said by many that selfishness is the bane of existence, but I wonder how many of us have a firm grasp on what selfishness is. Is it possible that many of us do not, but nonetheless we are all too happy to use a dead word as a cudgel to batter our opposition, but that is precisely what dead thought does because it is body without soul. Not that the soul is absent but rather it is cut off from influence.
The line between what is called selfishness and self expression can be a fine one. Can I describe one who in the public eye is a great humanitarian, a selfless giver of time, money, and physical exertion as selfish? Certainly! Does such a person contemn others for not acting precisely as he does? What could be more selfish? Does one pursue philanthropic endeavors as recognized by received wisdom, to run from, purify, squelch the face of one’s own soul? What could be more selfish? Good works of themselves are neither selfless or selfish. When untinctured by grace, disavowed by reason, unmoved by sympathy there is not selflessness, bur rather its inverse, selfishness.
Let me rather witness someone’s joy in purchasing a house, hitting a home-run, recovering from the flu--let me see their exuberance, joy, self satisfaction, as that self satisfaction is an expression that belongs to all of humanity and is in fact selfless by means of self expression. Fore if it is true but for the grace of God there go I, then it is true that by the grace of God there go I.
Me too, just doing the best I can to take the next step in getting things right.
*****
The foregoing may suggest to you that I believe the individual lives through others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather the individual discovers others by means of living; self expression; self knowing; self understanding. Through the experience of our own lives we create the language that allows us to know others by way of ourselves.
When some say that the group requires the sublimation of self expression for the betterment of the group, as a principle, and not as a discrete action, they are then speaking on behalf of tyranny and the impoverishment of the individual.
That too I admit rubs against a fine line. Here, by group, I mean a group that the individual isn’t free to join or quit or never admit to having ever joined. That is a group that has as near as possible absolute coercive power. That would be government.
Yes government is itself no neutral thing. I believe consent by the governed is the only legitimacy that is available to just government, and government should be constituted to form a more perfect union for and by the group from which it is constituted. A just government in theory and practice is a free assembly and as such must afford that same principle, free assembly, to its sub groups, or it usurps authority not granted or authorized by the source of its legitimacy.
Still, the individual cannot demand acceptance of his self expression, as that itself is an imposition that is wholly unwarranted, unjustifiable, as it denies the same right to others that it asserts for itself.
Yes, this applies to assemblies too.
Just government must be as circumspect as practicable when considering what limits it will set to free expression. We call this limited government. But freely crafted groups must on the other hand be as free to self define as is possible within the limits of agreed upon law; otherwise, the group’s right to free expression is arbitrarily sacrificed to governmental fiat.
That is, an individual’s right to free expression is denied if that individual joins a group, by free action, and that group by inclination of governmental action, beyond the prescription of limited government, proscribes the expression of the group. Fundamental to group formation is who to admit and who to bar from the group.
Abstractly, the right of free assembly is in no more need of defense as to its possible peculiarities than the right of free speech, which is to say that here I will not be burdened with defending the merits of a freely constituted assembly anymore than I will bother with the merits or lack thereof, notwithstanding legal limits for either, of a freely given speech.
Free assembly is the canary in the mine.
Coerced groupings is socialism/fascism. Its personality is unrestrained selfishness. Its so called intellectual structure is so presumptuous, egotistical, and stupid as to boggle the mind. It presumes the meaning of life--as if it had a clue (by way of illegitimate coercion it reveals itself as clueless). It prescribes remedies based upon its presumed meaning as if these prescriptions are self evident goods. Yet, it can be nothing more than mediocre sentiment born from sloggy consensus. That is, far from being the height of human wisdom, being charitable, it is rather the dregs. It is a tyrant whose appetite for power is insatiable.