On Selfishness

I am a divorced father of four, so I see my kids only on the weekends. My fiancée and I try to have a quiet, clean, relaxed place for them to come. I don't make big plans, or take them on jaunts around the city; we usually stay home, have a few simple consistent meals, walk to the park, play games, and talk.

Our favorite time to talk is over meals. Somehow, every time we sit down to eat, the conversation wanders into some odd philosophic or scientific or religious territory. Sometimes it gets snarled up there, caught in brambles of confusion, until we have to give up and say "We'll explain when you're older." But usually we pull through, and we like to think that sometimes what we say sinks in...

Last weekend, my oldest daughter, who is almost 12, said, "You know, people never do anything unless it helps them out in some way."

"What?" I said. "That's not true. I feed you guys, don't I?"

"Sure," she said, laughing. "But we're your kids, and you love us. So you're really doing it so that you will feel good. Most of the time, when people help other people, it's just so that they can feel good."

My fiancée and I looked at each other. What do you say to that?

And I have to admit that for me, it was a bit worrisome. My daughter is a sweet girl, and very giving, although I have noticed a recent trend toward a bit more self-centeredness than she had in the past -- probably just because she's on the cusp of adolescence. But to my mind there is no question that the larger culture of America is a lot more self-centered than is healthy. Our schools, our advertising, our media, and much of our everyday lives are saturated with the myths of the Self-Made Man -- the Humble Worker Who Makes It Big, the Fire Thief Who Steals Riches From the Gods -- idealized archetypes of people going out and being all self-sufficient and self-focused and successful, whatever that really means. Some myths are healthy, but this one is not. It's important to carry your fair share in society, but humanity is a social species, community is essential, and we all rely on each other and support each other.

I think my daughter's heart is in the right place; I don't think, if it comes down to it, she is really that self-centered. But if she continues to believe this as she grows older, if she continues to look around the world and see every act of charity and altruism as cold-blooded selfish calculation, is that good for her?

There are far too few of us who really understand selflessness. I want my daughter to be one of them.

How to explain this to her? We tried to marshal our thoughts and facts, to provide counter-arguments and counter-examples, but in the end I think she was unconvinced.

And I think -- after musing on it this week -- it's because she is right, in a sense. There is a part of us that is always calculating our selfish interests. Maybe it's an ancient holdover from our ancestors among the primates of the veldt; maybe it's even older, going back to the first vertebrates who, as Pratchett said, "divided [the world] into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks."

But that's not the only part of us. There is also the part that observes the world with detachment, quite unconnected to our bodies and social standing -- the part that is fascinated by the structure of crystals, that is captivated and carried away by music and poetry, that patiently disentangles genetic code and charts the rise and fall of the stars. And there's the part that deeply knows right from wrong, which instinctively recoils with disgust from violence and thievery in the same way that other animals recoil from feces. And the part that experiences the oneness of everything in the universe. And the part that gets to know another person so deeply and intimately that, when you're with them, all sense of separate self falls away...

These parts of the self are usually forgotten by American culture, or else they're shackled and bent to the task of self-aggrandizement. So fascinated and hypnotized are we by the idea of individual rights and self-sufficiency that these other parts of ourselves, if they are indeed parts of something that can be called a Self, are barely recognized. And yet it's these parts that make us most profoundly human, and bring us closest to the highest potential of our species.

I don't know if I can really explain this to a twelve year old. Our culture and language make it difficult to even talk about these things with adults. All I know for sure is that I can try to model them for her -- to be an example of someone who values these parts of himself, and lives by their guidance. In this, as in so many things in parenting, the highest calling of a parent is to be the best person you can be.