But maybe I should be less vague and expand on these ideas of
exchange objects and unconditional giving. I guess I'm going to make a mess of
things for now, which I'll probably have to clean up later. But when I talk
about exchange objects, pleasures and giving, I'm not just talking about
material goods. Those figure in sure, but it would be a sad and boring world if
all we could talk about was the exchange of material goods, though I'm sure the
mainstream economists would be quite content with that.
Besides, Peter Singer has already made the donation argument: that
we should donate what we can so long as it doesn't harm ourselves, because it
is our moral responsibility to help those in need. And Marx has philosophized
pretty thoroughly about material exchange. Plenty of work has been done to
advance arguments like that.
What I want to talk about is more along the lines of what David
Foster Wallace was interested in. I quote: “The really important kind of
freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and
being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and
over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day…” What a beautiful thing to
say! I would suggest reading the whole talk.
But thinking about what Wallace talks about in his work, it
becomes apparent that we don’t just live by material currencies and the
exchange of material objects, our very culture takes its shape from the
everyday social/relational exchanges we make with one another every day.
We operate in social currencies. We think certain things about
each other, and much of the everyday pleasure we experience comes from
experiencing not only what feels good to us materially, but what others think
and feel about us socially. We operate on a complex social economy, the
functions of which result in an environment that has a powerful effect on
individuals.
There’s also great despair and pain in what we sometimes think and
feel about each other, especially as the material avenues we use to display our
social selves become progressively more constrained. Our culture encourages us
to perpetually climb one another while becoming the best at any one skill so
that we may be worshiped by as great a number as possible.
All of those perceived as inferiors we mock viciously. Each minor
social revolution comes coupled with bitter satires of other failed social
revolutions. The only comedy permitted on the increasingly concentrated media
organs are those saturated with black irony, or if light-hearted, necessarily
populated with weak contrivances. Each demographic attempting to express
earnestness is cordoned off and labeled, perpetuated in the intellectual realm
as stereotypes. The result is that no one gets to communicate with one another.
Everyone is to supply greater visions of a good or just life and be worshiped
for it, as opposed to living that good life itself.
Unconditional giving in this case consists of temporarily
forgetting your self in your relation to others. Doing for others, and giving
everyone the benefit of a doubt…this is the way out. To give unconditionally doesn't have to mean donating some large fund to a foundation. It can mean
doing something for someone without expecting anything in return, or paying
tribute to someone’s unique character and showing your appreciation for their
presence within the dense interconnections of your life.
It can mean having compassion for another’s’ unique character and
perhaps stepping aside when interests conflict, voluntarily giving someone
power who is deemed to be deserving.
We talk about entering into more communal relations and casting
aside exchange logic when it comes to material possessions, giving up
conceptions of private property and market relations and adopting communal
cooperation, but we should also be talking about what it means to interact
socially on a communal level as well.
Much of our social interaction relies on the social self. Someone
slights us, which could be seen to subtract power from the self, so to replace
that lost power we either must slight the person back or else they should accommodate
us in some way that is a fair repayment. The inverse goes for when someone
gives to us. We feel the need to repay that gift. These are deeply ingrained
psychological mechanisms and they can’t always be bypassed. Oftentimes they are
even useful to ordering certain social relations.
However, there is something else to consider: the broken self.
This society seems to have become quite adept at producing broken people that
are suffering from some psychological pathology or another. For example, when
someone is in pain, they may lash out at others, withdraw socially, fall into a
depression, become paranoid or distrustful, become excessively clingy, or engage
in any number of other socially disruptive behaviors. When such behaviors are a
result of people in pain, which happens day to day for various reasons: people
are overworked by other scared, miserable, lonely broken people, people are
economically stressed, people have no higher institutions to trust or greater
communities to be loved in, people are having numerous health problems and
suffering from various addictions, etc.
So for many it is very easy to forget the cruelties one is
inflicting on one’s own immediate social network. Whoever can become conscious
of the need for unconditional giving has a moral obligation to find as much
compassion as possible for these broken people, and do all they can to assuage
the pain and insecurities of these individuals, even when a broken person’s social
behaviors benefit others in no possible way. These people are undoubtedly
locked into these patterns of behavior and have already alienated friends and
family, and are quickly becoming ever more lonely and miserable, necessitating
the development of new addictions and escapist tendencies to cope, leading to
more suffering.
Unconditional giving means allowing one’s social consciousness to
drift away from the self and towards others. True compassion is not just trying
to imagine oneself in another’s shoes, but the entire subjective experience of
others as different people from oneself, who may have different needs,
sensitivities, thought processes, fixations, and etc.
