How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

My mother likes entertaining friends and family at her house. She is what you might consider a great hostess. Whenever she has guests she makes their wellbeing her prime concern: Do you have enough to drink? Do you want some more pudding? Are you okay sat there? (to me, who is usually sat on the floor due to lack of seats).

Her approach is not born of pretension. She is not, to the best of my knowledge, interested in being known as for her social grace. In fact, given her feminist credentials, the idea of being viewed as the stereotypical woman of the house would be one she would actively shun. Instead, the care and consideration shown to her guests stems from a genuine desire to ensure that they are happy. Only when she has fulfilled this need to her own satisfaction is she free to relax and attend to her own needs.

This is not to say that my mother is overly fawning; the kind of hostess whose over exuberant displays of attention only serve to make their guests uncomfortable. She is much more subtle then that. However, by the end of a long visit or a large gathering, as well as being visibly contented she is also noticeably tired.

I have, to a certain extent, inherited this characteristic, though my way of dealing with it is entirely different. I rarely entertain guests and, when I do, they are usually close friends or family. It's not that I don't enjoy the company of others (well, it's not just that), but I know that when I invite people to my house I will not be able to relax as I normally do. This is less of an issue when the visitors are close family and friends; I can trust that, when their needs arise, they can take care of themselves - treating my house as their house.
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Altruism is distracting. If, while trying to watch the latest episode of Lost, I could hear someone crying from another room in the house I would not be able to enjoy the show. The sobs would be a sound of immediacy; of importance; of a greater significance then what I was doing. Continuing my viewing in these circumstances would seem cold and self-indulgent. If appropriate, I would be compelled to offer my assistance to the person in need and, only once I had helped to rectify their problem, could I return to my vicariously-mysterious island in the Pacific. My only alternative would be to turn up the volume on my TV and hope that, in time, I would forget what I had heard; that the images on the screen would replace those in my mind.

If you learn of a problem, be in personal, social or environmental, and you know that, in some way, you could make a contribution toward the solution; your conscious decision not to do so is one that also involves costs. It is impossible to unlearn something, but you can attempt to forget by a process of distracting yourself in the varieties of life. However, this suppression has a ‘mental cost’, the extent of this cost plays itself out in a number of ways in people’s lives and I will explore them at another time. The point I am making here is this: while ignorance may be bliss, wilful apathy is not.

I try to solve some problems as I learn of them. I regularly write letters to prisoners of conscience, I recycle, I boycott Coca-Cola, I give regular donations to charity (though not to the extent that it diminishes my ability to afford the frivolous things I enjoy). Performing these activities is not a great infringement on my quality of life, but they allow me to say, with a certain self-satisfaction that ‘I do my bit’. When presented with a further problem I can justify to myself the claims that ‘my life is already is full of responsibilities’ and ‘that someone else needs to pick up the slack on this one’.

This leads me to three questions: To what extent can this attitude be seen as a valid one? Where do our responsibilities towards one another, the communities we live in and world in general end? How many problems can one person be reasonably expected to solve in the course of their life?
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Taken from the perspective of a single life, the problems of the world are infinite and insurmountable. Between my ten o’clock protest at the weapons fair and my ten-thirty stint at the local soup kitchen I am unlikely to find the time to intercept a Norwegian whaling vessel. The economics of both time and space demand that problems are compartmentalized and institutionalised. This gives birth to charities with as specific yet varied remits as The British Hedgehog Preservation Society and Shelter Cymru – supporting badly housed people in Wales.

Although they may receive limited funding from governments and private fund (such as the lottery commission), these institutions only continue to exist because of the financial support they receive from altruistic individuals. These supporters give money because they are moved by the issues; they pay others to work on their behalf to solve the problems of the world. This has the cathartic effect of answering that nagging psychic question ‘Should I be doing more?’.

This is, no doubt, a good thing, providing both personal and social benefits. There is little surprise that the practice is encouraged by all major religions. However, this approach only removes the question by degree. We now ask ourselves: ‘To what extent should I sacrifice my personal needs to give financial support to others?’

Consider my mother’s little get together. Let us assume that there is an optimal number of people that she can entertain for an optimal length of time, say four people for four hours. Any more then this and either her health or her guest’s happiness would be compromised; any less and she could have invited someone else. Her hospitality produces a gain of sixteen ‘happiness hours’.

Now, suppose that my mother could afford to hire some help for the evening - Jeeves the butler (for no other reason then the name makes me smile). For simplicity’s sake, Jeeves works at the same rate as my mother (there are a multitude of reasons why he may not but, again, I will explore these at another time). Once Jeeves is busy serving drinks and propping cushions my mother would be free to do what she needed, though nothing more could be done to improve her guest’s stay. From this arrangement we are able to infer two further scenarios.

In the first my mother decides to throw a larger party. What argument could then be made for my mother to invite another four guests and wait on them herself thereby increasing the total of happiness hours to thirty-two. Why stop there? Assuming she could afford it, why not hire a small army of Jeeveses who could bring happiness to a banquet of hundred?

Conversely, is my mother was contented with the butlered gathering of four, to what extent is she now free to act as she wishes? Anything she does with her newly liberated time which jeopardises the well being of the guest could be viewed as counterproductive. If, for example, she was now able to get drunk, insult her guests and spit in the punch, one could legitimately question the wisdom of hiring help.

This leads us to the idea of the net impact of altruism. Today I could give everything I own to charity and shortly die of starvation, or I could give ten percent of my earnings for the the rest of my life - Which would amount to more?

Similarly, I could give X in direct debits to environmental charities yet continue to use my four wheel drive and consume Y amount of pollution emitting, non-renewable resources. How can I be sure I am solving rather then contributing to the problem? To what extent am I simply trying to balance the equation of my life? Do such reliable, independent ways of assessing our net impact on the world exist?
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I enjoy writing letters to prisoners of conscience as my mother enjoys preparing meals for others. These are emotional responses that, in this instance, needn’t be intellectualized any further. However, I wouldn’t enjoy having substantially less money because, in a moment of crazed generosity, I had given it away in to charity.

In my mother’s hypothetical banquet she would have got pleasure from seeing the happiness of her guests. They would also be able to thank her for their evening, recognising that the Jeeveses were at her expense and for their benefit. No doubt this positive feedback would also be rewarding.

At this point the analogy fails when applied to the world of large, multinational charities. We can never be completely certain that the money we give is helping to finance a sanitation project in Uganda or the mortgage repayment on the Chief Exec’s detached house in Kent. While there may be something slightly distasteful in the new approach of charities, where supporters ‘adopt’ a project, animal or even a child, and are given regular feedback on their progress, it is a rare individual who gives confidentially yet substantially.

I do things to help the world and those around me, but does the fact that I could do more necessarily mean that I should? Would the loss of my leisure time and disposable income lead to a brightly-burning, but ultimately short-lived burst of altruism?

As with most things, the proof of the altusim-pudding is very much in it's eating. If you enjoy giving to charity you will continue doing so; if you don't you probably won't. However, one could question the extent to which those who pretend to delight in giving away their money and time serve to provide excuses (however unintentionally) to those who are more honest about their motivations. How often do you hear people claim that they leave charity work to those who enjoy doing it? At the risk of creating a nation of martyrs, I would welcome more honesty on this subject. The existence of a world of problems does not presuppose an elite of willing problem solvers. Before the end we may all have to take our turn as Jeeves, however reluctantly.