Of Dubious Moral Fads and Bread
Twenty years ago, a fad arose around a movie, the premise of which was to do something good for someone and then tell them to 'pay it forward' to someone else. It was a nice enough idea in general, at least for a movie plot, though the film tanked and it soon became obvious that the moral tenet of the piece was more flimsy and stupid than the rubbish chain emails people used to send out at about the same time. The movie, Pay it Forward (2000) was, to one critic at the time, "reprehensible". Everyone in the film plays along and magically benefits and a curmudgeon teacher suddenly realizes that people are inherently good and loses his cynicism. It has a 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is forgettable at best.
The thesis of this movie arose in my mind a few days ago while we were picking up bread for our lunches at the local grocery market. We had our small assortment of groceries paid for by the lady in front of us. She, it turned out, had had her own oddments paid for moments before by the gentleman in front of her. As she paid for our things, she looked back with a magnanimous smile and said, "pay it forward". Nice enough, you might think. Perhaps under other, less embarrassing, less frustrating circumstances.
As we both glanced over our shoulders to see who was behind us, an elderly person with a buggy full of meat and premium food products was just scooting into the checkout lane. Neither of us was prepared to pay her grocery bill at that moment, so we skedaddled, heads held low, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Once in the relative anonymity of our vehicle, we puffed and sighed and made unhappy, rueful noises. After all, we had been forced to accept another person's charity and then in full view of the cashier and possibly other customers, it looked like we flat refused to ‘pay it forward’ ourselves. We didn’t ask for the charity and we certainly didn’t ask to be loaded down with the guilt of not paying the good deed forward in response. The whole thing felt terrible, especially in light of the fact that neither of us had needed to pull out our wallets to pay. It clearly didn't give us the feeling of having been helped, which is usually one of humble gratitude.
I have been a student of morality for several decades. I’m no expert (no one is) but I’ve given long thought to our moral motivations and questions of why we developed morality and how that morality shows us up in our feeble attempts to categorize, label and then feel superior to others. There are some great works on morality out there and I highly recommend most of them. Morality usually defies definition, but it can be categorized within human behavior, at least enough for us to begin to know what we feel is right and wrong in the scheme of daily life.
Human morality is of perennial fascination for philosophers mainly because unlike most monotheistic religious doctrines would have us believe, human decency is complex, nuanced, difficult to understand and often defies our expectations. Morality is directly linked to our evolutionary survival as a species. It has a foundational connection to the normative behaviors in our social lexicon. We are a social species and morality is, in part, the interpersonal currency we use to navigate the convoluted seas of human development and relationships. The undiluted reality is that at some very important point in our history we had to begin to show kindness to other humans in order to keep enough of us alive to make it through the bleak, dangerous wastelands of our frail origins. If only one survives but everyone else dies, no one survives. Cooperation, kindness, generosity, the ability to see ourselves in the suffering of other people, to recognize our homogeneity and heterogeneity all stem from our moral and ethical concerns during the darkness of our human ancestry. Those moral values have prevailed alongside the violent and genocidal mechanisms that exist in contradictory dichotomy in our heads even today.
Certainly, not all humans have a generous impulse, nor are we all charitable or kind. There are enough of us, now, for it to seem like humanity has a morality problem and religious ideology has taken full advantage of that appearance in order to pounce on human morality as being rotten or malfunctioning or broken from the outset. They offer platitudes and bits of iron-age agrarian ‘wisdom’ claiming that the natural order is corrupted with sin. They create a crab-trap system bound by guilt and fear of eternal damnation. Once inside, it is nearly impossible to extract one’s operating morality from those so-called principles. People within these snow-globe models feel obliged to help, not because it is natural or universally beneficial or even utilitarian, but because they feel compelled lest something bad should happen to them. It belies the motivation for simple kindness and charity intrinsic in almost all of us and warps the desire to do good for its own sake.
If one wants to get an understanding for simple human morality, small children often set the best example. For instance, a child with a full lunch box may share some of her food with another child that doesn't have as much. There is no moral obligation to do this beyond natural empathy and the first child wishing to help or care for her friend. She is internally motivated but gives no thought to that motivation beyond friendship or kindness. When she tells her parents about her decision to help her classmate, they can make the child feel good about helping by making sure that she has enough in her lunch pail to share when needed and encourage this delightful impulse. This is normal, healthy human morality at work.
However, imagine if the little girl only shared her lunch with her friend with the proviso that the friend then pass along that same level of generosity to someone else. The entire thing would feel forced and insincere, as if the child can only benefit if they make certain that others benefit, too. If that child did pass along the help without the obligation, we recognize this as human morality under normal operation. They benefited from kindness and they want to help too. However, with the imperative to ‘pay it forward’ in place, it no longer feels like generosity nor does it feel moral. It becomes an expectation and the first act of kindness is robbed of any meaning or benefit. Except maybe for feeling bad about not being able to help even though you’ve been helped, there is no joy in paying it forward, only obligation.
Paying it forward is a bankrupt idea that was designed to get people to think that all it takes to feel moral is to do something nice to someone unbidden only once something nice has been done to them first. Once the deed is done, the onus is no longer on us, our quota apparently having been reached. The next person has to do something kind and so on, but that is out of our hands. Morality doesn’t have any escape clauses or quotas (outside of religion).
In his book, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant excavates an excellent formula for motivating human good from the rubbish and faux moralities popular in his day. He said that one should always act in such a way that one could hope that the maximizing of that action could become a universal law. In other words, if you share your lunch, that act could be easily taken up by anyone and not lose moral weight. He also said that if we can help then we are duty-bound to help. No strings or forwarding of obligation is necessary. It works well enough without that machanism.
While we are appreciative of the gesture in its purest form and would love to thank the nice person for her generosity, I would also caution her (when not caught off guard) that such acts are designed to employ guilt and a false sense of moral satisfaction. Other acts of kindness, even the very small and simple kind—holding a door, lending a sympathetic ear, sharing a smile or a friendly word—keep our world moving forward. Human morality isn't grandiose or magnificent. It cannot be based on coercion, guilt, threats or other tautological exhortations or expectations.
Human morality precedes modern bankrupt ideas like "pay it forward" and it will outlast them, too. As JRR Tolkien said, 'I have found that it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folks that keeps the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.' We need no special prosthetic of morality to help people. That way lies insincerity and eventually true moral bankruptcy. If we can help, we ought to do so. If we want to help, there is nothing more human and moral than to act on that desire. No strings, no obligation, no guilt, just ancient human morality at work.
