Paying attention to our emotions
by Colin Aitken.
Effective altruism is sometimes criticized for being cold and unfeeling, a way of taking the “heart” out of generosity. I think this is generally unfair: I’ve found the effective altruists I’ve met to be more caring and compassionate than the average person, not less. But doing the right thing is hard, and one only needs to scroll through a list of facebook fundraisers to find situations where our hearts and our minds disagree.
When I first started exploring effective altruism, I mistook perfectly normal emotions for evidence that I was “irrational” and thought that the proper response was to try to suppress any emotions I couldn’t justify logically. When this inevitably failed, I concluded that I was a bad effective altruist.
This is, to be blunt, an unhealthy side effect of the way we discuss altruism. These emotions are natural, not because we’re bad people but because we’re holistic, feeling beings who experience joy and sorrow and hope and love and a million other feelings. We don’t worship a stoic, indifferent God, but a Lord who grew impatient with fig trees and wept when his friend -- who he knew he was about to resurrect -- passed away. If we want the EA movement to be sustainable, we need to let people bring their whole selves to the table.
This problem isn’t specific to EA. My struggle with mental illness has been marked by deeply irrational thoughts and feelings, and any depressed person can tell you that trying to “just stop thinking” the negative thoughts does not work. Instead, a hard-won lesson of secular therapy is that the act of simply observing a feeling takes away much of its power, and allows one to ask questions like “why do I feel this way?” and “is there anything I need to do at this time?”
The Dilemma of Altruism: Emotional vs Rational Choices
I don’t mean to imply that “I would like to do something ineffective” and “I hate myself” are the same sort of feeling, or that in a short blog post I can teach you the full truth of something that took me months of therapy. But I do want to look at a scenario that I think EA has traditionally approached somewhat tactlessly: where I, committed to effective giving to fight global poverty, meet a homeless man on the street and feel perhaps some combination of compassion, sadness, and guilt.
We often reduce situations like this to two options: I could give in to my emotion, give this man money I could have donated to an effective charity, and thus help him at the cost of a larger number of people I haven’t met. Or I make the “rational” choice to suppress the emotion, ignore the man, and move on with my life, perhaps making myself a bit less compassionate.
Instead of immediately reducing this man’s life and worth to inputs into some sort of effectiveness calculation, suppose I simply stop and pay attention to my emotions. I notice that I’m feeling compassion for the man, sad that he’s in a painful predicament, a little bit angry that our society allows (causes?) this to happen, and maybe a bit guilty that I probably won’t help him out.
Understanding My Emotions: A Spiritual Perspective
A first question might be “why am I feeling this way?” In this case, the answer is obvious: I’m upset because a person made in the image of God is suffering. And I’m right to feel this way, because we know from scripture that God himself mourns his people’s pain, even when he doesn’t intervene. And so I find that my emotion wasn’t irrational at all: this man is in a sad and unjust situation, and it’s healthy and even loving for me to acknowledge that, regardless of whether the best course of action is to help him financially.
However, there can also be deeper layers to explore: perhaps I feel more strongly about giving to this man than others because somewhere in the depths of my heart I don’t quite think of faraway people as being as valuable as my neighbors. This is not how God sees people, so this is both something to repent of and an opportunity to grow spiritually, to learn to see people in my heart the way my mind knows God sees them. Perhaps I currently give towards animal welfare and the feeling reflects a deeper worry that I should be focusing on people. This doesn’t necessarily mean I shift my giving -- perhaps my feeling is wrong! -- but it’s an invitation to think carefully about what I value and why part of me feels conflicted, rather than simply burying it all.
On the other hand, even if my heart makes the “rational” decision there may still be sin hiding just out of sight. Western culture fosters a certain distrust of our unhoused neighbors, seeing them as lazy (“why don’t they just get jobs?”), degenerate (“they’ll just spend it on drugs and alcohol”), or even dangerous (“don’t touch them or you’ll get hepatitis”). This kind of uncharitable assumption is sinful, and often hides even deeper sins of pride and false superiority. No matter how effectively we donate or work, love and compassion are at the center of Christian ethics and cannot be discarded.
There will always be further questions, equally important to answer: What should I do with this emotion? Was I really going to do something “more effective” with the change in my pocket? Are there non-financial ways I can help the man? What does Christian love look like when I can’t do anything to help? Am I treating him with dignity? Can the compassion I’m feeling help me in places where I can make a difference? How has the global church traditionally processed feelings of lament towards injustice?
I cannot tell you the right way to answer every question, and I certainly can’t tell you the right way to process your feelings. But I do want to put in a vote for listening.