Reaching
Out
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| Third Year photograph from School which I took for the Year Book. Some will be friends for life! |
He brought us to his little studio where he had many
carved heads, which you will see in the photos that accompany these lines that
to my mind were of ancient Celtic design as they were carved out of granite
rock, at least so it appeared to me, a total neophyte in sculpture. He also had some of his paintings on the
walls. On a small desk to the front of
his studio he displayed a Visitor’s Book that was signed by many. This man was reaching out to us to talk about
his art, albeit in broken English and our rudimentary Italian.
What is that Desire or Drive to Reach Out and in turn
to Receive?
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| Students Council presenting cheque to Arthritis Society |
Secondly, let me refer to the theory of social
Darwinism which was extremely popular in the late nineteenth century (1870s in
USA and the UK). Social Darwinists generally argued
that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak
should see their wealth and power decrease. Different social Darwinists have
different views about which groups of people are the strong and the
weak, and they also hold different opinions about the precise mechanism
that should be used to promote strength and punish weakness. This type of
thinking can obviously lead to fascism and racism at its extreme interpretation
as we have seen so vividly in Nazism and Stalinism and so forth.
Thirdly, let me
mention the role of friendship in life.
Essentially friendship is an important factor in what I have termed
above as the desire or drive to reach out and its opposite to receive. Many years ago I remember learning about the
ancient Greek understanding of this phenomenon.
Aristotle gives great praise his concept of friendship or philia,
which includes not only voluntary relationships but also those relationships
that hold between the members of a family. Friendship, says Aristotle, is a
virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no
one would choose to live, though he had all other goods’.
If friendship is so
important to the good life, then it is important to ask the question, what is
friendship? According to Aristotle, for a person to be friends with another ‘it
is necessary that [they] bear good will to each other and wish good things for
each other, without this escaping their notice’. Friendships that are based
partly or wholly on virtue are desirable not only because they are associated
with a high degree of mutual benefit, but also because they are associated with
companionship, dependability, and trust. More important still, to be in such a
friendship and to seek out the good of one’s friend is to exercise reason and
virtue, which is the distinctive function of human beings, and which amounts to
happiness or what Aristotle terms “eudaimonia.”
And yet, there is
still a deeper sense to the drive or desire to reach out that is purely
altruistic, that has absolutely no self-interest in it for the giver, as in
those who work for causes greater than themselves: people who join such
organizations like Vincent de Paul, The Red Cross, Goal, Trócaire, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and so forth for purely
altruistic reasons. I will readily admit
that there is a return factor for the giver, namely that of satisfaction, and a
positive feel-good factor. However, my
point here is that there is something more than the mere biological, more the
mere egotistical or self-interest at work in my above named desire or drive to
reach out and to receive in return.
If the Greeks spoke
about “philia” which we have defined above, the early Christians spoke about
“agape.” Agape is selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love, the highest
of the four types of love in the Bible. [Eros, Storge and Philia are the
other three terms used]. There are
indeed many incidents of people laying down their lives not alone for their
friends, but for others whom they don’t even know at all, like a teacher or
doctor or care worker or child-minder protecting those whom they care for from
a lunatic gunman, or simply a fireman or Garda or any member of the public putting
his or her life at risk to save another.
Now that drive or desire to reach out to another in such a purely
selfless and dramatic or dynamic way cannot be explained by any of the theories
I have outlined above. Or simply how
does one explain random acts of kindness? Surely they are more than just the
opposite of random acts of violence? Now, therefore, I wish to call this
phenomenon I’m discussing here the Greatest Highest Factor to which we can
aspire as human beings?
Are we Less or More?
Perhaps one of the
less desirable characteristics of the human race is its hubris or pride that would over-estimate its own abilities and
indeed even its own virtues. This, of
course has led to all types of oppression and exploitation of other human
beings (deemed to be less than human as in slavery), of animals (destruction of
species, endangering other species to feed the greed for ivory or whatever) and
indeed of the earth through destruction of nature and the pollution of the
environment.
However, we are more
than those reductionists that Dawkins et al would have us be. We are more in our desires to reach out, our
drive to do good, in our moral awareness, in so far as, in the words of the
great contemporary Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, we act within
moral frameworks and horizons of value that are greater than us. Such moral frameworks and horizons of value
are very clearly felt at our heart’s core in times of moral judgments in the
wake of horrific crimes like those tried at Nuremberg in the wake of atrocities
committed during the Second World War.
That sense of moral wrongness, of gross deviation from what we
instinctively or intuitively believe is right is surely a pointer to what is
more in the human person than a mere collocation of atoms, molecules or organs;
to what is more in the human person than a mere correct choice of acting; to
what is more in human society than the mere wellbeing of the greatest number of
its citizens.
What is the more?
Many years ago (1994)
I was asked by a learned theologian who was the second reader of my S.T.L.
thesis what was the more in the human person at my defense of my piece of
academic work before a panel of three Doctors of theology. From this distance
in time I cannot recall what precisely I said then. I most probably said something about the
grace of God which lives in every human soul.
Back then in the 1990s we spoke of grace as being “the theology of
Christian relationships.” Today, I would
not put the answer in such theological terms as a non-practicing Catholic who
likes to describe himself as a Christian-Buddhist, whose two great heroes are
the founders of both these religions.
What I’d say now is that the human being is more insofar as he is not
just an animal with a high IQ. He is an
animal also with an EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and an SQ (Spiritual
Intelligence). There are times when I am
meditating that some power other than me moves through me, a power that I
firmly believe to be greater than me.
This is the SQ dimension I believe, to which we humans can allow
ourselves to be open. I believe that SQ
shows itself in all religions in their purest forms (not in their impure forms
as in Jihad or Crusades, Inquisitions or Conquistadores). However, I also believe that SQ shows itself
in many other manifestations outside of religion: in arts and crafts, in sports
and in music – in all creative pursuits.
This for me is humankind in its Highest Common Factor. Too many of us subscribe to the Lowest Common
Denominator of what we humans are and can be.
