Humanity Saves Itself
[This post is about an ideal. There may be good arguments against striving for this ideal. If one does strive for the ideal then this point should be kept in mind.]
I’m not sure how common this mistake is, but sometimes I get to feeling like heroes are above humanity. Like they’ve transcended, stepped above, and are reaching back to help others. But when I try to live up to this kind of ideal I almost inevitably come to feel burdened, flat, demotivated, and alienated.
This remains true even after coming across some extremely useful techniques for handling my emotions. I’m able to dissipate negative emotions by realizing that emotions are intrinsically orthogonal both to the state of the world and to the values I have over those states. I’m also able to sit with negative emotions by accepting them, neither fighting nor fleeing them. Armed with these techniques I can embrace all my emotions, I can remove suffering from my physical and emotional pain, and I can greatly amplify the pleasure I gain from many experiences.
Even so, I still run into problems when I view myself as something above humanity and human concern. What I call this higher class is unimportant, whether it’s “player characters”, “spiritually developed humans”, or anything else.
When I view myself as approximately without any concerns or need for consideration, then when my own desires arise I think to myself “Ah! I have the ability to be free of suffering in any situation! I will therefore universally apply this power to any of my concerns that don’t assist me in being a bad-ass hero.” This separates me from connecting emotionally with the concerns and values of my own life. There are two or three problems with this approach.
- My life becomes flat when I cease to care about its ups and downs. Happiness is much more vivid when you pay attention to it and are glad of it. And there are better ways to be unruffled by small concerns.
- It becomes much easier to view altruism as a burden when I don’t assign importance to the quality of my own life. I think I experience this effect less than most, but it’s certainly very significant.
- When I don’t care about the good or bad things in my own life it then becomes much harder to care about the existence of those things in the lives of others. I’ve written about this previously.
When I view myself as something above the majority of humanity I then come to feel alienated from that humanity. Humanity starts to gain the feeling of the “civilians” in video games, little people who stand around needing and hoping to be saved. You get points for saving them, sometimes they’re even the sole objective, but they aren’t characters.
Perhaps even worse, by thinking of heroes as being in a class outside humanity proper I remove from the class of humanity exactly those people whom I most look up to and admire. I deprive humanity of its heroes by considering non-human all those people who do the coolest things,
So what’s the alternative?
Heroes, then, are not in a different class. Heroes are people, just the same as other people. They may be a little less burdened by suffering, they may have internalized more heroic memes, they may be more gifted by ability, they may have trained harder, and they may be currently more altruistic in practice than most people, but they are still just as human.
And no (ideal) hero saves others without saving herself. Even if it arises that a hero can do the most good by sacrificing herself, she does not do so because she has no moral value, having transcended the “petty concerns” of humanity. She has just as much moral value as the people she is saving, and her sacrifice is a terrible loss. Not because she is better than most human beings, but simply because she is a human being. She would sacrifice herself merely because she can save many by sacrificing one. It would be just as good and sad a deed to sacrifice someone else in order to save others, even if that reveals less virtue. But virtue acts as a status signal and a useful indicator for humans to aim for in the pursuit of doing good; it is quite distinct from the actual good done.
And if the hero does not suffer from something as others do? Then it may reduce suffering for the hero to put herself in the place of others. But it’s still just as good and wonderful a thing for her to enjoy friendships, and to have a romance, and to spend a pleasant afternoon, as it is for anyone else.
Heroes are people that don’t stop with themselves when they set out to save people. They work to save as many as they can. Maybe it’s because they’ve generalized that it’s a terrible thing when they suffer or die and it’s a wonderful thing to flourish among friends, and so likewise with others. Maybe they just care a great deal about others without involving any explicit moral thinking at all.
I have a collection of inspiring pictures I’ve saved from the net, and as I went through them again I made sure to view the heroes not as something above humanity, something transcended and beyond moral valence, but as “merely” exceptionally altruistic and capable human beings. Their suffering is just as worthy of concern as anyone else’s, even if they are better at avoiding it, and equal too are their joys. And in an ideal world, they know and realize this: they are part of the humanity which they aim to save.
Tags: Heroism, Utilitarianism