What does one do against suffering?
Recently, I have been volunteering, in keeping with what I said in The Real and Final Enlightenment. Specifically, I have been doing Compassion Patrols (it’s in Spanish, but Chrome can sort that out for you). We go out the first and last Friday nights of every month to distribute food, hygiene kits, friezes, clothes, and clean syringes (should they ask) to the homeless. We stay out doing this for quite a while. The first time I did this, years ago, I came back at 7am. The last two times I came back at 2am and 4am. We call it ‘un jangueo con amor’. ‘Hanging out with love’. The homeless are truly grateful to us for what we do. They frequently bless us. They have said they can’t believe that there are people like us in the world. That’s how mean life has been to them. Receiving some niceness is unbelievable to them.
And by the revelation of effective altruism, this may all be a waste of time.
I respect effective altruism, I do. Many charities suck up donations into administrative bloat as opposed to helping people. I have heard the Red Cross is specially guilty of this. And so, there is a need to figure out how to get bang for your buck when doing charity. Fulfilling that need is what effective altruism is all about.
How do they figure out how to get bang for your buck? It often involves using an utilitarian calculus, a weighing of happiness against suffering. Wherein lies the whole issue.
The problem, if it can be called that, is what this reveals. Which is that the world is in many respects a giant mass of suffering. And what’s more, those of us in the first world can in fact act against that suffering.
We are, in fact, in the infamous trolley problem.
Except in the real version, pulling the lever to save 5 doesn’t kill someone, it just… causes you to lose a bit of money and/or time:
...research by GiveWell has found that it’s possible to give an infant a year of healthy life by donating around $100 to one of the most cost-effective global health charities, such as Against Malaria Foundation.
$500 dollars to buy 1 year of healthy life for 5 children.
Precisely why wouldn’t one pull the lever in that scenario? Which is not a scenario, it is our reality. Most people in the first world can afford that.
It all gets twisted quickly though. The parable of the rich man from Fargo illustrates why:
In the parable a rich man realizes he can help the world’s troubles. So he gives all his money away to charity. The world still has troubles. He sees there is a lack of organ donors. So he donates a kidney. The lack is still there. So he kills himself so all of his organs will be donated.
Clearly, one needs a certain degree of selfishness. But what degree? The answer cannot be to be 100% selfish. To not pull the lever to spare oneself a measly $500 dollars.
But that level of total selfishness, where one does not give to charity at all, is all too easy. It’s just living on autopilot. Really reveals why George Gurdjieff said we are all asleep. The suffering of far away Africa is indeed very far away. It can’t jolt most awake.
But running around in the middle of the night trying to help the homeless really jolts you awake. Therein lies part of the utility of doing such a thing. Suddenly, suffering is not an abstraction. It becomes a real and urgent problem. More real and more urgent than most of the stuff we think and do.
Ah, but there comes the parable of the rich man again. One can’t forsake everything to tilt against suffering. But we certainly do have to play Quixote at least some of the time and actually try to slay suffering.
Specially collectively. I feel like I really understand how the abolitionists felt now: the severity of our moral error is as vast as slavery. We spend so much time and money on pure frivolity. And we actually need that frivolity to be clear. We don’t want to turn our minds into a ‘sunless space’:
But also, this isn’t the time to be fucking around. We can do massive mobilizations when it comes to war: why can’t we do a wartime mobilization for effective altruism?
The US spent $4 trillion on World War II. It currently spends $484.85 billion per year on charity, and of course, probably not half of it goes to effective charities. So we currently spend around half what we did for World War II. We could be spending much more. Charitable giving is at 2.2% GDP per year. In 1945, the war cost 40% of GDP. We could be doing. So. Much. More.
Will we?
Effective altruists need to start thinking like abolitionists, and do whatever the abolitionists did to shake their societies from their slumber and actually win.
The time for political effective altruism has come.
What about the homeless that our Puerto Rican band of merry altruists brings some relief to? I did say it might be a waste of time. Should I give that up because I can do more good spending that time and effort on another cause? This one is the trolley problem proper. All I can say is that I can’t forget what I have seen. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. And that I feel I do have more of a duty for the problems of my country than I do for problems far away. Puerto Rico is not a first world country after all. So I will keep doing that, even as I try to figure out ways to be effective in my local altruism.
My altruism won’t be kept local though. I will be taking the Giving What We Can pledge soon. You probably should too.
Gotta pull that lever right?