On Altruism and Christianity

This is a tough issue for me. I am mostly a fiscal libertarian. I am somewhat of a rare breed there because I am also a committed Christian. Many libertarians are atheists. The esteemed author of Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand spoke wrote eloquently against altruism.

The Christian church as a whole is involved very heavily in altruism. Food banks, homeless shelters, missions of all sorts. I believe in all of these endeavors. The conflict comes from the blurring of altruism that has occurred since the explosion of government. Everything that the government sells is sold on the basis of altruism. Giving people a hand who are down on their luck has been the selling point of every government giveaway plan from the beginning of time. In stage one thinking I believe in helping people down on their luck. I personally give to the Salvation Army, a local mission in Akron (near where I live), and of course tithing to my church. The United Methodist church is very active in mission work and disaster relief. All of those things I believe in.

To my way of thinking when altruism gets beyond emergency, or survival relief it can become a strait jacket. We see it every day. The natural spirit of man is to succeed. We get our esteem from succeeding. Even when we fail we build the character and the knowledge that is needed to succeed in the future. When we attempt to take away failure we take away the experiences that people need to succeed in the future.

Life is a balancing act. Too much of a good thing leads to too little of another. When we attempt to take away the events of failure we take away the experience which helps us learn to adapt. The most obvious example I can think of is teenage pregnancy. In past days there was a stigma against this. There is no doubt that sometimes these young women were treated very unfairly. I never want to go back to these days, but the stigma taught most young women not to do this. There is a reason for this: It is difficult for the young women and not beneficial for the children. The stigma kept them from making a mistake in many cases. Today as soon as a young woman gets pregnant the government swoops in to educate her in the many ways that the state will help her along the way. We do this under the guise of making sure the children do not suffer. The children don't have to suffer, they can be adopted by people who are ready for the task who either choose not to get pregnant or simply cannot. In today's society though, why would the woman choose adoption? The state is poised to give her support in many ways to have the child. In many cases (certainly not all) the young women simply are not ready for the responsibility of raising a child. She simply has no incentive to choose adoption. She may suffer a little, but mostly the children suffer from not having a dad. Additionally they grow up in a world where the state is at least partially the bread winner of the family. They don't learn independence, they don't learn to take care of themselves because they don't need to.

To use a different example let's look at something less substantive but no less parallel. A couple of weeks back my wife and I took the kids bowling. Every lane now has bumpers. They are great for little kids. They can get a decent score when they aren't big enough to have great control of the ball. The problem is they never stop using them. I looked around I saw teenagers using them as a crutch, I saw adults banking balls off them to get spares. Of course bowling skills are not vital to life but if you are going to bowl, why not have real results and not the bumper related crutch? The people who want to improve simply cannot use them. Life however is not always that clear.

Now, back to Christianity. Can we claim to care for the souls of people and contribute to the dumbing down of people's accomplishments? When we provide altruism beyond disaster or survival, we teach people that they don't need to excel, they don't need to succeed, they don't need to feed the part of their soul that depends on success and failure. You can say that those people don't need to receive that support, they can choose not to. I disagree. If it is there for the taking most people simply won't turn it down. The ones that do are much better for doing so, but most people simply won't. My bottom line is it simply is not compassionate to continue to block people from learning from setbacks. Setbacks are not failure, they are a roadmap to future success.