Muddled morningthot

Dearest,

We’re essentially selfish. Are you a saint? We’re all selfish, no matter how altruistic we strive to become. I’m not saying that we lack the proper willpower to overcome self-centeredness: I’m saying that the world is constructed in such a way that it is impossible to help everyone who needs it. The scope of one’s charity remains so narrow that it is necessary to choose where to expend one’s energies; the flipside of this choice is that one’s energies are withheld from certain of the needy. How is the function of one’s mind that determines this implementation of energy not a manifestation of selfishness?

For instance, if you enter a church and discover a trove of starving, abused children – say there are fifty of them – and then a Priest emerges from the shadows and begins to panic when he sees you aiming to save the children, so he prays to his God, asking him to rain destruction from heaven, and the God complies by sending a fiery Angel through the ceiling who announces that the building will burn to ashes in fifteen minutes, which is exactly the time it will take for you, the hero, to make one trip carrying out five children (one on each limb, and one hanging from your neck), then you must select which five of the fifty shall receive salvation – just as Abraham had to quibble with Yahweh God when the latter was hellbent on destroying the Cities of the Plain, in Genesis 18:23-33, and Abe argued his God down to ten souls (that is, if there were found ten decent people in the cities, then God agreed reluctantly to forgo his evil plan), yet this was his limit, beyond which God would hear no further prayers:

Abraham said, “Oh let not the LORD be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten righteous shall be found in the cities.” And the LORD said, “I will not destroy it for ten’s sake;” whereupon he walked away, unwilling to bargain any further. Then the LORD rained upon those cities brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. (Genesis 18:32-33; 19:24-25)

My point is that, before you rescue from the burning church those five children that you are able to carry, you must decide which of the forty-five children shall remain inside the church and burn to death. That is a heartbreaking judgment: how can one make it? What part of one’s compassionate mind is able to accept these terms? And what is one to do? At first, you entertained the notion of simply remaining in the church with the fifty children and accepting martyrdom along with them, as if to say to the priest and his god: “All or nothing – I will not negotiate with terrorists.” But then you thought: why allow these horrible, ugly fiends the satisfaction of six additional, unnecessary sacrifices (yourself and the five kids you can save)? So you fixed your mind on doing what is possible. But then, you were thrown back upon the problem: How to choose? Do you just close your eyes, hold out your arms and yell “First come, first served,” and take whichever five manage to clutch onto you fastest? But then you would be rewarding the mere animalistic skills of scrambling and shoving. You would rather preserve the opposite characteristics: gentleness and the tendency to harmonize. “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” (Blake’s Proverbs of Hell) And yet, to stand there rummaging through the church’s trove of abused children, looking for the worthiest specimens, even if time were to permit such an act of curation, strikes you as a repulsive instance of eugenics, of which you will take no part. But the precious moments are ticking away: you must act now. Therefore, you briefly interview the children, and ask about their taste in music; then, since five of them happen to prefer the type of music that was popular when you were a youth, you bow down to that happy few and say “Hop on,” and you dash with them out of the building, an instant before it collapses.

Your story ended well. I’m sure that that would never happen, if I myself were to face the same dilemma – for the odds of me finding even one person who shares my taste in any of the arts is low to nonexistent, let alone a child, or in this case five. Nonetheless, your own semi-happy ending serves to make my point above about charity always requiring selfishness. For why should the kids, to survive, need to share either of our proclivities in art?

Therefore, let me present a revised and redeemed reality – an alternate ending. Here is what should have happened when you encountered the fifty children trapped by the Priest in the burning church:

DEUS EX MACHINA

A Foreign God rushes upon the scene and puts the Priest and his God’s Angel in a portable glowing prison-cube made of blue lasers, and then he summons to your aid a cold wind from the Northern regions to balance out the flames and make the church’s atmosphere pleasant. The Foreign God then shows you how to prepare a delicious supper using local plants, and he teaches you all how to compose poetry. So the children, who for years have been starving, now eat and gain strength. And all fifty of them grow up and become the finest adults that the world has yet seen. They bring human civilization out of the Ignorant Age and into the Age of Refinement.

(There. Much better. And just think: in either case, if it hadn’t been for your intervention, the church would have let those kids rot in captivity and kept abusing them forever.)