Temporal Altruism
by Curtis Edward Clark
"While our politicians are extending the national debt into the futures of our grandchildren, Thomas W. Clark wants to extend altruism into the future---over the issue of ecology. "For those with children and grandchildren," writes Clark, "imagining loved ones facing an ecologically impoverished world works well to motivate concern. But for those of us who don’t, why should we forgo present pleasures for the sake of a future we’ll never see?"
"At this point it becomes necessary to ask what those "objectives" have to do with altruism. Clark rarely gets to his point quickly, instead making us wade through a dozen (or so) paragraphs before he gets to his "aha!" moment. In this case he takes more than 3/4 of the article before telling us that perhaps "temporal altruism"--which he describes as "concern for our descendants"--ought to be "the central publicly celebrated personal virtue, not the rugged individualism that makes the present-day self our primary concern."
In October of 2008, I asked him point blank whether his philosophy was "'apologetics" for some purpose that I couldn't fathom. They seem like apologetics in the true sense: something is always wrong with this creature called "man", and Clark's organization just can't seem to help itself, believing in what it might call "false gods", such as "rampant individualism, free will, ultimate moral responsibility, and selfishness seen as personal defect, etc"
So arguing from adverse consequences seems only right, if you are trying to scare people away from such things. "Concern for our descendents" depends on the idea that we have any descendents to be concerned for, and Clark makes it clear that our grandchildren and theirs could be doomed.
"Since worrying about the future of the planet is a luxury," he writes, "affordable by only those whose immediate and near-term needs have been met, sustainability is closely connected to economic equality. To the extent that access to education and economic security are increased, so too will concern for the environment." [italics added]
Economic equality is what this fight is about, not global warming. While there is truth that the north pole is melting, the south pole is 17 inches thicker than it has been since man first set foot there. Last year China has its coldest winter on record, and in June there was still ice on the mountain tops in Colorado and Washington.
In Copenhagen this week, the international politics have been on how to transfer $100 billion every year to developing nations to allow them to clean up their environments, while giving them until 2020 before they even begin to do it. In the mean time, "developed" nations such as the U.S. would be required to reduce emissions, and the developing nations would be allowed to increase theirs.
"For those with children and grandchildren," Clark says, "imagining loved ones facing an ecologically impoverished world works well to motivate concern...An important factor in nurturing altruistic motivation is to be directly reinforced by tangible successes [which] actually happens in response to well-targeted grassroots campaigns.
"Of course, this goes against the grain of our biologically programmed predilection for self-concern, but if social approbation and censure are recruited in the fight against this tendency, the very notion of what it means to be socially successful could change."
My "biologically programmed predilection for self-concern" extends to my nation's sovereign right to be free of enforced altruism whereby my grandchildren will never see the black side of the accounting ledger, not to mention the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution I see crumbling under the compassionate concern of Clark and those like him.
"We must nurture the norm of altruism in our votes, our personal behavior, our financial investments, and our policy advocacy," he continues. "If we don’t...then we’ll likely muddle along until we and our immediate descendents discover ourselves caught in what will surely seem a catastrophe we should have avoided. Faced with these stark, vivid alternatives, the choices we should make now are obvious."
While the choices may be obvious to all of us, some, like Clark, will choose collectivism, altruism, and bondage to the governments of other nations. Hopefully, Americans will wake up sooner than later and begin to understand that the only thing the world wants is our money and our complicity in believing that everything the rest of the world wants is for the best of all.
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