11/5/18
Global Altruism: Some Considerations
Edward A. Tiryakian
Department of Sociology
DukeUniversity
Prepared for Vincent Jeffries,ed., Handbook of Public Sociology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Global Altruism: Some Considerations
Introduction
Pitirim Sorokin was a sociological pioneer in many important fields, from the sociology of revolutions, to comparative theories, the dynamics of large-scale change, and the sociology of time.[1] For the most part, and unusual for the discipline, they have not lost their actuality for getting a perspective on our contemporary world.
I take as an example which very much has global relevance today his study originally published in Russian in 1922, and available in English only since 1975: Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs.[2] Sorokin (and his wife) had observed and experienced first-hand the terrible famine that swept Russia in the immediate post-war years following the Soviet revolution. He had gone far beyond observation to a meticulous study of historical records in peacetime and wartime to investigate comparatively the effects of hunger and famine in social relationships. The finished work is every bit as much of a reference at the close of this century’s first decade as it was nearly 80 years ago, with perhaps an even larger sphere of relevance.sincethe The sharp rise of energy and other commodity prices, the increase of population in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, intensive ethnic conflicts, and growing social inequalities in other “emerging markets” have together made problematic much progress in human development in its basic aspects of subsistence, such as a minimum income for food and shelter, and even personal safety..
At the beginning of the new century (indeed, a new millennium), the United Nations sponsored a Millennium Summit of world leaders, from which was formulated a project to be realized by 2015 of improving world conditions in meeting eight major goals, collectively known as the Millennium Development Goals. I will shortly indicate how this ties-in with the general theme of this paper, but let us note at present that the first goal is to “eradicate extreme hunger and poverty.” The criterion was initially set as the population living below $1 a day, but some improvement (notably in China) has “raised” the threshold level to $2 a day. Still, Tthe United Nations Human Development Report for 2007/2008indicates that no less than 73 countries had ten percent or more of its population living below $2 a day, with nearly half (35) of these countries having more than half of the population with an income below this paltry amount. The most extreme instances of poverty –India, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Zambia, Niger, Burundi, Central African Republic, Rwanda, Gambia—have no less than fourth-fifths of their population eking their existence with this abysmal figure. The laconic summary statement in the 2008 Annual Report of the United Nations Development Programme: “Some 1.2 billion people around the world live on less than a dollar a day,”[3] hardly conveys the everyday world – and its man-made and nature-made hazards—of those living in extreme poverty[4]. It is a general powerlessness in the face of the physical and human environment which is the condition of about two-fifths of the world’s 6.7 billion inhabitants. Sadly, it is unlikely for those in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and perhaps many in the West Indies and Latin America and other countries as well, that by themselves they can harness resources and the social and political will to emulate the example of East Asia. Free trade agreements and IMF regulations provide strictures which increase, rather than decrease, economic inequalities.[5]
Unless globalization opens up a new cornucopia and/or unless significant structural and motivational transformations can be put in place, it looks increasingly dubious that the Millennial Project Goals will be met in whole or in part in recipient countries by the target date of 2015. The stark reality that “850 million go hungry every night” is, unfortunately, a reminder of the relevance of Sorokin’s study of “hunger as a factor in human affairs.” His 1922 study took Sorokin to look at other calamities of the human condition, and 20 years later he published a more general work in this vein.[6]
It would be a mistake, however, to view Sorokin as only a seer of the dark and debasing aspects of social life. He did explore, like Dostoyevsky, the deep and ugly currents which impact society in war and in peace. But he also came up from these lower depths to study warmer life-giving currents, and in the last phase of his creative career, he produced pioneering studies of altruism. These will be the springboard for our following in his wake to take up a consideration of global altruism.
Sorokin and Altruism
Sorokin can well qualify as a “critical sociologist” (of the dominant “pseudo-scientific” methodology of the social sciences) and even as a “public sociologist” (as conceptualized by Michael Burawoy[7]) in espousing progressive causes and his adamant denunciations of state policy promoting wars, including the War in Vietnam. That is not particularly distinctive since sociology has a well-established tradition of dissent that includes Thorstein Veblen, W.E.B. Dubois, and C. Wright Mills. Sorokin, however, went beyond negativism to search for the reconstruction of society and social relationships in non-violent ways (he greatly admired Gandhi who showed the way to non-violent resistance), essentially for a cognitive reorientation toward the “other”, what he termed “amitology”-- a perspective marked by good-will, cooperation, and love. [8] Altruism as a variable of personality and interpersonal behavior is critical to this recasting or transformation of the social, at the micro as well as at the macro level. Accordingly, empirical research (comparative and historical) on altruism became for Sorokin – retrieving the legacy of Comte [9] -- an important and at the time, untrodden, field of sociological inquiry. With the patronage of benefactor Eli Lilly, Sorokin – who had launched Harvard’s Department of Sociology at the start of the 1930s—set up twenty years later The Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity which in four years spawned four scholarly volumes.[10]
It is besides the point to explicate Sorokin’s own explorations of love and altruism, and how these concerns relate to broader dimensions of his oeuvre, such as civilizational analysis. There are several works that provide the reader with such overviews, besides the essential text of Johnston, notably Ford, Richard and Talbutt (1996), Talbutt (1998), and del Pozo Avniño (2006). What is to be borne in mind is that Sorokin’s endeavor in this last career phase was to provide a cognitive and behavioral reframing to the marked negativism of late modernity (which he termed “the declining sensate phase of Western culture”). Both in the media and popular culture the negativism shows itself in “hair-raising murder stories, sex scandals or perversions” which constitute well over 50% of the topics of contemporary Western culture – thus starts Sorokin in 1950 in Altruistic Love. More than half a century later, what Sorokin saw as negativism is even more flouted in a barrage of negative political ads and prurient ragsheet exposés of political figures, in the profanity and extreme misogyny of the music of rappers, and in the fascination for fiction and non-fiction violence directed against women and children. In that same opening, Sorokin raises the cry,
Our sensate culture… dwells mainly in the region
of subsocial sewers, breathes mainly their foul air; and
drags down into their turbid muck everything heroic,
positive, true, good, and beautiful (Altruistic Love, p. 3).
Polar to this dominating orientation is the lives of saints and “good neighbors”, and the studies of Sorokin’s Center focused on the latter as a dramatic alternative to the negativism in all its forms. Since Sorokin’s death in 1968, there has been no let-up in the general cultural negativism of popular culture and the mass media. Yet the main corpus of sociology, then and now, does not seem to have responded with enlarging its sphere of attention, not only to the negativism undermining the civility of civil society, but also to the positive alternative field of altruism.
And yet, research on “altruism” outside of sociology has come under increasing attention at the micro and at the macro level. Undoubtedly an important stimulus came from evolutionary biology and E.O. Wilson’s mammoth Sociobiology (1975) relating altruism to kin selection. Aside from its benign neglect in sociology, altruism has enjoyed multidisciplinary coverage (and spirited controversies as well as supportive data) in various fields such as psychology, neurobiology, biology and theology (Post, Underwood, Schloss and Hurlbut 2002; Gintis, Bowles, Boyd and Fehr 2003). The irony of sociologists’ tepid take of a field opened up by Sorokin half a century ago is shown by the 2008 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association not having in its Final Program a single session on altruism (although the general meeting theme of “Worlds at Work” could certainly have provided the occasion for research papers relating altruism to work). [11]
More in keeping with Sorokin’s presidential exhortation of 1965 that our discipline should seek higher ground in new syntheses [12], I would now like to consider how in the context of globalization, altruism takes on important new forms that were not part of the original research of Sorokin’s Research Center, but which are promising and relevant for a broader perspective on both globalization and altruism. While my considerations are not a “synthesis”, they are intended to be heuristic for expanding the sociological awareness of altruism in the contemporary world.
Global Altruism: From the Ground Up
However fuzzy “globalization” suggests as a playing field of advanced modernity (the latter, to be sure, itself a murky and ambiguous notion), it has become a widely-used multidisciplinary referent. A referent of what? Of various processes that interlink materially and virtually all the regions of the world, with a loose economic, political, cultural and technological integration of vaster scope than any previous state. The need for the social sciences, particularly sociology and political science, to expand their horizon beyond the nation-state as the traditional unit of analysis, has been cogently made (Albrow 1996). Even if the conceptualization and articulation of the parameters of the new age lack consensus, as the emergent global reality and its geo-political and geo-cultural realignments are still in an early phase of becoming[13], it warrants viewing the playing field for altruistic behavior as becoming globalized, beyond neighborhoods, regions, or even national borders. I take “global” and its related “globalization” to indicate the whole human world as the interactive unit of analysis, and “global system” as an emergent or dynamic entity which interrelates regions, albeit at different rhythms of change and development.
Sudden as well as chronic degradations in the physical and human environments, conditions that debase the existence of those living at the edge, forcible evictions from traditional habitats (due to demands of agribusiness, foreign invaders, or from paramilitaries who are nominally subjects of the same state), the repression and near-extinction of civil society in blatant violation of human rights – all are part of the same global age as the one of mediated glamour, luxury, and opulence that global capitalism has provided.
Much of the turmoil of the past two decades or so since “globalization” has become recognized has both socioeconomic and sociopolitical dimensions, making the global system not a simple “new world order” but one highly complex and contested.[14] On the constructive side are new bases of peaceful integration (such as the European Union). On the negative side, an unanticipated upsurge in violent movements of nationalism, fundamentalism, ethnic repression, and global acts of terrorism, together with degrading and massive human trafficking.[15]
It is in this broad frame, that Sorokin would have readily recognized as an extrapolation from his studies of the late sensate age, that I will discuss global forms of altruism. The need for ameliorative efforts to go beyond the state or country level is imperative. Particularly as most of the states with the greatest needs for altruistic behavior lack the competence, organizations, or even, in some instances, the desire to alleviate economic and political misery, including blatant violations of human rights impacting enormous numbers.
To borrow from Frantz Fanon, the global age puts a spotlight on a vast new “wretched of the earth”. Though not providing a solution, “global altruism” is a set of practices seeking to alleviate some of the negative consequences of globalization on “the economic and political wretched of the earth”. The practices, undertaken by different agents at different levels, open a beam of light and an alternative model B to the market based model A of efficiency and “rational choice” which is at heart based on premises (at the individual and state level) of egoism or self-interest. [16] Tacitly,global altruism is a cognitive and normative orientation that gives primacy to improving the condition of the most unfortunate members of the global community. Its presupposition is that accepting the economic, political and cultural welfare of the global community depends, not accidentally but intrinsically, upon the welfare of those marginalized by processes of globalization. Globalization can be transformed by the voluntaristic actions of forms of altruism, so that global altruism itself becomes an important vector of globalization.[17] Ultimately, a common denominator in various forms of global altruism is being conducive for its recipients to gain a sense of active participation in their own improvement and development, and not just being “a charity case”.[18]
I begin at the micro level, from the ground up” with three individuals, then consider at the meso level two INGO’s (International non-governmental organizations), lastly at the macro level I will consider countries’ performance on altruism in terms of the Millennium Development Project with which I started this paper.
Global Altruism: the Micro level
Sorokin’s initial volume on altruism, Altruistic Love (1950) focused on two readily discernable and publicly recognized groups of altruists: “good neighbors” and “saints”, the former recognized by their peer group, the latter recognized by Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches. Modifying this to a globalized context beyond the borders of the nation-state, I will discuss three levels of agents of altruism: individuals, organizations, and states. There are different modes of peer group recognition, and some organizations – such as religious ones—have normative principles of service and giving to others which favor global altruistic activity. How extensive is this commitment will vary so that there is not a one-to-one correlation between “religious” and “secular” individuals and organizations, and their level of altruistic commitment and activity.
At this micro level, the exemplars are three persons, who have shown sustained commitment to global altruism toward broad segments of the human community, in particular to those living in misery, for the most part homeless and without minimal state support and assistance. What makes them particularly appropriate for our discussion is that each started and/or is associated with a humanitarian movement with a global reach. Two of them have won international recognition for their “good deeds” with a gold standard of international recognition: the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mother Teresa (Agne Gonxha Bojaxhiu, 1910-1997) has become an iconic figure of devotion to “the poorest of the poor”.[19] While her presence is associated with Calcutta, she was also active at the international level after establishing her own religious order, Missionaries of Charity. The basic mission was to provide love and care for those bypassed by their own societal community[20], and the global range of her organization – which grew to over 600 missions in more than 100 countries—involved setting up hospices and homes for victims of HIV/AIDS [21], leprosy, and tuberculosis, not only in India, but in various other settings, including victims of radiation in Chernobyl, of earthquakes in Armenia, and of starvation in Ethiopia. She and the houses her order set up with volunteers did not discriminate between political regimes, taking missions to Communist as well as non-Communist countries during the Cold War period. Her basic priority for her relief work was to carry it out among the “poorest of the poor” in practically all the continents where relief work had urgent need in instances of floods, epidemics, and man-made disasters.
Her exemplary life of dedication to others and her exhortation to bring a modicum of comfort to the “poorest of the poor” (for example, in her address to the United Nations in 1985) was recognized internationally by both secular and religious organizations. Thus, in 1979 she was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize[22] and posthumously on October 19, 2003 (appropriately, World Mission Sunday) she was beatified in the Roman Catholic Church, an important step to becoming a saint, with Pope John Paul II himself pronouncing the homily.