What Is The Point Of Selflessness?

This morning, the new curate at our church preached a sermon on friendship.  In his opinion, the essential ingredient is selflessness.  Friendship, he said, cannot survive if people are just demanding what they want; they have to focus on each other’s needs.

Which is fair enough – but I’m not sure that selflessness is the right way to achieve this.

It really depends on what we mean by ‘selflessness’.  One definition would be ‘lacking a self’.  It is possible that very young babies, and the most profoundly autistic people (as opposed to those who are just rather Asperger-ish, like me) do not have a sense of themselves as separate entities from other people and from inanimate objects.  We can’t be sure, because people in this situation aren’t often able to talk about how they think and feel.

I do know one man who is both autistic and schizophrenic, but articulate enough to talk about having little sense of self.  He says that he does not see himself as any more ‘a person’ than an individual atom is a person or the universe as a whole is a person.  He regards himself as simply part of the universe, and, as nobody would talk about the sun being ‘just’ or a rainstorm being ‘unjust’, or would accuse a lion of murder, so he doesn’t see how his own actions can be moral or immoral.

While having no sense of self means you don’t have to bother with vanity, it also means you aren’t able to act altruistically.  A crying baby isn’t able to think, ‘I am upset because I’ve dropped my rattle.  But Mum and Dad are quite busy right now, and my crying isn’t going to help them.  I suppose I can survive a few minutes until they’ve got a moment to pick the rattle up.’  So, this kind of selflessness does not promote relationship.

A second kind of selflessness I have heard defined as ‘living as if self did not exist’.  But this, taken to its logical conclusion, would mean not bothering with basic self-care (living as if there is no ‘you’ to care for) and not doing anything to help others (living as if there is no ‘you’ who can benefit others). 

By ‘selflessness’, most people probably simply mean unselfishness.  A friendship between two entirely selfish people (each concerned only with their own desires) could not work.  But neither could a friendship between two entirely unselfish people, who would each be interested only in trying to meet each other’s desires.  As each refuses to talk about his/her own desires, neither of them can find out what the other wants.

A relationship between one selfish and one unselfish person is possible.  I’ve been in plenty of them, both as the selfish ‘child’ figure receiving support, and as the unselfish ‘parent’ figure giving it.  However, my deepest friendships began by meeting people whose company I enjoyed, and who enjoyed mine.

My relationship with my Beloved partner is the best friendship I have ever had, and it began because each of us, quite selfishly, joined a dating website because we hoped to be happier in a relationship than either of us was when single.  We discovered that we liked being together, we fell in love and got married, and I am overwhelmingly glad we did.  Obviously, being in a relationship means caring for each other and considering each other’s needs.  But unselfishness isn’t what first motivates us to search for a lover, or a friend.

I think a better basis for interacting with other people is not selflessness or even unselfishness, but love.  Selflessness says: ‘I am nothing – there is no “me” to interact.’  Unselfishness says: ‘I exist, but I must use this fact only to serve others – they matter and I don’t.’  Love says: ‘People matter, therefore I matter and other people matter.’  From a Christian point of view, this would be: ‘God loves us, therefore he wants us to love ourselves and love each other.’

Love may motivate the same actions as unselfishness, but with a different rationale.  Love says, ‘It’s time I wrote to my pen-pal in prison, because he must be getting bored and lonely, and he seems to like getting my letters.’  Unselfishness, instead, would say, ‘I ought to write to my pen-pal in prison, because it’s very frivolous of me just to have fun writing fan-fiction stories.’  I suspect selflessness would say, ‘There’s nothing in my life that’s worth writing about, so why bother?’

Once, when I was having a long and distressing argument with a friend about what ‘dying to self’ meant, we were interrupted by my friend’s little girl wanting me to read to her.  Immediately, I broke off angsting and we had a good time sharing her current favourite book (a manual on the medicinal uses of herbs).

My friend said afterwards, ‘There you are!  That was dying to self, when you were willing to put your own problems on hold in order to read to her.’

I said, ‘No, it wasn’t.  I didn’t stop being me.  It was because I’m me, and I like your daughter and I like reading aloud, that I was happy to read to her.  And the fact that she distracted me from what I was worrying about was a bonus.’

As a child, I was told a fable about heaven and hell.  Hell is a dining-hall filled with a delicious banquet, where the only available cutlery is ten feet long, and so nobody can eat anything.  Heaven is exactly the same, except that there, people are sitting on opposite sides of the table and feeding each other.

I thought that I would rather be in the place where someone said, ‘This cutlery is ridiculous.  Why don’t we just eat with our fingers?’  That way, they’d all have time to eat the meal while it was still warm (which isn’t easy when feeding someone else with ten-foot-long cutlery), and go out to play afterwards.