Accidental Blogger

An excellent article by Steven Pinker in the New York Times is doing the rounds of the blogosphere. Do read whether or not you agree with all his "scientific" claims.

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.  (See my post on Norman Borlaug)

I have argued here (rather ineffectually perhaps) on a couple of occasions (see here and here) that most of us are gifted with a natural sense of fairness ( no harm to or exploitation of others), empathy and co-operation that can be the basis of our common morality irrespective of variations in cultures. Yet it is clear that many cannot shake off the assumption that "real" (superior and more valid) morality must wear the cloak of purity, religious sanctity, ascetic lifestyle, spiritual fulfilment or visible personal sacrifice. Mundane, secular, workaday morality as a driving force of doing common good on the other hand, does not impress us. That moral acts can be thought out, planned and materially consequential is a notion that does not capture our imagination. Which is why in public perception Mother Teresa’s services to the needy and suffering appear more "moral" than do Gates’ well planned, cool headed (but something that Gates himself is sincere and passionate about) philanthropy and Borlaug’s tireless and quiet scientific research on behalf of the hungry.  I call this a misunderstanding of our moral grounding.  Mind you, I am not arguing that one or the other of the trio is more or less moral in their personal convictions and in their motivations for acting on those convictions. What I am questioning is our limited understanding of what constitutes morality.   

Pinker ends his essay eloquently:

Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”