Last night I was again in my usual place in Rondebosch and got into a fairly heated debate with a friend of a friend from Tanzania. He had said he was 'interested in economics', so I pushed for a clarification of this by saying 'you mean your interested in capitalist economics, i.e. making money.' And he agreed. So I got to thinking about this notion of greed. Is it inherent? Or is it dependent on our social milieu, e.g. does it develop because of the idolization of those in power over others?
And since today is Valentine's Day when we (supposedly) should be thinking about our significant others, maybe a discussion of whether or not selfishness is inherent is a good topic. Does he really love you, or he is just offering you this cheap card because he has a hidden agenda? (But maybe you're accepting it because you also have a hidden agenda... but then maybe he knows that you know that he knows that you know... you get the picture...). To raise your suspicions even further (because my primary goal by publishing this post is to plant a seed of doubt about the value of 'superstition' in terms of certain days being supposedly 'more important' than others in terms of showing someone else you care, and so, in this instance I'm unfortunately out to make war, not love) let me share a humourous anecdote shared with me by some friends here in South Africa:
The son of a certain family is well-known by his family and most of his friends to be something of a 'Don Juan' (though I've not been able to affirm this through personal experience since he's currently in a detention center and I've only visited him once). Given that Valentine's Day was coming up, they told me about how there is a very large Valentine card that one of his aunts received some years ago. As luck would have it, the card was completely generic and not personalized. So every year on February 14 he takes this same gigantic card and gives it to whichever female is the apple of his eye at the time, and even though as the years go by its appearance has gotten old and crusty, as far as I know it's always greeted exceptionally favourably ('ohhh... the sacrifice you must have made to get such a Valentine card JUST FOR ME!!!'), and the guy usually gets what he wants (the substance of which is probably fairly obvious). So they joked that they should contact him and ask him who 'the Valentine' should go to this year... (so ladies, maybe this year you should check your Valentine cards a bit more carefully than years past for signs that it might have actually come from years past...)
But let's get back to theory, shall we? In Book 2 of The Republic, Plato tells the story of 'The Ring of Gyges'. He describes a shepherd named Gyges, who finds a ring that is able to make him invisible at will. He describes a sequence of events wherein the shepherd uses the powers of the ring to kill the king, marry the queen, and rule over the domain. Plato then declares that if a just man had found the ring, his actions would be the same as the unjust man,
"For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice."
In other words, Plato argues that the only reason why we are moral beings is because of the consequences that we face due to our actions. (Recall I previously brought up this notion of consequentialism at the end of the discussion of 'Sadist morality' in the post Exegesis in the Bedroom). If, in the case of having such a ring, you can do whatever you wish and no one could ever charge you with any action since they could never trace the action to you, there are seemingly no consequences. (If you've seen it, maybe think of Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man). Although this sequence of events could never conceivably happen, let's take this a step further.
Often an argument against materialistic greed is "he who dies with the most toys still dies" or, equivalently, "no matter what you have, you can't take it with", but let's look at it from a more 'statistical' vantage point. If one is to play Russian Roulette, and the revolver in question has six chambers only one of which contains a bullet, then you have only a 1/6 chances of dying. But the problem with statistics is that they only really 'work' long term. In normal roulette, if you lose, you can ante up and try again, but in Russian Roulette if you end up on the fatal chamber, you can't say 'the odds weren't in my favour, so let me try again', because you're dead and that's the bottom line.
So consider the following argument: what we really should blame human greed on is human finiteness, because in the end all 'worldly' consequences (i.e., death doesn't count), no matter how large, are, in the end, only temporary (consider, for example, the old adage that 'suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem'). For example, it may be all well and good to say 'we need to protect the Earth for future generations', but talk is cheap; in the end, any individual will be dead long before 'future generations' come into being. Conceivably, one can argue 'well surely my own future generations are equivalent to my existing in future generations': children, children's children, etc, but even if this is true, it really is an 'out of sight out of mind' problem, and, when the chip's are down, most people are willing to (deliberately or not) turn a blind eye to this sort of idea and show a real lack of foresight by exploiting the world's resources in whatever way tickles their fancy.
And this claim of finiteness extends to other's memories of events and consequences, which is why someone who 'holds a grudge' is so dangerous:
"How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness! A poet might say that God made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of human dignity."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Perhaps, then, this is the real reason why Heaven is such a perfect place: everybody has to be moral because 'it's a loooooooooooooooong (i.e. infinite) ride and if I screw someone over, its gonna come back to haunt me' (But if that's the case, shouldn't Hell, which is also eternal, be equally perfect?)
Indeed, one sometimes wonders how those who believe in an otherworldly paradise can be so selfish and greedy, since if they happen to meet anyone up there who they screwed over down here, they're going to be hearing about it for a long time.
Or maybe not: maybe chronic amnesia is a prerequisite for human perfection, and is therefore an attribute of all residents of Heaven (save for God Himself, of course, who is omniscient)...
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