What Makes A Person Good?

[Seil]

Right now I'll settle for not being such a dissapointment. I've always had the dreams of wealth, power and women, and what I would do with each; but most of the time I just try to live up to my unreasonably high expectations and utterly fail at it. That being said, I do try to be a genuinely nice person. I try to help out. I can make people smile, I can make people happy, but for myself, I usually just need a cigarette and some good liquor to keep me warm.

I've been reading these two books: "Help," by Garret Keizer and "The Compassionate Life" by Marc Barasch. While Help deals primarily with discussing help in different forms, (obviously) Keizer - a minister - spends the first few bits talking about the tale of The Good Samaritan, Catholicism and Budhsim. Barasch spends a bit discussing scientific research - the last chapter I read was discussing the difference atwixt chimpanzees and bonobo monkeys, and how they relate to us on the empathetic/sympathetic side of things.

They're both really well written and are really intreresting so far, and I recommend both if you're curious about the nature of human goodness, whether or not it's actually "human" goodness at all, why people are good...

Barasch, in the chapter what with the monkeys, spends a bit of time observing chimpanzees, who have their alpha males, they have their own heiarchy. Bonobo monkeys are more easy going, more prone to helping each other... and sexing each other as well. Bonobos are the more kind, the more gentle monkeys, according to the book, which is according to people helping to continue the research of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Sue is a psychobiologist, and raised a bonobo from infancy, sharing the duties with an adoptive bonobo mother. There's all sorts of stories to tell, such as how the monkey, Kanzi, tried to open a jar of cherries by throwing it at the ground. The jar bounced, and hit his keeper in the knee, who cried out, grasping her knee. Kanzi went to her, thinking that her hand was hurt, and asked through sign language or lexigrams to see it. He took her hand, inspecting it, and upon finding an old scar, urged her to take her canteen to clean it.

Barasch mentions the golden rule here: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Had it been Kanzi who suffered a cut, she would wash it, clean it.

Kanzi is very effective at making tools - when keepers put a box filled with goodies for him, they stretched a particularly tough bit of hide over the top, strapping it into place. Kanzi learned how to get at it by taking rocks, and smashing them until he could find a particularly sharp piece and cutting the hide. However, when they introduced a wild bonobo, P-Suke to the same problem, he couldn't figure it out. He didn't figure out how to open the crate. From that, Barasch infers:

Suddenly, a realization dawns, and it feels a little stunning. Kanzi, due to his facility with one system of syllables - language - can catch on to the skill and perhaps even the concept of tool making that characterized early man. Kanzi has acquired a different mind than P-Suke, a symbol using mind; that has brought him a new way - for want of a more cautious term - thinking about the world.

Kanzi was just a regular Joe Bonobo until he was handed (or seized for himself) the tools of symbolic thinking. "The primate brain is the hardware. Culture is the operating system," Fields says. "I can run a simple system on my computer hardware, like DOS 1.0, or I can run Windows, or I can run Linux. Kanzi's operating system has become different than P-Suke's; Kanzi's brain can now run the genera of culture.

It's an interesting idea, and Barasch goes on even further to looking things from a primate perspective at the airport on the way home. He sees people in alpha male positions, paternal patterns and the like. It's not all science, though. He does go on to talk about the Dalai Lama.

Keizer goes a different route on the same map. He talks about help as something that should be reciprocal: that one person should want to help, while another person wants to receive the help. He conradicts this by relating a story about a woman trapped in an incredibly abusive relationship, shut down so much that she won't even speak. She receives help and compassion and support and from the passages including her in the book seems to have gotten better. He remarks that while the woman might have wanted help, she was unable to communicate her want.

Keizer - and this is where I tie in my first sobering paragraph - mentions that of the many different kinds of help - from the Samaritan (who I didn't know the history of, Samaritans were kind of hated) to the help tries to give as a minister. He mentions that one type is to push it on someone (something he tells us is usually not the best action) but while that can result in further furors, sometimes the best type of help is to just let it be. To be available, but to leave someones privacy untouched, to let them be alone. When I get the book back - I lent it out - I'll see if I can use his wording, write in what he said, but for now I want to ask the question:

We're a weird people. We created religion where the ideal, the most one can aspire to be is a good person. Our books and writings tend to favor the hero, heroism by defeniton being doing good. We're usually fighting battles with ourselves, keeping us from shouting at someone we dislike in conversations we don't want to be in because of societal constraints, which again, push us toward being good. Though there are many definitions of "good," and how to be a sincere, honest, loving, genuine person, the question remains why aren't we? Why do we fight and bicker and hoard and thieve?

I'm hoping to trigger a discussion, but the thing that I've recently discovered was that after reading the books I mentions, Help and The Compassionate Life, I've thought about being a good person, and because I'm thinking about it, I'm acting it... or, at least, actively noticing the good deeds I do. Maybe that's the most I can accomplish with this discussion, the opportunity to get you to think about what being a good person means, and doing it because you're thinking it.