My generation’s virtue (often maligned as vice) is that we never learned to force ourselves to be committed or even to fake being committed to anything that didn’t seem relevant and valuable.
We learned morality from punk, or maybe punk expressed the only morality we found credible, or maybe it was both, developing together in a living feedback loop.
Maturity brings new questions, though. Many of us know that the ideals that were thrust in our faces in our childhood and youth were suspicious and definitely not compelling.
Does that mean that ideals in general are not compelling? Denial becomes tedious after several decades. What can we authentically care about and sacrifice to? Can we avoid picking something at random for the sake of having something to care about and sacrifice to?
99% of my friends will say “Community!”
I worry that community impulse might be an example of the random sacrifice-for-its-own-sake cause I just mentioned. If we want community that sustains us rather than drains us, something we participate in, and not just a cozy scene we set up to admire with one another, we have some serious philosophical detoxification and reconditioning to do. Everyone I know has this overwhelming urge to exclaim, “Look at us, all here together!” every time we’re all here together.
We need to rethink the relationship between individual and community.
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Individuals have the capacity to speak to one another, to show truth to one another, to make appeals to one another and consequently to become participants in a unified, diverse, manifold being, with no loss to their own selfhood.
Examples:
- Collaborating in a team environment, you find ideas being drawn out of you by the situation, superior to anything you could ever conceive alone. It is your idea, because it is everyone’s. Somehow, regardless of who speaks the idea, everyone had a part in its generation.
- You are in an intense and good-willed conversation with another. You notice that you are speaking, but you do not know what you will say next. You are more a learner than a teacher. Where are these thoughts coming from, if you are not drawing from your own preexistent knowledge?
- Something shifts in your social environment. Your entire world changes, the color shifts, the themes shift, the possibilities close in on you, or they unfold and open. You change with it. Or does it change with you?
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Frankly, I don’t think one discrete person ever sacrifices for another discrete person.
People sacrifice for some form of selfhood. The question is: how is selfhood understood?
Some see the self primarily as an observable person in the world, seen by others and admired or despised. If such a person sacrifices himself to whatever cause — he sacrifices his life to his image-self. This is narcissistic martyrdom. My suspicion is that most religious martyrs have been narcissists or narcissists’ tools.
Others see the self spiritually, as pure consciousness, within which one’s world (or at its extreme, the entire world) is contained. The self is the one who experiences. This kind of self will sacrifice self as one kind of experiencing being to a future not-yet-experienced form of experiencing self.
Others see the ego-self and the greater self as related but different. The ego is a manifestation of greater self. Greater self can be understood in a variety of ways, too, and this will affect the character of the sacrifice. This kind of self will sacrifice his individual selfhood to the source of his selfhood, which produced what is good in him, and will continue to produce it, like a tree produces fruit.
These three can resemble one another and are easily confused, especially by self-sacrificers.
I’m not only talking about great sacrifices. I’m talking about sacrifices of all kinds of things to all kinds of beings — of happiness, of convenience, of material wealth, of freedom, of safety, etc. — to God, or god, or religion, or nation, or party, or company, or ideal, or principle, or spouse, or friend, or colleague, etc..
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