In Praise of Extravagant Love
BY Ross Martinie Eiler
Sam Waxworth’s apartment smells like death.
Sam is the protagonist of Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020). A data journalist loosely based on Nate Silver, Sam has just rushed a move to New York City.
Waxworth had been fairly comprehensive when designing his apartment-search algorithm. He’d limited his range of neighborhoods based on safety, vibrancy, and proximity to a feature (waterfront, public park, major cultural institution), as well as location relative to his office and the school in Park Slope where Lucy would be teaching in the fall. He’d calculated distances based on mileage and average commute time. Within these parameters, the main criterion was value, measured in square feet per dollar. One apartment in Red Hook had come out so far ahead of the others that Waxworth worried he was missing something. It wasn’t especially well served by public transportation, but this didn’t seem sufficient to explain the discrepancy. You could see lower Manhattan from the window. You could walk along the river. Further research suggested that the neighborhood was even a little hip...
The building itself was occupied on its first floor by something called the Hun Lee Poultry House, its name written in English and Chinese on a green awning beside cartoon drawings of a chicken and a duck. Waxworth imagined cooking odors coming up from the kitchen… If the restaurant was any good, it might become an additional feature of the place.
And so it might have, if the Hun Lee Poultry House had in fact been a restaurant, rather than a wholesale distributor - a warehouse full of live, caged birds. Halfway down the block, one suffered only a mild unpleasantness, as though something run over in the street had been left to rot. As you approached the building, the smell intensified at a rate not quite exponential but certainly more than linear. In the stairwell, unaccustomed eyes would water. You could practically see the stench in the air. The urgent squawks that passed through the walls all but demanded to be anthropomorphized into pleas for release.
In our present secularizing moment, we are awash in reductionistic models that purport to enlighten the world while completely missing the screaming chickens of human souls. James C. Scott’s commendable Seeing Like a State (1998) describes how well-intentioned state projects simplify and manipulate complex systems into “legible” commodities for the sake of control and efficiency. (Picture, for example, “scientific forestry” replacing an old growth forest with monocultures planted in straight lines; or how the architecture of Brasilia replaced traditional neighborhoods with brutalist asphalt.) When states deal with complex human cultures and values, they will bulldoze them - often literally - for the sake of simplification and efficiency. This tendency, of course, is not limited to states. Every level of American culture emphasizes speed and efficiency which generates a false understanding of the human person. Our Mammon-based culture only values that which can be counted: money, capital, grades, outputs. Alternative, traditional or religious worldviews are considered backwards. In understanding everything through numbers and imputable data, we understand nothing at all.
There has been some buzz around the phrase “Effective Altruism” (EA), a movement within philanthropy influenced by the writings of William MacAskill, the utilitarian ethics of Peter Singer, and the Silicon Valley ethos of Sam Bankman-Fried that advocates “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible and taking action on that basis.” At the heart of EA are good and natural impulses: we should give money away, we want our charitable actions to actually help people, and we should consider the impacts of our actions on future generations. But these ideas are old, universal, obvious, and not a contribution of EA.
What is new about EA are its quantitative models and utilitarian bean-counting that confidently urge people to override their human moral impulses in favor of an abstract and mathematically-produced bottom line. (Do you think you should spend $1000 to help your cousin pay her rent? Shame on you! That money could have saved the life of a sick child in Africa. Did you spend $1000 to save the life of a single juvenile homo sapiens in Africa? Shame on you! That money could have saved the life of 400 street cats.)
Current Affairs’s Nathan Robinson recounts: “I heard an EA-sympathetic graduate student explaining to a law student that she shouldn’t be a public defender, because it would be morally more beneficial for her to work at a large corporate law firm and donate most of her salary to an anti-malaria charity. The argument that he made was that if she didn’t become a public defender, someone else would fill the post, but if she didn’t take the position as a Wall Street lawyer, the person who did take it probably wouldn’t donate their money to charity, thus by taking the public defender job instead of the Wall Street job she was essentially murdering the people whose lives she could have saved by donating a Wall Street income to charity.” (This utilitarian career-counseling was also the subject of William MacAskill’s piece Want an Ethical Career? Become a Banker.)
EA uses technical feats to convince people to cede control of their exercise of goodwill and generosity because a more “right” and “efficient” generosity can be abstractly calculated. But these calculations necessarily recycle and give moral license to the values of materialist corporate capitalism. In this sense, EA is just a recent member of a well-established and ever-expanding club, joining such Senior Members as the Technocratic Paradigm of AI Research, Tom Friedman’s “world is flat” Global Capitalism, and whoever-it-is that keeps giving every kid in Monroe County Schools an iPad.
We should expect delusions. When secularism overthrows God, the throne does not remain empty. The End of Enchantment has foisted and continues to foist all kinds of new ideological fantasies to the forefront of our public commitments. Overconfident reductionistic data analysis is a terrible place to locate human values; but for many people it is all they have left.
The reason I am writing this is not to punch down on Effective Altruism but rather to remind us that there is an alternative. Christianity offers a corrective: Extravagant & Profligate Love.
The New Testament has a parable about effective altruism and extravagant love: the Anointing of Jesus (paralleled in Mt 26, Mk 14, Lk 7, Jn 12).
Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (John)
History’s first recorded Effective Altruist was Judas Iscariot. But Judas is not the point of the parable. Mary is.
Then turning toward the woman, Jesus said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. (Luke). Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her. (Matthew)
Firs Zhuravlev
Let us remember. Let us proclaim! Mary’s act of magnificence is a celebration of the messy overflowing that is Love. Love does not require a spreadsheet and a calculator; love takes a broken alabaster jar and it reeks of pure nard. Love is messy like hair-on-feet, mixed with tears and perfume. Love is thanks and praise and wonder and honor at the Miracle that is this other person. Love is not reductionistic, it is complexifying. And the transforming revolutionary power of love is what all of us - especially the poor, the homeless and the marginalized - need and deserve. Real love will never stop at mere sentiment but will always compel us (as St. James reminds us) to get our hands dirty, to make sure our beloved is cared for, warm and fed. Love means looking at another person with humility and knowing “I will never understand this person, but O with my whole heart I want to offer myself to them.” Parents know this. So do newlyweds.
Tom Cornell shared the following:
A donor came into the New York Catholic Worker house one morning and gave Dorothy Day a diamond ring. Dorothy thanked her for the donation and put it in her pocket without batting an eye. Later a certain demented lady came in, one of the more irritating regulars at the CW house, one of those people who make you wonder if you were cut out for life in a house of hospitality. I can’t recall her ever saying ‘thank you’ or looking like she was on the edge of saying it. She had a voice that could strip paint off the wall. Dorothy took the diamond ring out of her pocket and gave it to this lady. Someone on the staff said to Dorothy, ‘Wouldn’t it have been better if we took the ring to the diamond exchange, sold it, and paid that woman’s rent for a year?’. Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do what she liked with the ring. She could sell it for rent money or take a trip to the Bahamas. Or she could enjoy wearing a diamond ring on her hand like the woman who gave it away. ‘Do you suppose,’ Dorothy asked, ‘that God created diamonds only for the rich?’
There is a deep inefficiency in honoring the ineffable sacred dignity of another person. Taking any posture of love - to behold a stranger in need, to be interrupted (and to be interruptible), to resist the urge to rush and instead be present - is incompatible with the siren song of Maximum Efficiency.
Do human beings have any way of overcoming loneliness that does not require some deep inefficiency? You, dear reader: you know what it means to be lonely and, I hope, what it means to come through that loneliness. How were you saved? When have you moved from floundering to flourishing? Was someone else there? In that moment, were they maximizing their efficiency? At your darkest hour, did your soul cry out for efficiency or for someone to be close by your side? We are, all of us, saved through senselessly immoderate and unearned gifts of love.
The basic needs of the human body are absolute real needs. Every man, woman and child deserves a home, clean air and water, healthy food, bodily safety and a livable planet; and we all have an unchosen moral duty to provide these one for another. And yet also every person needs family, community, meaning, purpose, and belonging. These also are real needs, essential to human flourishing. Human Needs do not arrange in a hierarchy but in a cloud of yearning and strife. We all know people in apartments with refrigerators and video games who are desolatingly miserable; meanwhile human history is replete with examples of people with much less material wealth living beautiful, worthy, and wonderful lives. Human spiritual needs are different from physical needs not because they are lesser but because they are incalculable. “Clean Air” can be simplified into a legislative bill; “Meaning,” “Belonging,” “Purpose” can only be understood in the heart and spoken, if at all, through music, art and poetry. Our spiritual needs will forever defy attempts at simplification and reduction. Data-based analytical approaches definitionally exclude the spiritual needs of human souls because they cannot be quantified; and yet any attempt to reduce human suffering that ignores these realities will be insufficient at best or counterproductive at worst.
Our models can be wrong, our good intentions can spawn hosts of new problems, and our policy corrections can be self-defeating. But Solidarity in Love - stopping to care for the wounded on the side of the road, throwing a feast for a lost son who comes home, offering a bed to a weary woman tired of the shelters, baking a cake for a homeless guest who has not had a birthday party in decades, washing feet with tears - will always be a medicine that heals the broken world. In faith we plant seeds of love that we leave for a future harvest.
Ross Martinie Eiler, along with his wife Andrea, are co-founders of the Bloomington Christian Radical Catholic Worker in Bloomington, IN. He is a husband, father, piano tuner, a student of the Works of Mercy, and Minister of Record on death row.