Hugh Trenchard

While not entirely deliberate at the time of writing it, the short story entitled, “The Best Cure for Loneliness” (previous post), touches on interesting current issues regarding the evolutionary and psychological basis for altruism. For example, in Cialdini et al. (1997) “Reinterpreting Empathy – Altruism Relationship: When One Into One Equals Oneness”, the authors argue for a non-altruistic (or essentially self-interested) motive for kindness to others that involves the concept “self-other oneness”.

True altruism involves selfless assistance with costs to the helper but no benefit to him/her. Cialdini et al. note prominent researcher, Batson, who argues that “purely altruistic action can occur reliably, provided that it is preceded by a specific psychological state: empathic concern for another” (481).

Cialdini et al. challenge this by presenting the concept of “self-other oneness” which entails a largely self-interested motive, similar to other kinds of self interested motivations, or “egoistic” motivations such as social approval, guilt, or sadness (483).

Cialdini et al describe self-other oneness:

“The notion of a responsive and fluid sense of self offers the provocative possibility that when one takes the perspective of another (either through instructions or feelings of attachment) and vicariously experiences what the other is experiencing, one comes to incorporate the self within the boundaries of the other….What is merged is conceptual, not physical.”

Cialdini et al note that the self-oneness response intensifies on a continuum of increasing attachment: near stranger, acquaintance, a good friend, or a family member (483), saying, “The upshot of this analysis is that close attachments may elevate benevolence not because individuals feel more empathic concern for the close other, but because they feel more at one with the other – that is, because they perceive more of themselves in the other…If people locate more of themselves in the others to whom they are closely attached, then the helping that takes place among such individuals may not be selfless” (483).

The present discussion is not meant to be a scholarly analysis of the Cialdini et al “self-other oneness” category of egoistic kindness and it has only marginal value in illustrating some of the arguments relating to altruism and self-interested motivations for kindness. However, I do present it for the sake of a thought provoking paradox, one which arguably presents a problem in the logic of the Caldini argument.

Thus the story, “The Best Cure for Loneliness”, entails an interesting extension to the notion of “self-other oneness”, in that the characters of the story (who of course share my name!) are the purest (fictional) example of the concept: they are both Hugh Trenchard (note I have not written this story because of a great need to see my name in print (!); the story was modelled on one written by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the writer encounters himself on a park bench).

In the story, the first HT indicates that he cannot be altruistic to the other because he is only concerned about social approval (“no fine looking women or well-suited men nearby”), and only becomes concerned about his counterpart and prepared to engage in an arguably altruistic act when HT (the first) realizes his counterpart is *in fact* himself. In the end, both engage in apparently selfless acts for each other, and indicate they may oscillate between these selfless acts when periods of “impoverishment” befall them.

Along the continuum of self-other attachment, their relationship is at the farthest extreme: far more than family, they are the purest form of oneness: they are in fact each other! If the Cialdini et al analysis is applied, a paradox thus arises: their motivations to assist the other is primarily selfish, and yet they fundamentally assist themselves. Although a paradox of this story, it does present a rhetorical\logical problem for the Caldini argument: if the concept of self-otherness is taken to its farthest extreme, if you assist yourself, then you are simultaneously both fundamentally self-interested and purely altruistic!

In any event, my aim here is not to present a rigorous criticism of the Caldini et al argument. Rather, it is only that I have realized my story entails some interesting elements of the altruism/selfishness debate which I have thought to illustrate a little here.

I leave this for now, perhaps to be revisited another day.

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Cialdini, R., Brown, S. Lewis, B., Luce, C., Neuberg. S. (1997) “Reinterpreting Empathy – Altruism Relationship: When One Into One Equals Oneness”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 3, 481-494

“Shall I tell you a story?” Asked the impoverished man, whose stated motivation to speak was a two-dollar coin, but whose obvious delusions revealed clearly to me his desperation for human contact on that hour of that day when hundreds had passed by and cast their eyes beyond his transparent, ragged sillouette. “It is the story of the compression of your happiness, Hugh Trenchard, to a single point and its implosion such that it encompasses the universe.”

For my selfishness, of charity I do not profess a single strand in my stony body, although, perhaps to impress company, I have been witnessed to press gently a token now and again into the hand or cap of those whose lives litter or adorn the streets, the description for which depends on the perspective I choose that day and the particular proportions of harmones and glucose coursing my veins, the relative concentrations of which may be determined by many things: the color of the sky, the intensity of the sun, the last minute office visit from the director who kept me late, the absence or overabundance of telephone or electronic messages that day.

Indeed it is well known that charity impresses others, and perhaps capably counting myself among the best and shrewdest of sociopaths, I have determined that a nod and smile and a coin in the hand of the needy appears to others as compassion, and such an appearance entails a vast panoply of potential benefits, of which it is not currently my intention to enumerate.

To be sure, this day was one when I perceived there to be no benefit derived from my stopping to engage the impoverished man: I was in no company, and there were no fine looking women or well-suited men nearby to witness the event and for whom I may have fantasized their thoughts to be, “my, how considerate and compassionate is that young man to engage that unfortunate destitute.” And the benefit to the man himself was negligible, if not enabling an entirely self-destructive trajectory, I long ago convinced myself.

But that he knew my name was more than startling. It is of course acceptable social engagement to acknowledge the greetings of others who know your name. But for those whose lives are not known publicly, it is rare for strangers to know your name, and so when such a stranger identifies you by your given names with clearest conviction, it is generally difficult to ignore, even for the least sanguine among us.

And so I stopped. “You know my name?” I asked the man.

“As surely as you know yourself.” He replied. “And I will, for a two-dollar coin, tell you that you also know me, and that when I begin to speak, you will be the one to tell me the story of my happiness, how it compresses to a point and implodes such that it encompasses the universe.”

“I will tell you the story?” I asked. “Why would I do such a thing? I do not know that story. It sounds utterly nonsensical. If you knew me so well, you would know that I am a skeptical man of science.” I said. “And this is a charade. There are ways for you to determine my name, who I am. I pass by this way frequently, it cannot be difficult for you to learn about me. And so I defy your story and leave you here to accost another victim of your fraud. But if you must, I will give you a five dollar bill if you promise to save your breath and let me on my way.”

“All right,” he replied. “But you know it will haunt you. My words will vibrate all the neural strands of your brain, and you will wonder about the story which you know well and that only you can tell me.”

“Oh please,” I said. “I have no more time for this game. I have no stories for you. I must go.” I turned my heals and began to stride away.

The impoverished man yelled after me. “I know the books on your shelf, Hugh Trenchard! I know that you have read Jorge Luis Borges this very afternoon, that you read The Book of Sand, and The Other; how Borges met himself and how they dreamed of each other! I know too that as you lay reading, you began to fashion a story in your mind that began this way: “Shall I tell you a story?” Asked the impoverished man”".

I stopped again, and turned. I was beyond surprise. If whom you thought was a stranger tells you so much, he who was a stranger can no longer properly be described that way, and there can be nothing less than infinite understanding. “Then how would you have me begin this story?” I asked.

“I do not need to tell you,” he said. “I am waiting for you to begin,” he said, returning the five-dollar bill to me. I nodded and thanked him. “Will you get coffee with that?” he asked.

“No.” I replied. “Today I am hungry, and there is a burger at McDonalds with my name on it. But I must wait for another stranger to come along to tell them this story, for I will need more money for supper tonight.”

“Then I will leave you here.” He said. “Take care of yourself and I will talk again with you another day.”

“Will you tell me the story, then?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You will return the five-dollar bill to me, and every synapse will be a microcosm of the universe. There is no loneliness to be achieved when all the connections of the cosmos lies compressed within us. Go, Hugh Trenchard, engage the universe and return to me when you are impoverished again.”

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IF a self-proclaimed studious man of exacting diligence finds himself frequenting the local Starbucks on the somewhat delusional premise that he intends to study the rigours of supply and demand of currency, exchange markets, current account deficits and surpluses, J-curves and the nuances of the Marshall-Lerner condition; and if this man deludes himself as the background strains of Bing Crosby are, for once, insufficiently loud to drown the nasal resonances of another young man’s nearby Quebecois Francais that seems in strange way and barely tolerable fashion to vibrate arrythmically and dissonantly his ears tympanic tissues, then certainly this man would be true to foundations of integrity to question why he is in this particular location, that is, the local Starbucks, when his time is undoubtedly better spent in the quieter confines of home. Also would he wisely exalt the virtues of honest discourse to question why the temptation is now irresistable to dribble out blog blather, when the time taken to do so means correspondingly equal durations of time not taken to engage in his studies of exacting diligence.

Does this man soothe his present lack of patience to work through the rigours of the task at hand? Is he fatigued from his dose of treadmill intervals in which he proclaimed with egregious self-satisfaction that “his legs were on fire”? Does he feel the sluggish relaxation of cognitive clarity that results from three consecutive days of some quantity of liquor consumed, albeit not excessively, but to the concommitant detriment of sleep?

And why is this man suddenly aware of the sloping table at which he sits, the loose top of the adjacent table on which his elbow rests, and why so suddenly noticeable is the slight discomfort of his lower back that results from back lifts at the gym? All such inconsequential events in past similar contexts would go unnoticed, and so why the uncharacteristic sensitivity? Indeed, if one were to distill present blog profusions to their one essential point, one might be forgiven for observing that our man seems, er…shall we say…pissed off.

And if our man could self-proclaim some capacity to engage insight into the present state of his consciousness, what would he find? Could he reach into the well of foul and soupy water and the sharp pebbles of his thoughts, and stir his hand long enough to bring the water to equilibrium and begin, grain by grain, to smooth the rough edges of every stone there?

He concedes that he cannot until the water is flushed and the stones smoothed by the pure clear spring of another, who by her absence, even for a day or two, cuts and grinds every stone together in a dull grating roar that fills up and displaces every cell in his body and leaves him unmoving like a statue of one billion fossilized roughcut stones.

In his moment of paralysis he is glancing up; he has ceased to type, and his distractions at once hone to a point and disappear. He strains, and there is international finance. It grabs and rattles him. He has written. Yes, he has written of his fleeting insight, false or true, his delusions, of water and pebbles and statues and rattles. He can move again.

Given a couple of spare hours preceding sleep and a day off work tomorrow (as all my Fridays are), and a temporary relinquishment of the pains of a course in International Finance, for a few minutes preceding the setting down of these words I thought that I might upload a video file of a flock of Brant geese on the waters near Parksville, taken during a recent weekend getaway. But the sometimes intricate mechanics of electronic file conversion has, for now, usurped my attempts and caused me to re-direct the focus of my ramblings for the night.

However, before leaving the subject of Brant geese, a subject to which I will return, I must comment that these are remarkable birds from the perspective of collective phenomena generally. I had observed how closely clustered these birds were as they floated on the heaving cold waters near to the shoreline, and I watched how they would adjust their positions when relocating en masse by drifting in behind each other, much as cyclists do when speeds are driven to a certain output threshold at which riders self-organize into a synchronized paceline. Another example of the “drafting effect”, I thought, as I watched them. The drafting effect is of course the description I apply to any natural self-organized process whereby agents in a system save energy by following others.

So, I managed to capture a brief digital video of the flock on the water, albeit in fairly poor quality. But I will leave the vagaries of file uploads for another time, when the hour is not so near the stroke of midnight, and the lids less heavy.

That said, as the seconds wind on inexorably toward that moment when today becomes tomorrow, when evening becomes morning; that moment when I vow to cry for the night “I can no more” and send myself to bed – in the intervening time there is little left of detail to be expressed, but merely a mood, a cloud of sensations which emerge from a unique sequence of synaptic events that crystallize to a few phrases on a white, empty, digital space.

Ah there it is! I can no more.

This shall be continued soon.