A Moral Revolution
The Effective Altruism for Christians blog has recently published a piece of mine on the History of Christian Giving:
Such a long period of history has many lessons, many concepts and nuances which deserve further exploration, but here I will examine just two - the contingency of care for the poor and how religious ideology and the material structure of society intersect to make the moral basis of care.
Christian giving - to the poor, to the sick, to the helpless - was a real and significant change in the moral landscape of the Ancient Mediterranean. This is perhaps what surprised me most in my research, as my default assumption would be that helping the weak is close to a cultural universal. In the world of Greece and Rome, beggars, widows, and the sick were burdens, and helping them was a sign of weakness. Christianity changed this.
Of course there are few hard binaries. Would a normal Greek aristocrat give water to a desperately thirsty man in his presence? I would still guess yes. But what the change from a Pagan to a Christian understanding of the weak shows is just how important distance, physical and social, is to morality. The Ancient Mediterranean world believed strongly in moral obligations to those close to us, but those close to us were defined as people in ties of reciprocal giving and friendship. The Xenia, ritual hospitality towards foreigners, discussed so often in reading the Odyssey, was a very real ideal that did not extend to poor travelers in a more cosmopolitan Roman society with lots of economic migration among people who could not claim equality with Iron age heroes. Even with this ideal enshrined in the core texts of a society for a millennium, it took a century of Christianity to invent traveller’s hostels.
Mengzi posits that the inherent goodness of human nature is revealed in basic, innate, emotions, such as the natural urge to save a child from falling in a well. These seeds of action are there in every culture, but the process of abstraction from basic human compassion to moral action is complex, arbitrary, and culturally conditioned. Moral standards come partially from religious and cultural development - Christianity’s insistence on agape and helping those who harm you were unique and significant - but also depend on the overall structure of society. Warrior ethics gets displaced in a peaceful society; Rome’s maturing into a multiethnic empire necessarily saw a reevaluation of moral standards and responsibility for the weak. Even Julian the Apostate when pondering a potential pagan future for the Roman Empire had to admit that the treatment of the poor and sick was a weakness in his beloved Hellenic morality which needed to be repaired. A Christian late Rome cared more for the poor than a Pagan late Rome would have, but the difference was not absolute.
This is also my provisional explanation for why similar cultures of charity developed in absence of Christianity throughout the post-Classical world. East-Asian Buddhism sees a similar story of wealthy individuals giving directly to the poor, bypassing a usually uncaring state. Zakat, Islamic almsgiving, spread through the world that was once Rome turning a virtue of the devout into an obligation for all. Christianity is not a prerequisite for altruistic giving, what’s needed is a different assessment of who is worthy of moral care, which is a quality that is determined both by religious values of a society and the economic-social structure of the society itself. The best Christianities are those that will force this moral care even in a society predisposed to disregard it, but the religion has often failed to meet this standard.
The contingency of these values is also perhaps what caused the stall of altruism’s further development. The peaceful world within the empire of 4th and 5th century Rome gave way to small and poor warring kingdoms. Travelers could no longer move throughout this world relying on the goodwill of their fellow countrymen, and the interpretation of Christianity changed in parallel. The greater focus on religious institutions over the poor comes at least partially from this reality. Christianity demanded that some still be given to strangers and the poor, but such cultural values can be bent.
When modernity came, and the era of truly global charity was born in 18th and 19th century Britain, both factors play a role. The British were the first to become truly wealthy in a sustained way, and with their colonial empire citizens had direct and troubling access to people far poorer than them. The structures of empire made most of the interaction between these peoples cruel, but Mengzi’s seeds could not fail to bloom in at least a few individuals. And there was a religious element too. The Protestant religious ethic motivated direct involvement with the poor in the form of moral advancement, making the poor self-sufficient. This was very different than the original Christian giving - no one thought that a leper or a widow would become independent through alms - but the focus on individual improvement in Protestant and Enlightenment theology intersected well with the Colonial situation of improved communication and interconnection and arguably gave us what good global aid has produced. Utilitarianism and the secular ethics of philanthropy were born of the elite form of these trends within Christianity in a way which escaped Christianity, and this ideology has succeeded in quietly grounding the modern world.
Looking back, it seems to me that the best ethic is to do all one can based on good moral principles, and to do so without waiting for society as a whole to bring people close together. For an upperclass Christian woman married to a pagan in a North African provincial capital in the 3rd century, giving to the local poor was the correct moral stance. It would not have made sense to worry about famines in China or Sweden or the Americas. For a woman in similar circumstances now, it does make sense to have such a worry, because society has involved to make that worry into meaningful action.
We fail morally when history advances our capabilities, but we do not respond properly, which is always. Greece and Rome could have always cared for beggars, the wealthy Christian woman could have risked her husband’s displeasure by taking in travelers, the Medieval Church could have cared for peasants as much as it did monks. A strong moral fabric for society must constantly challenge its citizens to reapply the basic compassion and love to changing circumstances. It must always bring us face to face with the weak, and confront us with our responsibility to help.