Purpose - selfless service: The Biology of Service
K, poor chap, is struggling. He'd gone for a walk to think about a vignette about service, selfless service. He couldn't come up with one. Why? I am I so cynical, K thought, that I see all acts of service as hidden, and not so hidden, deals: I do this, if you do that? K remembers reading a book about Mother Theresa in which she is portrayed as a power hungry woman who needed others to suffer to have a purpose in her life. The author went so far as to claim that she deliberately withheld treatment from those she cared for to 'ensure' that there would always be a supply of sufferers to satisfy her need to be able to give service.
Perhaps that book is crazy, but in fact K does find it hard to visualize a selfless person. Selfless acts - definitely; random acts of kindness - all the time. But a selfless life, isn't that reserved for saints, and aren't we all, K definitely included, sinners of one kind or another? Speaking of saints and sinners, even the religions say that selfless service is a means to an end - the end being nirvana, not having to be reborn into this earthly misery, or to get to heaven. Very few religious figures transcend that. In fact, K is aware of only one, the Bodhisattva in Buddhism, who, according to Joseph Campbell is 'benevolent without purpose'.
K pours himself a second glass of wine and wonders if this view, his view, is not just an expression of the situation - scarcity - humans, and yes, K again definitely included, have always found themselves in. When you constantly live on the edge of mayhem, of disease, of starvation, of random death and war, then it does make sense to establish connections that lead to dependencies - and leave the selflessness to the chosen few. Because you never know, do you, whom you may need to depend upon. Then it is helpful when the rights and obligations are clear, crystal clear and beforehand. Once you remove the threat of death and you are free to serve, without hidden or any other obvious motive.
With that though, K sits up straight - and almost knocks the wine bottle over. If this line of thinking is true than stories of selfless service as the purpose of life must be easier to find amongst those who have always lived in material abundance, the nobility. True enough, a story comes to K's mind about a young Belorussian princess who spent the years of the Second World War in Berlin, working for the German Foreign Service. A, for that is her name, has told her story in the form of a three hundred page diary and K feels, it is worth summarizing here.
As nobility, A's family had to leave Belorussia once the Russian communist revolution of 1917 had extended her influence that far west. The family fled to Lithuania which was already between the first and second world war an independent nation. Sensing, in the late 1930s, the destruction of their country, A and many members of her family fled further. Only A's parent's stayed back, for as long as they could. A and her sister ended up in Berlin, when the Nazis were in power, with a passport from a country that no longer existed. She managed to find a job as a secretary in the Foreign Office, partly on the strength of her ability to speak several languages.
On one level, her life in Berlin during the war years is that of countless others: hunger, bombing raids, exhaustion, a strange sense of dancing on a volcano, friends and relative who are killed, sporadic, at best, information from family and loved ones. But on another level, it is completely different: As a member, albeit a minor one, of one of Europe's noble families she has friends and relatives on all sides of the war. K remembers a poignant scene were A takes time off from work for a prison visit to her cousin who fought on the side of the Allies and was taken prisoner by the Germans. She also has connections, closer than she realizes at first, to the German resistance - and she and her friends are able to perform small services to those wanted, imprisoned, tortured and killed by the Nazis after the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944.
A is part of a network that touches members of the nobility all over Europe and therefore on all sides of the war. Her ability to know information and to organize food and escape routes is better than that of 'normal' people. A privilege she uses to the best of her ability and one she makes readily available to those around her. She leads a precarious life: working at the Foreign Office, with no official nationality, a refugee in other words, connected to the opposing sides, both inside and outside of Germany, struggling daily to get enough sleep, to get enough food, to have, quite literally, a roof over her head:
And yet…
Her 'habits' of abundance make her see things and act differently. The war makes it pointless to try to keep the advantages she derives from these habits to herself - even though others tried to do precisely that. The thought of hoarding never seems to have occurred to A. Not because she was naïve, but because even in the years of 1939 to 1946 in Germany, as a stateless refugee, she instinctively felt and lived as if there was enough; and as if selfless service required neither sacrifice nor high moral standards. In fact, as if it was normal.
K is not part of the nobility and he knows next to no one from that world, but somehow, he is impressed. It is of course easier to be generous when you have enough - but how many are not, even under those circumstances.
What strikes K in A's story is that the focus of survival has been moved: from the self to something outside the self, in A's case the network of nobility that withstood even such strains as various members fighting on different sides of the war. Her trust in that network was neither blind, nor calculating, nor misplaced. As she served others, others served her. It was done in a light, matter-of-fact and non-calculating way. No one entered the good deeds done on one side of some ledger and the ones received on another. It was all done and received in the absolute knowledge that there was enough to go round. Living this way creates a lightness, even a playfulness, even, as odd as it sounds, un times of war. A was not burdened by the need to rely on herself to keep her life intact. When needed, others would help, allowing her to concentrate on helping others in need.
It is that trust in a network, a system if you will, K began to think, that gets closer to the essence of service in an abundant world. And it opened his eyes to another great example: the body! Perhaps, K wondered, it is easier to talk about something that so obviously (?) has no purpose like life itself.
Numerous, nay countless proteins, cells and 'foreign' bodies work together to make up the body, human or otherwise. The more we learn about the way a body functions, the more miraculous, to K at least, it becomes. Starting with an egg cell and a sperm cell, a process begins, seemingly spontaneous, adaptive, regenerative if need be, that leads to a highly complex, sophisticated and temporary - but proud - defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything, inevitably returns to entropy, an 'ultimate state of inert uniformity' as the dictionary dryly informs us.
While in the beginning anything is possible, as cells divide over and over again, they specialize. (Even then some retain the, so far theoretical, ability to recreate the entire body all over again.) And in specializing they do not strike bargains: The retinal cells do not have a deal with the red blood cells. The brain cells do not start a small - nothing implied, you know, but just in case … - storage space for oxygen, which in fact they cannot do without for very long. And the lungs do not make a deals with the intestines. No, they all rely, blindly, on the whole functioning and serving each others' needs. Sometimes, and of course eventually, the whole thing collapses and dies. But in the meantime, the body in all its majesty functions as a collection of cells, and a few symbiotic outsiders, serving each other selflessly.
Wait a minute, K interrupts the warm pleasantness he always feels when something seems to make sense, what about the 'selfish gene' he once read about? He remembers Richard Dawkins' book in which the author argued that the view of cells working selflessly without purpose is an illusion. The truth, according to Dawkins, is that all of them are harnessed by the gene and all it cares about is replication. K's intellect being less developed than Dawkins' - or is this actually the beginning of the effect of the wine? - K says to himself 'Perhaps!' But what then about all those water molecules who arrange themselves neatly in a vortex when you pull the plug in the sink or the bathtub? No genes here. So are they selflessly serving the purpose of a smooth exit?
Or, K really begins now to wonder - cautiously, very cautiously to begin with - could it be that we humans for one reason or another do not trust the very idea of service? No one actually talked to a gene, did they, and learned once and for all that all they really care about, and pretty single-mindedly at that, is propagation. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is us who need to interpret the world - cells and genes and maybe even water molecules included too - as a never ending series of deals that are struck, across very short distances and with very careful ledger entries.
It is getting late and K is becoming pensive: What if you are honest, he muses, and no one notices? What if a tree dies in a forest and there is no witness? What indeed if you are benevolent without purpose?
Since a nightcap does not bring the necessary clarity of thought, in fact it doesn't bring any clarity at all, K retires to bed. Jump back to the top ...