Virtuous Living and Entitlement

I just finished reading this excellent story in the latest Ms Magazine called “The Thing Around Your Neck,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s about a black woman, Akunna, who moves from Nigeria to the States and starts dating a white American man. It’s about entitlement and expectations. As I was reading it, the polarity between her attitude and his kept making me think of this one lesson I teach every year in my philosophy classes.

In a unit on the virtuous life, I have students read many different philosophies on the good life, the right way to live. We work chronologically through some of the big names. Then to wrap it all up, I make a chart on the board and ask the students to get in groups to brainstorm some very general similarities or trends within each column:

On the left hand side: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Freud, Mill, Rand
On the right hand side: Epictetus, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Jung, Thoreau, Marx

Then, as they’re thinking, I add “Hindu, Catholicism, and Islam” to the left and “Buddhism, Gnosticism, and 1st Nations” to the right. I sometimes interrupt them with a bit of Brooke Medicine Eagle’s writings.

I let them think a little more, then add “Hitler” to the left and “Gandhi” to the right. I wait for objections, but there are none.

Here’s what they typically come up with:

On the left: use reason to control yourself and the world, linear, a continuum from good to bad, either/or thinking, self vs others, individual rights are more important than the larger community, hierarchical organizations with the self at top, domination, most major governmental views, scientific, independent, logical, capitalism, right-leaning, conquer, fix the world, make it happen, segregate

On the right: accept what you can’t change and let yourself flow through life, communes, monasteries, gardens, yin/yang, cyclical, bad and good are one, both/and thinking, solidarity, community rights are more important than each individual, egalitarian, each person has equal value, holistic, dependent, intuitive, communism, left-leaning, passive resistance, appreciate the world, let it happen, connect

Very generally, on the left of the original column is mostly a group of people who wrote from a position of wealth or power, and on the right mostly a group who were poor or relatively powerless by chance or choice.

While I was reading the story of Akunna, it occurred to me that I should suggest “entitlement” be added to the left, but then what falls to the right? The first word that comes to mind is “undeserving” but that’s not right at all. I came across a blog (I’d link it if I could find it again!) that off-handedly used the phrase “deserved entitlement,” and I question it on so many levels. Isn’t it redundant? What constitutes undeserved entitlement? Who deserves to be entitled?

What Akunna was experiencing was partly a sense of not being deserving of ownership of everything she set her eyes on, she seemed to feel even undeserving of the man’s attentions and suspicious of his kindness to her, but there was more to it. It’s not complacency, because she and her family also want more out of life. It’s her constant awareness and her worldview that set them apart. Every little thing he believes without question that he has a right to or the right to do without reminds her of her home where people have so very limited choices in life.

On the left hand column sits the unwritten premise that we are all separate entities with some better than others, all striving to stay ahead of the game. Once we get near the top, we can have whatever we want and remain oblivious or forgetful of any people or environment harmed in the process. But the other side has an inter-connected view, an awareness of the suffering at the hands of the powerful and destruction of people and places, and various efforts to help one another rise above the pain in this world.

I always remind students that if a philosophy were really perfect, we’d all be following it. There are problems or at least criticisms with the theories. Students always jump on the chance to criticize: The first group risks alienation of themselves from the earth, their labour, and one another. They ignore the suffering of others. The second has no power or strength. They will always be stepped on by the rest of society. Students typically come to the conclusion that it’s better to risk being alienated than a doormat. Nothing’s worse than being weak.

But I remind them of the history of the Acadians. A very strong group of French Canadians who we dispossessed and exiled because they refused to take sides in a fight, but they came back when invited and carried on wherever they landed (many bypassed Canada for Louisiana). They went with the flow of life, not trying to control the situation, but just living their lives. They avoided the arguments instead of getting sucked into them. Yet we wouldn’t call them passive or weak. They were principled and persevered against all odds. That takes strength, courage, stamina. They’re survivors. And of course there’s always Gandhi as a good example of peaceful strength.

A few come to the tidy compromise that there is a season for all things. Sometimes it’s useful to control ourselves and our situation, to set goals and work towards them, and sometimes it’s better to step aside of a confict, to let go of control, to just see where we end up. We just need the wisdom to know when to do what. A time to conquer, a time to be conquered (or hope to be missed in the crossfire)? That’s still either/or thinking though, but, of course, so is my entire lesson (and I’m always careful to point this out to the kids). It’s hard to shift mindsets that are so ingrained in our lives and ancestry. But when that mindset is harming people and the world, we have to keep trying.

We can stop conquering without being conquered in the process. If we don't fight to win an argument, it doesn't mean we lost. We don’t need to step on others in order to help ourselves. And we don’t need to own the things we see or desire. Hard work, intelligence, and/or luck (mostly luck) of the few don’t make anyone more deserving of the products of exploitation of the many. My students need to learn more about the rest of the world, how the rest of the people live. Yet even those lessons rarely arouse their sympathies enough to get them to actually change their lives, where they shop, how many things they think they need.

And I’m right there in that boat with them justifying owning acres of land with a staunch refusal to log it or even run a road through it to get to the lake, preferring to canoe our way around the land to get to our little campsite. But so much of this land was stolen in the first place, I don’t really have a right to any of it. But you won’t see me giving it away.

Entitlement is a product of an inability to measure well, as Plato might say. We see the immediate rewards as larger because they’re closer to us and therefore they seem more rewarding, but forget the far away impact of our actions which seem so minor because of their distance from us. It’s a recognized principle of behaviour modification theory that immediate reinforcers typically win out over delayed punishers. It explains why we go to a movie with friends instead of working on that report that’s due in a few days. It explains why we keep drinking free trade coffee even though some of the beans have likely been picked under brutal slave conditions. It’s not that we lack compassion, but that we lack the ability (or desire) to keep that awareness at the front of our minds at all times. We have no ability to really feel the inter-connectedness of our lives with one another and with the world.

Well, not yet.