Religion

THREE The Loneliness of Looking Out for

Number One

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IF you could live without limits, if you could do any- thing, go anywhere, command anyone to do what you wanted, would that make you happy? Would you be able to use all that power in ways that would give your life enduring significance and satisfaction?

One of the classics of world literature, Goethe's dra- matic poem Faust, the story of the man who sells his soul to the devil, focuses on that question. Dr. Faust, the hero of the poem, is a middle-aged scholar and scientist who has just about given up hope that he will ever learn the true meaning of life. He has begun to fear that he will come to the end of his life honored and well educated but without ever having experienced what it means to be truly alive. That is why he makes his desperate bargain with the devil, promising the devil his soul in the hereafter in ex- change for just one moment on· earth so fulfilling that he will be moved to say, " Let this moment linger, it is so good ."

The German poet Goethe spent his whole life writing his masterpiece Faust. He intended it to be his major statement about the meaning of life, the endu ring li terary

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masterpiece which would give his own life meaning, Ii began writin g his play at the age of twenty, set it aside t c other proiects, then went back to it at forty (part of hor

, . 'di~ own reaction to reaching mt - !JC, we may suspect), and completed it shortly before his death at age eighty-three, While we cannot be sure how old Goethe was when h wrote any particular line, it is fascinating to see how the hero's ideas of what h~ wants to do with his life chang: from the beginning of the story to its end.

At the outset of the play, the middle-aged Faust 118 pictured by a young Goethe wants to experience every. thing, to live without limits. He wants to read all the books, speak all the languages, taste all the pleasures. He wants to be like God, going beyond human limitations. So the devil gives him everything-wealth, political power, the ability to travel anywhere and be loved by any woman he desires. Faust does it all and he is still not happy. However much wealth he acquires, however many women he seduces, there is an unsatisfied hunger within him.

By the time we come to the end of the play, the author Goethe is in his eighties and his hero Faust has aged along with him. Instead of winning fights and attracting young women, Faust is now at work building dikes to reclaim land from the sea for people to live and work on. Instead of trying to be like God, a God of power, seeing and controlling without limits, he has now become like God, a God of creation, separating the water from the dry land, planting gardens and setting people to work in them. Now for the first time, Faust can say, "Let this moment linger, it is so good."

When we are young, we pursue success for its own sake. We want to find out how good we are. A man sells his

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Tht Lontllrms of Looking Ou l for Numbtr Ont

home and moves to a different community, asking his wife and children to adjust to new friends and new schools, because a promotion at work requires it. A college athlete postpones graduate school to try out with a professional team, It may or may not make sense financially, but at that stage in our lives, it is hard for us to resist a challenge. It is not only the rewards of success that lure us on at that point; success itself is the reward. We want to find out how far our ability will carry us.

Then things change. Instead of seeing life as a contest and victory as an end in its own right, we start to see success as a means to an end. Instead of asking, How high can I climb? we start thinking in terms of, What sort of life will this make possible for me? The attractive you ng woman stops seeing the men in her life as a measure of how popular she is and starts asking herself what sort of husbands and fathers they might be, what sort of home she would have with them. The hard-driving businessman becomes less concerned with the next step up the corpo- rate ladder and more concerned with translating his suc- cess into a life he can feel good about.

I can imagine that this is the path Ecclesiastes traveled. At first, he set out to make money because he was bright and ambitious, and that is what bright and ambitious people do. Though he never gives us the details, he appar- ently made a lot of money fairly easily and early in his life. "I built houses and planted vineyards fo r myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all manner of frui t trees .. . I had male and fem ale servants, and great herds and flocks , more than anyone else before me. I gathered for myself si lver and gold, the treasures of kings and provinces." (2:4-8)

He seems to have everything going fo r him that a man

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WA NTED IS N'T ENOUGH

could possibly want. He seems to have no limits on h' attainments. He is fabulous!y rich, impressively inten(~ gent. Why t~en ~oes he conh~ue to feel that something is missing? Might 1t be that this sort of success somehow contains within itself the seeds of its own failure? Is there something about this striving for getting ahead which lets Act I of our lives be fulfilling and gratifying, but tends to make Act II inevitably disappointing?

To see the goal of life as "winning" forces us to see other people as competitors, threats to our happiness. For us to "win," they have to "lose." Their failure becomes one of the necessary ingredients of our success. In a competitive situation, whether it is a high school social setting or a baseball pennant race, there can be winners only if there arc losers. Everyone who strives to be a winner finds that he has to set himself against the rest. He rises as they fall, and that ou tlook has its consequences.

Two true stories illustrate this. An American tourist found himself in India on the day of the pilgrimage to the top of a sacred mountain. Thousands of people would climb the steep path to the mountaintop. The tourist, who had been joggi ng and doing vi gorous exercise and thought he was in . good shape, decided to join in and share the experience. After twenty minutes, he was out of breath and could hardly climb another step, while women carry- ing babies, and frail old men with canes, moved easily past him. "I don' t understand it," he said to an Indian compan- ion. "How can those people do it when I can't?" His friend answered, " It is because you have the typical American habi t of seeing everything as a test. You see the mountain as your enem y and you set out to defeat it. So, naturall y, the mountai n fights back and it is stronger than you are. We do not see the mountain as our enemy to be con-

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Tht Loneliness of Looking Ou t for Nu mber One

quered. Th~ purpose ?f ~ur climb is to become one with the moun tain ands~ it hfts u_s up and carries us along. "

Second story: A fnen d of mmc, a clergyman a few years older than I am, chose to share a very personal insight with me. He realized that something remarkable had hap- pened to him about the time he grew too old to be call ed to 8 major pulpit. He discovered that he was no longer looking at his closest friends and colleagues in larger con- gregations and wondering when they would die or be caught in a scandal, thereby creating a promotional va- cancy. He had never realized that he had been doing this, but his own concern for "moving up" and making some- thing of his career had led him to sec these fellow ministers as obstacles to his own happiness. His success could come only on the heels of their tragedy. For years, those feelings had made it hard for him to be genuinely friendly and open with colleagues and had made him dissatisfied with his own small congregation, despite its good points. He was turning himself into a lonely, jealous, bitter person. His sermons became harsh and judgmental, with little of the love or joy he claimed to represent, and he blamed others for his unhappiness. Now he finds that he has out- grown that sense of competitiveness. He can welcome colleagues as friends. He can serve as an unofficial mentor to younger ministers and accept his own congregants as being worthy of his love and care, rather than seeing them as symbols of his failure and lack of advancement. Noth- ing around him has changed but something inside him has changed , and he can look forward to his remaining years in the active ministry as being productive and gratifying ones.

Ecclesiastes worked to become wealthy and successful because for him wealth represented possibility, a life full

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of choices and comforts, knowing he would never ha ' ' q~

do without something because he could not afford it. Faust yearned for wealth and success, because for him they were the key to power over other people. He believed that if h had enough money and influence, he could arrange thin; in his life to his sati,faction, and life would be good. Ther are two things wrong with that kind of thinking. e

First, nobody can have that much power. The world is too complex and too elusive. You can never control every. thing that happens. Barbara Tuchman, in her book The March of Folly, examines the question of why leaders and nations behave foolishly in situations where it should be clear that what they are doing is hopelessly wrong. One of the recurring reasons for foolish behavior (the corrup- tion of Roman emperors and medieval popes, Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia, America in Vietnam) is the notion that if you are powerful enough, you can im- pose your will on others and do whatever you want. One after another, they all learned that even overwhelming power is not enough to guarantee total control.

Second, the quest for wealth and power, and the exer• cise of that power, tends to separate you from other peo- ple. Not only does the quest for wealth lead many people to see life in terms of competition rather than cooperation, but the exercise of power by the successful can make human relationships diffi cult. If you love someone because he always t_ries to please you, because he does only what you want him to do, that is not love. That is just a round· about way of loving yourself. Power like water flows downhill from someone in a higher p~sition to s;meone lower down. Love can be generated only between people who see themselves as equals, between people who can be mutually fulfilling to each other. Where one commands

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The Loneliness of Looking Out for Number One

and one obeys, there can be loyalty and gratitude but not love.

In the Bible, the sin of idolatry is not just a matter of bOwing down to statues. Idol worship is treating the work of your own hands as if it were divine, worshipping your- self as the highest source of value and creativity. When the second Commandment reads, "You shall not make your- self a graven image," one commentator takes that to mean not "You shall not make an idol for yourself," but "You shall not make an idol of yourself." Do not make yourself into an object of worship by believing that you have enough power to control the world in which you live and the other people who live in it.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and founder of the highly individualistic school of thought known as existentialism, once wrote, "Hell is other people." Sartre was a very wise man, bu t I think he said something very foolish on that occasion. Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. A leading anthropologist who had spent years studying chimpanzees in the wild once wrote, "One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee." That is, a chimpanzee can develop into a real chimpanzee only in the company of other chimps. Isolated in a zoo, it may survive but will never become its real self. I have been observing people in their natural habitat for at least as long as Dr. Leakey studied chimps, and I would paraphrase his comment to read, "One human being is no human being." None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge on ly in the ways we relate to other people.

Hell is not "other people." Hell is having worked so hard for success that it corroded your relationships with other people, so that you learned to see them only in terms

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of what they could do ~or_ you. I thin~ of ~aust, having traded his soul for unhm1ted power m this world, and being so lonely in his unlimi!ed power. Fo~ him, hell is the loneliness of havi ng everything and knowmg that it is still not enough. (Do we all make our bargains with the devil, gaining what we thought we wanted and losing part of our souls in the process?) I think of Ecclesiastes, surrounded by servants on his luxurious estate, perplexed by the ques- tion , If I have everything, why do I feel that something is missing? I think of Howard Hughes and Lyndon Johnson in their last years, experts at manipulating people to do their will, masters of the art of exercising power, ending up lonely old men surrounded by hired servants and favor seekers, wondering why so few people loved them.

Being in a position to exercise power over other people (employees, mates , children) may be gratifying for a little while, but never in the long run. Ultimately it leaves you lonely. You command, and you receive fear and obedience in return, and what emotionally healthy person can live on a diet of fear and obedience? Who wants people to be afraid of him, to obey him sullenly and grudgingly rather than freel y and out of love?

Martin Buber, an important twentieth-century theolo- gian, taught that our relationships with others take either of two forms . They are either I-It, treating the other per• son as an object, seeing him only in terms of what he does, or I-Thou, seeing the other as a subject, being aware of the other person's needs and feelings as well as one's own. Buber tells the story of an incident which changed his life and led him to that formu lation. When he was young, his parents were divorced and he went to live with his grand· parents on a farm . He would feed the animals, clean the pens, and groom the horses. One day, when Buber was

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Tht u,nelin ,ss of u,oking Out fo r Number Ont

abOut eleven, he was cari ng for a horse which was his particular fa vorite. He loved to ride and groom and feed that horse, and often brought it special treats, and the horse seemed to respond and like the boy who fed and combed it as well. As Buber was stroking the horse's neck, 8

strange feeling came over him. He fel t that he could not only understand what it fel t like to be an eleven-year-old bOY patting a horse. Because he loved the horse, he could understand what it m~st have felt like to be a horse being patted by a boy. The JOY of that moment, of being able to go beyond the confines of his own soul and know what another soul was experiencing, was so much more satisfy- ing than the sense of power to make someone else do his will, that years later, Buber foun ded his entire theology on that feeling.

The Bible shows us two contrasting faces of God. Some- times He is a commanding God, a God of Power, dest roy- ing Sodom, raining plagues on the Egyptians, splitting the Red Sea. And sometimes He is a helping God, a tender God, a God of Love and Relationship, visiti ng the sick, offering hope to the enslaved. We read those stories and we are understandably confu sed, because Love and Power are incompatible. You can love someone and gi ve him the room and the right to be himsel f, or you can try to control him, to make him do your will whether for his own good or for the enhancement of your own ego. But you can not do both at the same time. If you appreciate someone be- cause he or she lets you do whatever you want and makes you feel strong and smart, that is not love. It does not recognize the uniqueness of the other person, only his or her usefulness. You could substitute anyone else who was equally compliant, and it would make no differe nce to you . Loving someone for being like you, for being an

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extension of your will , is not really love. It is just a round. about way of loving yourself.

Sometimes God's Power seems to get in the way of His Love. If we obey God because we arc afraid of Hirn because we don 't want to offend Him, or because we ar~ so overwhelmed by His might that we do not dare to challenge Him, then He has our obedience but He docs not have our love. In order to love and be loved, God has to · give us room to choose, to become ourselves. He cannot monopolize all the Power and leave none for us. The covenant between God and humanity has to be more than a matter of the Almighty laying down the Law. It has to be an agreement freely entered into between two free parties.

I think of all those passages in the prophecies of Hosea and Jeremiah which portray God as a husband whose wife has betrayed him, terribly audacious passages which al- most picture God as lonely, longing for someone to love Him and not simply obey Him out of fea r, grieving that His people do not love Him after all He has done for them. "I remember the devotion of your younger days, your love as a bride, how you foll owed Me in to the wild erness, in a land not sown." (Jeremiah 2: 2) "Have I been like a desert to Israel, a land of deep gloom? Why then do My people say, 'We have broken loose, we will not come to You any more'?" (Jeremiah 2:3 1) God is One and because He is One, He is all alone unless and until ' there are people to love Him.

If we see oursclves as fashioned in the image of God if we understand the · f G • ' . . image o od m us to represent what we will be like whc b h' h . n we ecomc fu ll human bei ngs then ; ic image of God shall we aspire to, the lonely God of ewer or the loving God of Relationship?

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I would like to believe that in the earliest stages of fashioning the Bible and the culture out of which it sprang, the Israelites pictured God in the image of the Near East- ern despots of the world they knew, Egyp tian Pharaohs and kings of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, abso- lute monarchs with the power to make or suspend laws, the power of life and death over their subjects. But then, I would like to think, their understanding of religion began 10 mature. They came to sec that Power was not the absolute good, that the wielders of absolute power became not more than other humans but less than them, cruel and arbitrary, jealous and suspicious, inspiring fear but never love. And they could no longer picture God in that way. In the stories of Noah and the Flood or Abraham at Sodom, we al ready sec God pu nishing people fo r being wicked to each other, not for not worshipping Him. The prophets speak of a God for Whom people being kind_ to each other is more important than bri nging sacrifi~s to His altar. The image of a God of Power is never totally forkotten, but it is soon overshadowed by the image of a God who shares with us the task of building a humane world on the foundation of people cari ng for each other, even as He cares for each of us. God does not look out for number one; He looks out for the welfa re of those least able to take care of themselves. In both the Law and the Prophets, in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, God has a special con- cern for the poor and the brokenhearted and a certain suspicion toward the rich and the successful not because it is goo d to be poor and immo ral to be rich but because the poor an d the afflicted seem to find it easier to need each other and to belong to each other. They tend to be more vul nerable, less self-sat isfi ed, and there is something pro- foundly human about that.

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We too mu st go through the same evolutionary proecss our ancestors w_e~t through, from worshipping power and success to 1deahzmg helpfulness and caring relationshi My teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel used to say, "Wi:; I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old I admire kind people." '

There is nothing wrong with being successful. Churches, colleges, museums, and medical research all depend on the generosity of successful people sharing the fruits of their success with them. There is nothing wrong with having enough power to influence events. On the contrary, people who feel powerless and frustrated are more dangerous to society than people who know the effect of their influence and can use it wisely, because they may do desperate things to compel us to take them seri- ously. But there is something very wrong wi th the single- minded pursuit of wealth and power in a way which shuts us otffrom other people. It may put us in a position where the only thing worse than losing is winning.

There is a story behind the establishing of the Nobel Prizes, the supreme awards for achievement in the arts and sciences. Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, made a fortune by inventing more powerful explosives and licens- ing the formula to governments to make weapons. One day , Nobel 's brother died, and one newspaper by accident printed an obituary notice for Alfred instead. It identified him as the inventor of dynamite and the man who made a fo rtune by enabling armies to achieve new levels of mass destructi on. Nobel had the unique opportuni ty to read his own obituary in his life time and to see what he would be remembered fo r. He was shocked to think that this was what his life would add up to, to be rem embered as a sa

The Lonelines.s of looking Out fo r Number One

merchan t of death and destruction. He took his fortune and used it to estabHsh the awards for accomplishments in various fields w~1ch would benefit humanity, and it is for that, not fo r his explosives, that he is remembered today. When Nobel was at his most "successful," he was working against life and against friendship. Then he real- ized what he would leave behind if that were all he did, and he gave the last part of his life another direction.

In recent years, a number of books have appeared on the theme of "looking out for number one." They suggest that it is a brutal, competitive world out there, and the only way to get ahead is ruthlessly to take advantage of other people's weaknesses. My objection to those books is not just that I disagree with their morality. I do, but why should anyone be impressed by that? (The philosopher Nietzsche once said that morality is a conspiracy of the sheep to persuade the wolves that it is wicked to be strong.) My objection to the "looking out for number one" philosophy is that it docs not work. Take advantage of other people, use people, be suspicious of everyone, and you are liable to be so successful that you will end up fa r ahead of everyone else, looking down on them with scorn . And then where will you be? You will be all alone.

In the last few years, I have found myself traveling and lecturi ng a great deal. I have spoken in some thirty-eight slates and six forei gn countries. Often I am invited to the home of some prominen t member of the community fo r dinner before my lecture, or fo r a reception afterward. Most of the time, my hosts are very gracious and the gatherings enjoyable. But every now and then I find myself uncomfortable in th at setting, and one evening I fi nally realized why. Some people have to be very competi tive to

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reach the top, and once they have gotten there, they fi d . eakhhb

. f .. n u bard to br t e a 1t o compettttvcness, They are able to relax and ch~t with me. They feel that they hav:;~ impress me by tellmf~ me how succ

1 essful they arc, by

dropping the names o important peop c they know. Some- times they start an intellectual argument with me, trying to show me that they know more about my subject than I do. On those occasions, I find myself wondering why they feel they have to be so competitive, why they have to respond to a guest in their home as a competitor to be challenged, and whether part of the price they have paid for their success, part of their bargain with the devil if you will, is that they keep transforming friends into enemies.

I can understand why people who are now in their mid- to late thirties, the "baby boom" generation, might find a moralily of self-interest attractive. For many of them, their early years were spent in institutions which were not ready for them, overcrowded double-session schools, new unfinished suburbs. Their college and young adult years were convulsed by the war in Vietnam. (A baby boy born in 1948, at the beginning of the baby boom, would have turned eighteen in 1966, when the draft calls were heavi- est.) And while all young adults believe that their world is unprecedentedly different from the world of their par- ents, this generation may have had more reasons than most to think so. Technology, mobility, American power and affluence, the threat of nuclear war all made postwar American life drastically different from the world their parents had known in the Depression and war years. This ne:' generation was given so many choices and so few guidelines for making them. They felt they were con- stantly being asked to pay for other people's miscalcula- t10ns, sent to clean up other people's messes. No wonder

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they have grown up believing that people arc out to get them, governmen t is corrupt, authority is unreliable, busi- nessmen are -all crook_s, and no_ one else has their best interests at heart even 1f they claim to. Their music, their movies, their mores all proclaim this distrust and disillu- sionment. Why shouldn't I look out for myself/ That's what everybody else is doing.

Similarly, I can understand why a man (or occasionally but Jess often a woman) in his late forties will suddenly find a life of selfishness and self-indulgence irresistible, why he would leave his home in the suburbs for an apart- ment in a singles complex with pool and sauna, why he would swap his station wagon for a two-seater sports car, dye his hair and grow a beard (if it didn't come in too gray). He may be tired of a life of obligations, mortgage payments to meet, bills to pay, children to discipline. The humorist Sam Levenson used to say, "When I was a kid, they told me to do what my parents wanted. When I became a parent, they told me to do what my kids wanted. When do I get to do what I want?" I know a lot of middle-aged men who could say the same thing, but with- out laughing. They sec this breakout not as a flight from responsibility and respectability, but as their last desperate chance to grab some joy and freedom in a life which will soon be two-thirds over and into its th ird and fin al act. (The story is told of a member of the Texas state legisla- ture speaking in favor of a bill to outlaw certain kinds of sexual behavior who said, "There are three things wrong with this so-called New Morality. It violates the laws of God. It violates the Jaws ofTexas. And I' m too old to take advan tage of it.")

But even as I understand it, I can still see it as wrong. Not just morall y wrong, something which offen ds God,

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but misguided, a policy that causes us to work hard but condemns us to end up somewhere other than where we wanted to be. •

A man interviewed by Gail Sheehy for her book Pas- sages (he has left his wife and is living with an eightccn- year-old girl he has just met) puts it this way: "The diffi- cult thing for me to justify is leaving Nan [his ex-wife] high and dry because she hasn't done anything wrong. She's still in that other world where we were all brought up to live according to plans .. . What I've learned from the young people I've met out here is that there arc no com- mitments." In other words, happiness is having no com- mitments, no one to answer to (which is the literal mean- ing of the word "irresponsible"), no one whose needs or problems will ever get in your way or tie you down.

The narcissists' creed, "I am not here to worry about your needs and I don't expect you to worry about mine. It's every man for himself," was not invented in the twen- tieth century. It is the latest formulation of an approach which is as old as mankind itself. It was Cain who said scornfully, "Am I my brother's keeper?" He said that not to justify his murder of his brother Abel but to justify his lack of concern for his brother's well-being: I look out for my best interests and he looks out for his. And what is Cain's punishment? He becomes a wanderer on the face of the earth, with no place to call home, with no community to support or comfort him. The original looking-out-for· number-one man, like all of his descendants, is con· demned to spend all of his days unconnected.

R' In my all-time favorite movie, Casablanca, the hero ick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is portrayed at firs t as

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The Loneliness of Looking Out fo r Number One

8 cynical, suspicious, self-protecting person. He stays

aJiead of the game by loo~mg out only for himself and not

g iving in to tender feehngs. When a desperate ma •

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arrested by t e estapo m 1ck s bar, he asks Rick "Wh didn't you help me?" and Rick sneers, "I don't s;ick m~ neck out for anyone." Rick is living amid the cruelty and unfairness of the Second World War, and has learned that only the man who looks out for himself survives. He had t,cen hurt by, life when he ~ adc the "mistake" of taking someone else s welfare as seriously as he took his own. He bas grown cynical, safe, and successful. But at some level he realizes that something is missing fro m his life. Circum'. stances have forced hi~ to become tough and uncaring, but he looks at the Nazi office rs stationed in Casablanca tough, powerful , unsentimental, and he knows that h~ does not want to be like them.

Flashes of decency break through during the movie, until at the end he gives up his chance for escape and happiness in an act of generosity to the woman he loves. She leaves for England; he is condemned to wander in North Africa. Like Faust, like the young Martin Buber, he fo und life unsatisfying when he worried only about himself. It was in the process of saving and enriching the li ves of others that his own life began to take on meaning. Like Cain, Rick Blaine has become a man without a home- lan~. But unlike Cain, who condemned himself to exile by canng only about himself and refusing to be his brother's keeper, Rick feels himself alienated from life when he cares only about himself, and feels that he has come home to himself spirit ually when he gives up home and wealth a~d security in an act of self-sacrifice. In some ways, he wdl now have less, but in ways he has come to consider more important, he has become whole.

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