Invisible Someone. Visible One.
Scientists have apparently (or non-apparently, as the case may be) taken a big step toward making invisibility a possibility–according to an AP story and a C|Net article out this week.
But putting the technical aspects of a childhood dream aside, living among people who are invisible, or of living invisibly among people, is already an adult nightmare; ethically, that is.
Here’s a smidgen of background on egoism and altruism: People need each other. That fact is the bane and purpose of human existence in the world. It also explains why it is so easy to explain all human behavior, even what looks like altruism, as egoism. Altruism is a sincere (pure, simple) concern for others. Egoism is pure concern for self. While egoism is an essential part of living as a human it is not sufficient to explain genuinely ethical living. The Western world’s claim that everything people do is egoistic is wrongly motivated, wrong-headed, and wrong. Worse yet, if the West’s worldview were correct it would mean either that morals are not real (artificial constructs of society or individual psyches) or that morals are nothing more than a description of the selfishness of those who are approved by whoever stands in judgment–a famished view of ethics at best.
Back to the invisible man: The normal way for people to act toward each other leaves others as invisible even when they are in plain sight. When a person checks out of a grocery store carrying on a polite conversation with the checker, the checker is really invisible to the shopper. Why? Because any body (not anybody) could have filled the checker’s clothes and role and received exactly the same concern and interaction from the shopper. Of course, some shoppers actually get to know and care about the person who checks them, even if only for a moment; but generally not. And, of course, it is not necessarily the case that every shopper ought to get to know every checker with which they interact. The example is just to illustrate that when others are interchangeable, the subject in question is undoubtedly acting egoistically. The checker as a person is no more visible to the shopper than the individual pebbles in the asphalt over which he will drive on the way home; perhaps in plain sight, perhaps available to be seen with the right focus, but invisible nonetheless.
The ethics of treating a merchant in such a way is uncertain. (Yes, “ethics” is a singular noun.) But, especially in Christian terms, there are other examples where the ethics is unequivocal. In marriage, for instance, it is a predictable consequence of the belief and practice of egoism that spouses become interchangeable. To an egoist, marriage is simply what a person does because they need to be related to someone else in that unique way. The relationship is unique to the psyche of the husband, for example. But the wife herself, as a person, is interchangeable with others. (By the way, Plato’s understanding of how people relate to instantiations of forms is very similar, and so is his description of the will as purely egoistic, which explains why he foolishly assumes education is the solution to “evil”, like many Pragmatists today.)
But an ethical, particularly Christian, marriage is not about being related to someone in order to fulfill personal, psychological needs. Instead, marriage ought to be about a subject being related to one, one other who is not interchangeable with anyone else, and whose person carries more worth in the subject’s will than the subject himself. Then the spouse is not an invisible placeholder for the body, clothes, and business to which the subject wanted to relate, but instead a real and personally visible other to which the original subject is committed beyond the self.
In the workplace, that kind of altruism would differentiate a Christian business from a normal one. A Christian business is not just one which happens to have a Christian owner or claims a Christian logo or slogan, or professes Christ as its owner. Properly lived out, Christianity requires that “each esteems others better than themselves.” Then in a Christian business decisions could not be made with a disregard for the persons employed. Because employees would be visible as morally significant others, proprietors would have to consider the needs of individual employees beyond the economically egoistic interest of either the proprietor himself or even the corporation as a whole (e.g., Philemon and Onesimus).
Of course, part of the interest of employees is that the corporation succeed financially, just like part of the interest of a wife is that her husband be healthy. That is, genuine altruism does not exclude the reality of egoism. But egoism alone cannot explain the values of Christianity, nor for that matter, the reality of ethics. Ethics, after all, in its Christian form is not ultimately about how to relate to someone; it is about how to relate to one–one valuable, real, visible person.
