Generosity, the Silent Instinct
In this season of giving, do we really know what generosity is?
Alberto Rojas Gimenez has been on my mind since I was fifteen years old. He walks with levity and style and with upright bearing, or else he flies. However he chooses to travel, he is powerful and free. He has nothing to carry. He’s a man of astonishing generosity.
When I read the news these days, by contrast, I’m flooded with images of men (some women too) who slink and crawl, who hide and dissimulate, all in a misguided attempt to feel powerful and free, which they are not and will never be.
I read of Rojas Gimenez in Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs. Neruda writes of his great friend’s flamboyance, charisma, talent, and most of all his renowned generosity:
He gave away everything - his hat, his shirt, his jacket, and even his shoes. When he had no material belongings left, he would jot down a phrase on a scrap of paper, a line from a poem or something amusing that came into his head.
By Neruda’s account, Rojas Gimenez was himself a wonderful poet, and he left a profound influence on Neruda’s generation, yet nothing he wrote was ever published. What Neruda calls his “lovely poems” lived only on crumpled pieces of paper that were crammed into his pockets. He gave these away too, and remained indifferent to the celebrity that the Chilean poets he called his friends were beginning to enjoy.
Not long after I read Neruda’s Memoirs, I was leaving my home and my country with no plan to return, and I tried in my awkward teenage way to emulate Rojas Gimenez. I asked my friends to come to my house and take whatever they wanted from my belongings, which I decided I would no longer need. The little that remained I gave to (probably very alarmed) strangers on the subway later that day.
It wasn’t easy, for a girl who grew up very much attached to the sentimental value of so many objects, yet it was liberating in the extreme. I was untying myself from habits that had begun to add up to a life I hadn’t chosen for myself. Letting go of those things felt like clearing a space in which to dream.
Yet as I get older and more worried about the uncertain future of our species and this planet, and with children of my own to look out for, I find it increasingly harder to even imagine such a radical generosity, let alone come even remotely close to practising it. Given the current state of things, true generosity seems like the one thing we can’t afford. And yet it’s surely the one thing we most desperately need.
Generosity as Inner Strength
Some things seem so clear and obvious that we don’t bother to ask what they really are. Generosity is the habit of giving, isn’t it? That’s certainly how it appears, at least on the surface, even in Neruda’s portrait of his generous friend. But we can be generous or ungenerous in many ways: with our time, with our patience and our good will, with our interpretations of events and the motives and characters of those with whom we come into contact, and in our embrace of life and our belief in the goodness of the world.
Generosity is not just giving things away, it’s a total way of being and meeting the world. But what way is this? How and why does one walk upright in this way, and the other slink? There’s a hint in the etymology of the word, which comes to us from the Latin ‘generosus’ through Old French, and that in roughly the 16th century meant ‘noble’ or ‘magnanimous’. ‘Magnanimous’ may be a better word than ‘generous’, because it avoids the problem that we can also be generous with our vitriol and hatred, whereas ‘magnanimous’ implies that what we are being generous with is something good and healthy.
The word carries this earlier meaning by way of the Latin for ‘stock’ or ‘race’, as in ‘genus’. To be magnanimous or noble was simply, for the ancients, to be descended from a noble family. How does that get us to our contemporary understanding of generosity?
In his work The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche sketches a hypothetical master/slave dynamic that suggests the possible origins of this connection. The master is a noble person in the original sense of coming from an established family and/or healthy stock, and so experiences few or no impediments to his living a full and satisfying existence. He is in this sense very powerful, and can therefore afford to be honest, straightforward, and generally good. By contrast, the slave is the one who finds many obstacles in the way of his living freely. His response to this situation is to try to find power through the back routes, by means of cleverness and manipulation.
This for Nietzsche is the beginning of the long story of Western civilization, but it’s also a very basic and astute psychological observation. Organisms are primed to seek the power to expand and grow, and they will get it in any way they can. If they aren’t lucky enough to have direct access to it, they will find an alternate route. So it’s really about who can afford to live generously and with noble bearing. After all who wouldn’t live generously if they were blessed with abundant resources?
And yet, it isn’t really the wealthy who can afford to be generous, but the strong. This distinction is everything. Rojas Gimenez had practically nothing but his freedom. One could say that the abundant resources that allowed him to give away whatever he had were those he carried in his own mind/body. Every one of us, I imagine, has more than we know in the way of inner resources in potentia, but crucially it’s only those who understand that this is where their strength lies who are able to enact this strength and thus afford to be indifferent to material goods.
As we’ve seen so vividly of late, the very rich can often be counted among those who believe they can’t afford to live generously. They cling to material securities because they know or believe they would be helpless without them, and they manipulate in order to get more than their fair share, which of course is never enough.
Such people do enjoy a very real kind of power, but this power that one gets from material wealth or from subterfuge and meanness is never real power, never adds up to any kind of human flourishing. In fact it leads only to increasing inner weakness and further dependence on what is never reliable because it can never be entirely under our control. Dickens gave us Marley’s chains to illustrate exactly this.
The Silent Instinct
In her wonderful essay The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg makes a clarifying distinction between little virtues and great virtues:
As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should not be taught the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.
As a parent I am both drawn to this advice and also, I must admit, a little nervous about it. It’s one thing to imagine myself moving through the world as Alberto Rojas Gimenez - I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that he died of pneumonia after giving his coat away and walking miles in the cold to sleep on his sister’s couch – and another thing to set my children up for such a life.
But Ginzburg isn’t ultimately against the little virtues. She believes we should teach children to be indifferent to money, but she’s a realist about the world we live in and understands that every child needs, eventually, to learn the ways of the adult world. But, she points out, we needn’t worry about it so much - the lesson of economic responsibility is something we can practically drink from the air around us.
I can’t see Ginzburg objecting, then, if we at least sort of supervise and make sure that the financial literacy lessons that will help our children survive in a world that is very different from Neruda’s Chile are learned one way or another. The real problem is that we make these kinds of lessons the very substance of our relationships with our children, and with this emphasis we teach them that this is what we care about. We encourage them in this way to value the money they have and hoard above what they are or might be. And in contrasting the little and the great virtues, Ginzburg offers her own brilliant psychological insight:
The little virtues also arise from our deepest instincts, from a defensive instinct; but in them reason speaks, holds forth, displays its arguments as the brilliant advocate of self-preservation. The great virtues well up from an instinct in which reason does not speak, an instinct that seems to be difficult to name. And the best of us is in that silent instinct, and not in our defensive instinct which harangues, holds forth and displays its arguments with reason’s voice.
The best of us is in that silent instinct. I love this. Today we are told relentlessly by the wellness industry and our therapists that we need to construct and guard over boundaries, that self-care must always come first, that time is scarce and material wealth is both essential and forever precarious. Why does this advice always make me want to scream? It seems to me to issue from such a shrunken image of life. I admit, at the risk of contradiction, that such strategies may have some value, at times they may even be essential to survival. But it’s so important to see them, as Ginzburg does, as coming from a defensive instinct, and to learn not to be fundamentally shaped by this.
Our defensive instincts cannot be entirely disregarded, of course. But if the defensive instinct seems like the prudent one to follow, because it seems to decrease our reliance on anything other than what we ourselves have, this must be exposed as an illusion. Where the generous person doesn’t fear losing anything because they know nothing essential can be lost, the defensive person clings to material goods and status solely out of fear. Not just fear of scarcity in his own resources, but fear that others can’t be relied upon. And isn’t that how we found ourselves in a world such as this, by way of the ungenerous belief that if I don’t take what’s mine, some other greedy person will take it first?
When Ginzburg writes of that ‘silent instinct’, what I hear is something like faith. How did a man like Alberto Rojas Gimenez survive as long as he did, after all? In addition to relying on himself, he also seems to have trusted that the world would return his generosity, that he would always have a place to sleep and enough food to survive on. We make the world in our own image, after all, and our actions trigger more than we can ever take account of.
It seems a wildly impractical ideal, this radical generosity. But that’s the point of an ideal - to encourage us to stretch beyond the meagre limits of what we’re in the habit of expecting from ourselves. And it always seems to me that the shift of focus away from amassing security and towards generosity, scary as the prospect may be, suddenly reveals that we do have enough, that we’ve always had enough. It’s a leap of faith, so there’s no guarantee, but the defensive alternative is just too bleak. If we, in the midst of a world that seems designed to multiply our fears and insecurities, could make this rebellious leap, our children might inherit a world where they knew unequivocally that they would always have enough.
I’ll share below the first three stanzas of the (rather long, but well worth reading in its entirety) poem Neruda wrote upon hearing of his friend’s death. In a move of which Nietzsche would surely approve, Neruda’s Rojas Gimenez, not meek by any measure, seems to have inherited the whole earth.
Alberto Rojas Gimenez Comes Flying Between terrified feathers, between nights and magnolias and telegrams, between southerly winds and winds from the sea blowing West, you come flying. Under grave-plots and ashes, under the ice on the snail, under the remotest terrestrial waters, you come flying. Deeper still, between girls under fathoms of water, blind plants and a litter of fish heads, deeper, still deeper, among clouds once again you come flying...
I like this, the silent instinct.
Thank you Dreamhorse.