Delphic Maxim 55: Give back what you have received
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day
55. Give back what you have received
The greatest tragedy in the world today is the way people think of themselves exclusively as individuals, at the expense of their sense of community. While it’s not an especially new phenomenon — it’s been building over centuries — I believe that it has accelerated since the advent of mass communication. Each wave of technological change — television, computers, the internet, social media — has increased our sense of individuality and diminished in a lot of ways our responsibility to community.
That’s not to say communities haven’t been enabled by these technologies. They have the power to connect people in a way that didn’t exist previously — and in an agnostic way, which means that both good and bad movements get to develop in online spaces. At the moment we’re working out how to deal with the toxic end of that spectrum. But again, the common element to both of these is the way we are positioned as individuals, responsible for our own good.
Here’s where I think a reminder to ‘give back’ is important. None of us got to where we are without the strength and support of a whole community. Whether its education, health care, roads or the broader economy, we’re all the beneficiaries of community. We’ve observed this a few times throughout these maxims — the idea of the individual is heavily embedded in the social context of community. Having one without the other feels kind of meaningless to the ancients. At the moment I’m reading Plato’s Republic, which sort of takes this idea to its extreme: that all individuals are purposed for a role within the broader community. I’m not a fan of that kind of regime — individual freedom is important, it enables us to develop our own nobler, virtuous selves.
What does giving back look like? I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘choosing to be vegetarian’ or buying ‘green’ products. This isn’t giving back so much as alleviating the guilt we feel from participating in a system — industrial capitalism — that we know is ruining the environment and condemning people in some parts of the world to slavery. (Having said that, I’m not totally anti-capitalist, it’s a productive system when properly regulated. Reparations for the past are possible when we all work together — giving back on an international scale!). Or hey, maybe we don’t even think about it. For some, perhaps there’s a virtuous component that sends a message about social responsibility or social justice to others (what alt-right idiots would call ‘virtue signalling’, as if the use of that phrase was not itself a form of virtue-signalling).
But there are problems in the world that can’t be solved by individual choice alone. The idea that they can — that if so many consumers in the affluent West make a choice to go vegan that somehow the cruelty of industrial meat production will stop. The problems we have are so vast that they need big scale intervention. ‘Giving back’ here might involve political activism and participation (on top of your individual choice to opt out of the system — but don’t think that that choice alone is enough to make a difference).
Giving back to community means paying back in kind the generosity and benefits you have gained by virtue of your position in society. You may have been born into privilege — in fact most people reading this definitely were born into relative privilege (you have access to the internet and are wanky enough to read something by white, middle class me). Giving back can happen in those small interactions with people, where you make their day through an act of kindness. But it also happens at scale: caring about the world and the society in which you live, participating and enlivening the community around you, and being conscious of the gifts that have got you to where you are.
