GIVING

-->Giving

You see a needy person and you dip your hands into your pocket. And you give.

You visit Mother Teresa’s Home; you are moved by the work the nuns do and you decide to offer two days of your week to the cause.

Your neighbour’s son, weak in mathematics is in danger of failing his class and you offer to give him tuitions – absolutely free.

At night you go to bed and say, like Mr. Jack Horner: what a good boy am I!

And then neuroscientists like Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman go and spoil it all for you. They tell you that good works and charitable donations are all a matter of neurology, connected to something called the mesolimbic reward pathway. The mesolimbic pathway is one of the pathways in the brain that carries the neurotransmitter dopamine from one part to another. It is a primitive part of the brain that usually jumps up in joy in response to pleasures such as food and sex. When charitable people like you put the interests of others before your own by making donations, the limbic pathway carries dopamine to the subgenual cortex. And you end up feeling good.

So, Mr. Jack Horner, when you are being charitable or altruistic, you are not being a good boy who is suppressing your own selfish urges; you are actually tickling a part of the brain wired to give you pleasure.

Food, sex and charity: they are all part of the same hedonistic cluster in this pathway.

By that token, we would have to say that The Bill Gates Foundation or Mother Teresa’s Homes, for that matter are nothing more than just so much dopamine, rushing through the mesolimbic pathways of Mr. Gates and the Blessed sister?

They did all that philanthropy and charity for their own pleasure!

And then Mother Teresa was heard to have said, “Give till it hurts.” What “hurt” was she talking about? It was all pleasure, if our friends, Moll and Grafman have to be believed.

Before we strip philanthropy and charity of all their moral and spiritual sheen, let me hasten to reassure you that the conclusions of the neuroscientists are still mired in controversy. What they say is not yet universally accepted.

Personally, however, I am not averse to accepting their unholy conclusions as gospel truth, one that sits comfortably with divine design. I am happy to look upon that mesolimbic reward pathway as an ingenious system fashioned by the hand of the Lord as an incentive for us to do a rather hard thing – to give with no expectation of visible reward.

Face it: giving is not easy. Trapped as we are in a largely self-seeking mind and body, everything we do is for our own preservation, comfort, gain and happiness. The time and energy we spend for others can be seen by the selfish gene to be time and energy wasted, if we do not get anything for ourselves in return.

It’s okay for me to give your college-going son free tuitions if my wife tells me that he would make a nice catch for our college-going daughter; or for my wife to spend time and money on making those marzipan chocolates for my immediate boss just before increment time. Or what about paying for that expensive, new statue of our church’s patron saint, knowing that my name will be immortalized on a brass plate on the pedestal? Giving in such instances is not just easy, it is attractive. It has visible rewards that can be counted like currency notes. Like currency notes, however, those rewards are finite; measurable. Giver and receiver can evaluate the exchange value of the gift.

On the other hand, we have heard of virtual unrealities, such as Father Damien, Vincent De Paul and in our own time, Mother Teresa and of so many nameless young men and women who give up gainful periods of their life to work along the borders of inhumanity in Africa, India and Ecuador without expecting anything in return. You yourself have experienced moments when you have seen people and situations crying out for the succour that you sense only you can give. All thought and reasoning sink below the level of your heartstrings and you find yourself giving without counting cost or reward. The pleasure that you experience then cannot be measured in finite terms. And if you stop to wonder about the infinity of this joyful experience, you may come to that big and mystical realization that it was not you who were the giver. You were just the courier. The real giver was the Source of all love. You were picked for the job of delivering a small parcel of that infinite love.

True charity then, is what the Church would call agape in action, the compelling force of a love that is unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, and voluntary. The pleasure that you receive from agape-prompted giving cannot be grasped by way of reason or good sense. It would, in fact be viewed by many as folly or even madness. It is the madness of a few, for as we can see, not many are gifted (or should we say burdened?) with the genetics (or should we say spirituality?) of the unconditional giver.

And so, I find in neuroscience’s pronouncements about mesolimbic reward pathways and all that, a respectable scientific explanation of your altruistic and charitable behaviour, enough at least to exempt you from being silently regarded as either insane or eccentric.

Charity is kind, not mad.