Service nature

It isn’t fashionable to assert that human beings have a nature. Certainly the best circles frown on drawing the obvious conclusions about that nature from observing that we come in two sexes.

Be that as it may, suppose we take a slightly less obvious fact about our nature: we are made to serve each other. You can take a shortcut and borrow that from Christianity, or spend the time watching others and yourself to discover when people seem to be the most satisfied and joyful. It certainly seems to me to be those times when people find themselves useful and are able to help. One way of trying to make a friend in a new situation is to ask for help.

But, thanks to human cussedness, we don’t automatically learn how to be our best selves, and we’re good at doubling down on stupid.

It doesn’t seem to be quite the same when one is compelled to help—if my observations of myself and a number of children are any guide. Parents have the responsibility to compel, for a few years. The children learn, or not. In the meantime, the parents serve the children and each other—and sometimes their infirm parents at the same time.

If this is part of our nature, then it would seem that if a society wants to encourage human flourishing it should try (however incompletely) to help people make themselves useful. In an economy like ours that is usually taken to mean paying jobs.

We could naively say that an authority needs to tell people what to do to make themselves useful. You can easily find volunteers for that position, each eagerly claiming that this is the way they best serve other people. But as already noted, compulsion doesn’t encourage flourishing, and rather few of those volunteers seem plausible as servant-leaders.

Of course sometimes there needs to be compulsion—in wartime. But the habit of compulsion is hard to shake—Great Britain after World War II being a good example. The powers-that-be were addicted to managing the economy and declined to stop. The roles of master and slave are bad for both parties—even though the master may seem to have nice stuff.

We’ve got a problem with employment: higher skilled people are in demand, but there are fewer and fewer positions for low-skilled people. “Positions” aren’t the only way to serve others, but that’s the way we’ve geared things.

I can’t say what plans or policies would make it easier for people with few talents to find ways to serve. Top-down plans haven’t worked, and seem unlikely to ever work. Grassroots plans only seem to appear at very small scales, when everybody knows each other and tries to accommodate the less fortunate. And personality conflicts can wreck those plans too. Some people don’t want to cooperate—sometimes for good reasons, but usually from human cussedness.

On the other hand, a Universal Base Income not only doesn’t address the problem of finding ways for people to serve each other, it undercuts even the simplest incentives to serve.

We may not have a solution, but we can exclude some answers.