By Tom Palmeri (1979)
It had been a fine dinner, with drinks before and after, and we had come to that moment in the evening when the many masks that preserve us in the glare of the day are sometimes put aside and a person reaches out to touch the truth about himself and others. The young Filipino who was sitting across the table from my wife, Diane, and myself looked at us and said, “Why do you do what you do?” Diane and I grinned at each other. Then, for whatever reason, the lateness of the hour or the difficulty of answering fully, I said, “What else is there to do?” I meant it to be amusing, but it also had its serious point that he could take with him and ponder if he wanted. In any case, I left it at that.
It has often occurred to me since then that I cheated myself, as well as my young friend, out of an answer that might have been worth hearing. And so when a former student of mine who is now on the faculty asked me to write an answer to the very same question for use in the Philosophy Department’s bulletin, I thought perhaps the time had come to find out whether or not I really had an answer. For whatever it is worth, that is what follows.
The first thing to be said is that in the remainder of this article I will be answering only for myself. Diane and I work very closely together and I will often refer to her. And undoubtedly many of our reasons are similar. But there are also differences, and she will have to define her own position herself if she ever so chooses.
Now when people ask, “Why do you do what you do?” just what are they referring to? I teach Literature and Philosophy at Xavier University (Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines ). And I don’t imagine there are many American ex-Jesuits who have returned to the Philippines to teach at a Jesuit Ateneo. I know that some of my American Jesuit friends who used to be here and are now in the States find a certain irony in my being here when they are not. But still, my teaching is not the main thing that people have in mind. They are thinking rather of the fact that we have formed an organization of our own, Family to Family, Inc., to support the work that we do, and they are thinking of the work itself, the feeding program that supplies two meals each day to fifty malnourished children in our neighborhood and the temporary foster care that we provide in our own home to five children at a time. Those children have either been abandoned or come from homes where there are grave social and economic problems. They are almost always deathly sick when they come to us and frequently at the point of starvation. If a few months old, they weigh less than they did at birth. If three or four years old, they are often unable to walk or even sit. We keep and care for them until they are well and happy and can either be returned to their own homes or to new ones that have been found for them. And of course, the many people who can never accept the fact that our four adopted children (two Vietnamese and two Filipinos) are every bit as much our own as the two to whom Diane has given birth also have these in mind. Diane and I never think or our four adopted children as part of our work, but perhaps for the purpose of this article it is not beyond the point to include them. We deliberately chose all four of them ourselves and we have cared for them since they were infants, and they were in every bit as bad shape as the children who are brought to us for foster care.
With regard to what we do for the eleven children who are in our home at any one time, Diane is a registered nurse who has often had to function as a doctor, and so she supervises all of their medical care. I handle most of the administrative matters that come up, but am also directly involved in the care of the children. And that is perhaps the point to be emphasized, that both of us are always directly involved in caring for the children.
I believe the above is what others have in mind when they ask about what we do. But it need not be entirely the same as what I understand myself to be doing. And so it is necessary to cover the same ground again. First, my teaching at Xavier is significant to me, but it is not the main thing I am about, and I think people generally recognize that when they focus their attention on the children. The caring for the children is the central thing in our lives. But something that is almost always overlooked is that we live by the sea. People don’t think of that as “something that we do,” but for me it is. We live not one or two blocks from th sea, but with a yard that ends right at the beach. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And now we come to the important part. Why? What are my reasons? Nothing is clearer to me as I write this than the fact that I have no fully rational explanation. Probably no one ever does for such things. Matters like these are so personal and so charged with emotions that they defy all attempts to systematize them. And so I want to stress that what I am about to say is not a prescription for others. It is only an attempt to trace the motivating forces of my own conduct of life. Perhaps it is little more that the distillation of a mood.
What else is there to do? That is what I asked the young man and I intended something very serious by it. Unless one is contemplating suicide, one has to do something for whatever years remain. The question is what shall it be and how to determine it. At forty years old, as I look backwards and forwards, I am convinced that few things can be more pointless than to spend a life doing what is not interesting. There are, of course, a great many things that are interesting besides bringing children back from the edge of starvation. But few people do any of them. And that is the real point of the question. Few people even stop to think that they could do anything different with their lives. If they give any thought at all to what they will do with the years remaining to them, they assume that they have to do whatever everyone else does. And so they spend their lives doing what they themselves consider boring, going to an office or counter each day where they eagerly wait for the day to end so they can wait for the week to end until finally, after a thousand or more boring weeks, they can retire and sit at home to wait for everything to end. How utterly futile. If there are people for whom this is unavoidable, I pity them. And so this is the first thing to be said positively. I do what I do because I find it interesting, not boring.
On the negative side, there are certain reasons that should be explicitly set aside because they may commonly be attributed to me. I do not do what I do out of a sense of duty or responsibility for the conditions that I encounter. Let me try to clarify this by using Xavier as an example. I know the precise solutions for all of the University’s problems. And I have frequently made a great many of my views on that subject known. Yet five thousand administrators, teachers and students ignore my advice and continue to do as they themselves see fit. So how am I to be held responsible for what results? In any case, I refuse to be. It is the same with the children who are brought to us. There are a great many people at various levels of society who are responsible for the condition in which they come to us, but I reject any insinuation that I am one of them.
Nor is the situation with the world as a whole any better. The world is mad. I do not say that it has gone mad because that would imply that there was a time when it was sane, and I see no evidence to indicate that. In fact, the question of whether or not the world has made moral progress over the centuries or of whether or not there is any moral pattern discernible at all, be it for the better or for the worse, is one that has engaged a great deal of my intellectual life for the past twenty years, and I can see no answer to it at all. The United States finally did away with the legal institution of slavery and that was understandably progress. But I am not so sure that slavery would be economically advantageous any longer. And old forms of slavery have been replaced with new ones, such as the massive network of organized crime that extends almost everywhere and is happy to reap fruit from the pushing of drugs onto children who are too young even to realize what they are doing. Did Caesar’s legions do anything worse than Hitler’s slaughter of millions of Jews? And while you read this, the ”boat people” of Vietnam are bobbing up and down in their boats, waiting to be raped and robbed and murdered while an indifferent world watches. Has there been moral progress or regression? How would one even establish the criteria for an answer? Shall we consider merely the quantative factor of the number of people butchered in any given time frame as a percentage of the total population available? Or shall we also consider the qualitative element of the savagery and brutality with which the butchering is carried out? And how much weight shall we give it? How do you like your victim, fried on a spit for three hours or with a swift and merciful bullet through his head? No, it would take a wizard, not merely an intelligent man, to know where the world has been morally and where it is headed. All an intelligent man can tell is that it has always been mad and that no single individual can fundamentally alter the great structures of oppression and brutality. And so, for my own part, I have washed my hands of the world and ignore it as much as I can. Though a general knowledge of what goes on is of some value, the reading of a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine can do little more than foul the mind with what is ugly, and I do not allow them in my home. I have a fairly good idea of where the world is headed over the next ten years, it is not a pretty picture, and the last thing I need is a blow by blow description of it as it happens.
Having mentioned the fouling of the mind with what is ugly, I must also mention the beautiful, and for that I return to the sea. We live right by the beach and we have a little nipa-covered rest house where the sand begins. There I spend hours every day, often accompanied by the children. I read, I hold the little ones on my lap, I stare out at the volcanic island of Camiguin , and contemplate the cloud-wrapped peaks of the mountains that rise on the other side of the bay. It is a panorama that is ever the same and yet ever changing with each shift in the angle of the sun and in the formation of the clouds. For someone not brought up in the tropics, the colors are so brilliant they seem unreal. And yet they are far more real than most of what goes on in the life of man. The contemplation of such beauty is so uncomplicated and so immediately valuable. In the moment of experience, it is independent of what any tyrant in one of the great capitals of the world can do to destroy it. Aristotle recognized that not all propositions can or should be proven. Some are simply evident to anyone who understands them. Otherwise there would be an infinite regress. The same is true of values. Not every value is to be justified in terms of its instrumentality toward some other value. Certain experiences bear an ultimate value within themselves that is simply evident to anyone who understands. The contemplation of the beauty of Macajalar Bay as it repeats its endless transformations each day is one of them.
If this seems a lengthy digression, let me assure you it is not. And if the emphasis I am giving to the experience of beauty seems shocking to some, I will perhaps be excused when it is remembered that stressing the value of the beautiful is one of the things that a teacher of literature is supposed to be about, even if it seldom happens. In fact, the ancient Greeks may be the only people who have taken beauty in all its forms quite seriously. In English literature, it is William Wordsworth who towers above all others in his understanding of the desperate need man has for the beauty of nature and of all the forces in modern life that work to separate him from it. In any event, I see no less worth in an hour spent watching clouds move across the bay than I do in an hour of teaching Philosophy to students who positively do not want to learn how to write a correct sentence.
Somerset Maughn is an English novelist much given to exploring the reasons why people do what they do. He has many candid things to say about why he himself is a writer. In The Moon and Sixpence he probes the motivation of an English businessman who leaves his family and affairs to go to Tahiti and paint. There is also a minor character in the same book who is much to my point. Captain Brunot is a Frenchman who had fallen on bad times in France . With borrowed money, he bought an island in the Paumotus, and in the course of twenty years, he and his wife transformed what was little more than a sandbar into a beautiful and productive garden. He had no regrets for a life so spent. Beauty of nature is for the most part a gift man passively receives. It is there for the taking, frequently at no more expense than the trouble of raising one’s eyes from the ground and beholding it. But there is also the active creation of beauty. It is something that every artist understands, and yet it extends far beyond what people ordinarily think of as art.
And here we arrive at a point where a picture would truly be worth a thousand words, or rather two pictures. One of a child when it is brought to us and another of that same child a year later. Some of them die, of course, but most survive. And our reward at the end of that year is a vision of beauty that we ourselves have brought about. A transformation of a shrivelled, apathetic, and sometimes terror-stricken human form into a healthy and happy toddler, tumbling in the grass and the sea, filled with laughter and joy. I know of no better material in which to create beauty. I know of no deeper satisfaction than the creation of it. The condition in which the children come to us is the world’s doing. What they become in our care is our own.
And if in the midst of the madness, in the late hours of the evening, someone pauses and asks the ultimate question about life, “Why do you do what you do?” then that too is a thing of beauty and perhaps just as precious. Some people have considered us martyrs. If we are, it is only in that ancient sense of “witness,” witnesses in a mad world to the sanity of creating and cherishing what is beautiful. As for the rest, we have it all.