Control or surrender – is there a tension between Effective Altruism and Christianity?
By Dominic Roser.
This article is adapted from a part of Dominic Roser’s article Effective Altruism as Egyptian Gold for Christians published in the book Effective Altruism and Religion (open access online at https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783748925361-47/effective-altruism-as-egyptian-gold-for-christians)
Effective altruism encourages control. It tells us to be deliberate about our altruism, to step outside our ingrained habits and views of serving others and to optimize our altruism. If we don’t take responsibility for every detail of our altruism, nobody will.
In contrast, Christianity encourages surrender. It’s not all about us and our efforts. We are to let go of the hold we seek to have on everything and put things into God’s hands. The mindset is one of surrender to God’s mysterious and powerful presence in this world. Rather than acting like an engineer who fine-tunes every button on a big, complex machine we ought to espouse the mindset of children trusting their parents to lead them well. While EA encourages us to take control of things, Christianity encourages us to let go of control.
Biblical examples include the following:
In Judg. 7, God asks Gideon to deliberately go to war with 300 men even though 32,000 would have been available. Gideon is to deliberately refrain from making use of all available resources.
In Matt. 6, Jesus encourages us not to worry about tomorrow. The illustrations he gives are birds who do not invest for the future and the completely passive lilies.
In Ps. 127, we are encouraged to take a good night’s rest rather than labour late. This encouragement is based on the claim that “unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”
In Ps. 131, the writer approvingly compares himself to a child who says “I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.” This is similar to the famous line from Isaiah 55: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”
Mark 4 provides one of the clearest instances: “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain – first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.”
More generally, there is also the fact that God repeatedly chose unimportant and weak agents for doing his work – and they often achieved his purposes in mysterious, roundabout, and seemingly wasteful ways.
There are a couple of reasons for this emphasis on letting divine providence take its course rather than incessantly planning pro-active interventions.
1. God has epistemic advantages. Humans need to remember their limitations and the benefits of listening to the one who has a much better overview of this complex universe.
2. A lot of these examples can be applied to serve the mental health of overambitious do-gooders. Concern with self-care is in fact a point of overlap with EA. In contrast to other moral views, EA does not place an emphasis on good motivation and high sacrifice. Given that impact rather than effort matters, and given that not overburdening oneself with responsibility can serve impact in the long run, EA agrees with the upshots of a number of these passages.
3. In a lot of these examples the point seems to be about character development, in particular practicing trust and humility. For example, Gideon was to rely on a small number of soldiers so as to avoid the temptation of boasting.
These three considerations are speculative. And even if they provide some rationale for refraining from exercising control where it would be possible to do so, significant mystery remains. There seems to be a less superficial rationale in the Bible for letting some of our human possibility for influence go unused. The Bible reports on the experience of having to die off so as to receive life (for example in John 12:24–25). Surrendering completely in all respects is part and parcel of this overall spiritual practice of losing oneself in order to find God. The paradoxical nature of the Christian stance of surrendering control when action would seem possible and advisable is expressed in such sayings as “Pray as though everything depended on God; act as though everything depended on you” (wrongfully attributed to St Ignatius of Loyola) or Paul’s words “For when I am weak, then I am strong”.
The rationale for foregoing control is not our concern here anyway. The concern is the tension with EA’s underlying mindset of not letting any chance to affect the world for the good go unused. While this tension is real it should not be exaggerated. The Christian faith also clearly affirms initiative, action, planning, and the use of reason to pursue outcomes in a results-oriented way. If there is any tension with EA, this tension – the paradox of surrender – is already present within the Christian faith. The Christian faith’s affirmation of a pro-active attitude towards shaping this world is limited, and it is embedded in an underlying trustful sense of complete dependency on God.
To some extent the tension can be eased by going for the EA mindset in our actions and the Christian mindset in our attitudes. However, this only reduces the tension: if the Christian attitude of falling back on God’s sovereign working in this universe is taken seriously, it must have some implications for our actions.
There is a second reason for drastically limiting the tension. For most people in our fallen world, the alternative to EA – i.e. the alternative to a more controlling and deliberate approach to what one can affect – is typically not trust in God. Realistically, the alternative is typically thoughtlessly doing the first available good deeds and blindly continuing on well-trodden paths in one’s charitable efforts. If EA encourages people to move from thoughtless forms of love to more intentional forms, this is at least a step forward – and this is so even if committing the efforts to God’s wise providence were an even greater step forward. Even if a controlling attitude is spiritually problematic, it is at least an improvement over neither actively taking responsibility nor actively placing this responsibility in God’s hands.
