The Personal Touch

You have probably heard of the Inuit who barred a stranger from using his hearth because the fire might only be half as warm if two people shared it. Since a Harvard education should be a resource more like a fire than an apple, it is good to hear many students planning to share it by entering "public service" in one of three forms: financial contribution (apolitical donations to soup kitchens or inner-city programs), political office and direct service provision involving daily and face-to-face contact with clients. Overwhelmingly, however, Harvard students prefer the first two forms of public service and neglect the third kind. This is dangerous. Consider these analogies:

In my life, I have killed only one fish and still cringe at the experience. I was eight and at the supermarket with my parents. They wanted carp for dinner, and I wanted the live one from the tank so my sister and I could play with it in the bathtub at home. At dinner-time, my mother took out the carp and handed me a knife. I put it on the cutting board in the kitchen. The gills moved up and down, making the kind of sound your mouth makes upon opening when it is very dry. Its eyes, surely those of Isaac, son of Abraham, looked flat, round, unflinching, uncomprehending, accusing. I backed down. My mother took the knife and stabbed the fish in the lower back. She had obviously never killed a fish before either, for she would have known to club, not stab, it. I couldn't tell if the resulting "crack" was that of the scales breaking or that of the tip of the knife embedding itself through "Freddie" into the cutting board. I screamed. My sister cried. My mother cursed. We felt so guilty. We avoided fish for weeks and started with fish sticks when we phased into our diets again. (Ironically, I recall having lots of pork chops and chicken during those weeks).

As a recent immigrant, on the other hand, my aunt once made her living slaughtering hogs--hundreds of them. She says she feels sorry for them but does not feel particularly guilty. Why the difference between her feelings and ours? The reasons are two-fold.

First, Freddie's death was entirely our fault, whereas in my aunt's case, accountability for death was spread all over the meat-packing plant. There, one person herded the hogs into the hall; one person led them into the holding pen; one person pushed them up the plank; one person knocked them unconscious with a stun gun. Someone else pushed them onto the conveyor belt and yet another person operated the belt that processed the animals. "You know, I didn't really kill them," my aunt said.

Secondly, we voluntarily planned Freddie's death. My aunt did not plan to kill hundreds of hogs. Her boss told her to. She merely complied and does not feel guilty, because, in the words of psychologist Stanley Milgram, "the person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person."

How does all this relate to public service at Harvard?

Harvard students prefer public service in the form of financial contribution and political office for lots of reasons: After graduating, they will likely be rich (enabling the first form of public service) and they will likely be well-qualified (enabling service in the second form). Maybe the first two forms allow public service without precluding affluence and influence. Direct service provision, by contrast, is for the humble and the poor without honor and glory in return. But most important, so the argument goes, is the dichotomy between systematic reform and symptomatic reform.

Direct service provision such as tutoring prisoners or sheltering battered women is inherently a band-aid solution applied after the cut has already been made. Political involvement, on the other hand, attacks the system with legislation that keeps men out of prisons and women out of shelters to begin with. Is not the potential for change much greater in the political sphere?

Sure, but here's the rub: Public service at the political level only is akin to working in the plant where accountability is very diffuse and direct contact with the beneficiaries of policies is very rare. In such settings, the driving force for progressive legislation is interest and not duty. Just as killing the fish directly ensured a deeper sense of responsibility, serving clients directly will remind one of the injustices of society so that accountability cannot be dodged on a daily basis. Only when the desire for social change arises out of duty, rather than interest, will it be sustainable and effective. While financial contribution and political involvement might hold the potential for systemic reform, ignoring or avoiding direct service provision also reduces the probability of such reform. Public service needs both to be successful.

Alexander T. Nguyen '99 is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House. This is his final column.