Selfishness and public-spiritedness

I could link this to a biblical verse, indeed, I think, my all-time favourite one. The Micah one which everyone knows as "What doth the LORD require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God". In my version it is ".... but to shun bias and to prize kindness and to never forget how little you know". The bit that matters this time is bolded.

The synonym I want is not there: disinterestedness. Impartiality would do nearly as well.

We favour ourselves most of the time without even thinking about it. We favour our kindred and close friends and may even take that for altruism. (Sometimes it really is-- when for the sake of a child we set aside our own comfort.) But the action of the truly public spirited, indifferent even to their own reputation, is, I submit, so rare it could count as holy.

I'm not talking about spectacular sacrifices, necessarily-- just the act of trying hard to figure out what the public good requires and doing it.

Letting go of oneself is a large chunk of what we do, or try to do, in worship. That is why worship might serve as a way of finding out what the public good requires.

Attending to the public good and shunning all biases carries an authority of its own. You only have to be part of a noisy debate in which someone suddenly says, with no egotism but with knowledge and concern: "We could do this". (For the attractiveness of the good, see Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good.)

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