We’ll learn our appetites to subdue

Wednesday, November 10, I emailed several of my friends, colleagues, and family members:

Hello,

If you’re one of the people I’ve been meaning to get in touch with for
a long time — I’m really sorry. I still mean to get in touch with
you soon. As most of you know, I almost never write mass emails.

I’m writing tonight, though, for other-than-social reasons. I wanted
to tell you that I will be participating in a thirty-hour hunger
awareness fast next week, from 2:00 a.m. Wednesday night to 8:00 a.m.
Friday morning. It is organized by the Brown University Oxfam group
in order to raise money to combat poverty, starvation, and general
misery in Sudan. If some of you would be willing to sponsor my fast,
a few dollars can really go a long way to relieve suffering for the
people who need it most.

More information on our fast is here:
http://www.brown.edu/Students/Oxfam/fast.htm

Please email me if you’re willing to help. And accept my apologies
for bothering you if you’re not.

Take care,

Jonathan

The response was amazing. I know some good people. I was dreading the fast, but also excited about it. Food is very important to me — those close to me know that when I go more than a couple of hours without eating, I start getting irritable. It doesn’t take much at all for me to get dizzy, disoriented, and worse. Mild hypoglycemia, a doctor once told me, making this particular trait sound more impressive. I’d never fasted before.

Money started coming in, and I put it in my little envelope and felt good about helping the world. One professor sent me this email:

I never sponsor fasts because I think self-deprivation is no virtue unless it is actually necessary to help someone else, & I doubt that people who are starving are impressed by the voluntary fasting of the comfortable.My responmse to Oxfam-sponsored fasts is to go to a restaurant, eat a nice meal, & them send Oxfam an amount equal to what I spent on my meal.I will do that now if you give me the address for a donation. Like all middle-class Americans, I can give Oxfam the amount I spend on a meal without having to do without that meal. Why pretend otherwise??

I sent her the address, and she promised to send a check. The day of the fast was yesterday, Thursday. I’d been considering what to allow myself. Water, definitely. Juice? Tea? I decided to go all-out. No food, no drink but water. Morning was pretty much like normal, except hungrier. But my body didn’t like skipping lunch one bit. I lay down for a few minutes during the lunch hour before Jamie’s class.

In Jamie’s class, “The Nature of Morality”, one of the examples of an unselfish interest he used was, “maybe someone has the interest of feeding starving people in Darfur”. He’d given me thirty dollars a couple of hours earlier. I was hungry, and drank some water. I didn’t feel up to Wittgenstein that afternoon, so I skipped it for the first time this year and went home.

By that time, in addition to being very hungry, I also was very tired and had a bad headache. And then I realized the obvious thing I’d forgotten — I’m addicted to caffeine. Stupid, stupid. If I’d thought about it, I’d’ve broken that dependency earlier — it’s not really hard. It only takes a day or two. The first day is the only truly painful part. Brilliant me, I did that the same time I was fasting.

I took an afternoon nap and set my alarm to get me up in time to go see Emily’s concert. I had asked Tara about getting together, but she was busy. It was for the best, I think, since I was barely standing up by this point. Emily was fantastic, and seemed happy to see me afterward. Then I drove home. By this time I was feeling utterly miserable. My stomach began to feel sick. The radio ironically gave me food programming. NPR was carrying, and I kid you not, a man’s memoirs through food. Toast represents love for this guy. And he discusses a whole bunch of other foods that represent other things in his life.

I switched over to the scary conservative talk radio station, and Sean Hannity was making fun of Flipper for telling us we shouldn’t eat turkeys on Thanksgiving, and talking about his favorite lobster delivery site, and the amazing steak and mashed potatos and everything at his favorite steakhouse. Seriously, my drive home would have been really funny if it were in a bad movie.

I got home, had some water, watched Futurama and Family Guy, and went to bed, feeling horrible but proud of myself for getting through the day. I set my alarm for 7:00, in order to meet my fellow Oxfam members to break the fast together at 8:00.

I woke up, fairly clear-headed, at 8:30, cursed, dressed quickly and jumped in my car, driving to the fast-breaking meeting place. Too late, everybody’s gone. It turns out, my alarm-setting indicated 7 p.m., since I’d had an afternoon nap. That was really upsetting. Like, I almost started crying. I hadn’t gotten to see any of my fellow fasters on Thursday, and I wanted some companionship and solidarity. Oh well. I stopped by Dunkin Donuts and bought a seseme seed bagel and cream cheese and some orange juice and drove home. I ate, blissfully, while talking to Savannah online.

Felicia, the professor I’d quoted above, sent me this email this evening:

Dear Jonathan.
If you have time/inclination, I’d be interested in your reaction to
what I said about the Oxfam fast. I’ve never understood why
comfortable people think that short-term, voluntary self-deprivation
is a virtue. Having lost 145 pounds, I’ve often gone for short
periods with very little food. I never imagined that acting on this
personal choice could improve my understanding of what it would be
like to live in Third World poverty.

And this was my response:

‘Self-deprivation’ can be thought of in two different ways:

A: Self-deprivation is the tendency to deprive oneself of something one enjoys.
B: Self-deprivation is an action involving depriving oneself of
something one enjoys.

A is a character trait; B is an action. Which do you mean when you
say that self-deprivation is not a virtue? If you mean B, that’s
trivially true; self-deprivation in this sense is not even the right
sort of thing to be a virtue. Actions are not virtues. Neither are
acts of self-deprivation intrinsically good. But of course they can
sometimes be extrinsically good — as, for instance, when they lead to
desirable weight loss.

If you mean A, then I agree with you — there is nothing intrinsically
good about being the sort of person who tends to deprive himself of
something enjoyable. There may or may not be extrinsic merits to that
character trait, but I’m not assuming there are.

My act of self-deprivation (that is, B) yesterday was not an attempt
to exemplify the tendency (A) to self-deprive. Nor was it an attempt
to “improve my understanding of what it would be like to live in Third
World poverty”. (I don’t see why that’s important at all — I
understand it well enough to know that it’s miserable, and that if I
can make it better, I should.) And I certainly don’t think t

hat the
mere fact that I was suffering helped anyone in Darfur.

The reason I participated in a hunger fast this week was really a very
simple one — I fasted in order to raise money for relief efforts in
Darfur. (Well, technically, by the time I got to Thursday, I already
had most of the money in hand, but the money was given in response to
my *promise* to fast, so I guess you could say I fasted in order to
keep my *word* to those who gave me money.) Although you sent money
to Oxfam unrelated to the fast, I do not think that everyone sees
things your way. I sent an email to forty-three friends, colleagues,
and family members, telling them about my fast, and twenty-four of
them sent me money amounting to $425.

I think that if my email had said only, “I have been thinking about
Darfur and think it’s important to help the people there, please send
money,” I would have raised considerably less. If presented with
empirical evidence that in fact, I could have raised as much money
without the gesture of self-deprivation, I would conclude that it
wasn’t worthwhile for me to go hungry. But, human psychology as it
is, it seems to me that fasting *was* a useful gesture — that by
fasting, I raised hundreds of dollars in relief funding. And that
seems to me to be a pretty good reason to go hungry for a day.

JonathanAnd yeah, it does.