The Gift Inclines Toward Proximity
This is the first essay in the second half of Taming the Gift, where the project turns from naming what has tamed the gift to recovering what might set it free. To learn more about the project, visit here.
I grew up in the church; and, as I suspect is the case for others, the stories I heard in Sunday school came to me already domesticated. The lost sheep, the prodigal son, and the mustard seed all arrived on felt boards and in coloring books; and they lodged deeply enough that I can still hear them the way they were first told to me. The one I heard most, perhaps, was the good Samaritan.
A man is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho; on the way robbers attack him, take everything he has, and leave him beaten and half dead beside the road. A priest comes along, sees him, and crosses to the other side to pass by. A temple assistant, a Levite, does the same. Then a Samaritan comes along, a foreigner, the kind of person the injured man would have been taught to despise. He stops. He bandages the man’s wounds, puts him on his own animal, takes him to an inn, and pays for his care.
As a child you are meant to take one lesson from this: be the Samaritan and help people in need. It is good advice, and I have no quarrel with it. But I have come to suspect the lesson I was given was the safe one, the version that asked no more of me than my parents and teachers were already comfortable giving. The story was sanded down into a moral that fit inside the lives we already had. Read slowly with some help; there is more in it than that, and what it actually asks is harder. It is one of the truest pictures we have of what a gift is and what it asks of the people who give and receive it. And, read that way, we recognize ourselves in it, though not in the figure we were taught to admire.
A Less Domesticated Reading
It was Ivan Illich who gave me a less domesticated version of the story. Illich thought hard, across many years, about how the institutions of the modern West took over the things people once did for one another; and he traced a surprising amount of it back to this parable. To understand what the gospel had introduced into the world, he said, you had to understand what the Samaritan does and why it would have scandalized everyone listening.
Start with who the Samaritan is. The friction has been worn off the word until it means simply a helper, the name on a hospital, the laws that protect a bystander. But to the people first hearing the story a Samaritan was the enemy, the heretic, the despised outsider. Samaritans and Jews did not travel together, eat together, or worship the same way; and each regarded the other as a corruption of the true faith. The man bleeding in the ditch would sooner have expected a Samaritan to finish what the robbers started than to stop and save his life. There was no bond between them, no shared faith, no kinship, no obligation of any kind. If anyone on that road had a right to keep walking, it was the Samaritan.
And this, Illich says, is the point. The priest and the Levite had every reason to stop and did not. The Samaritan had every reason to pass and did not. This was a parable told in response to the question of where one’s obligation to others ends. Traditionally, a neighbor was someone inside your circle: your people, your faith, your obligations. The Samaritan blows the circle apart. He makes a neighbor of a man no rule could have assigned him, a man on the far side of the oldest boundary either of them knew. The neighbor, Illich says, is not a category you belong to but a person you move toward. No one could have told the Samaritan in advance that this stranger was his neighbor. The man became his neighbor in the crossing, and not one moment before.
That is the part the Sunday school lesson leaves out, and it is what matters most. The story is not about being kind to people in need. It is about how a bond comes into being where none existed by someone willing to cross a road he had every reason not to cross. What the Samaritan demonstrates, in a single afternoon on a dangerous road, is an inclination toward proximity: a readiness to be moved toward another person before we have decided whether we owe them anything. And that inclination, it turns out, is the deepest thing about a gift. A true gift is not the discharge of an obligation we already have. It is moving toward someone we are not yet bound to, the act that creates the bond rather than settling it.
The Ones We Recognize
This brings us back to the two who passed by because, if we are honest, they are the ones we recognize. We admire the Samaritan. But admiration is not resemblance, and the figures on that road who look most like us are the two who did not cross.
The priest and the Levite have been scolded for two thousand years, and the scolding has made it hard to see them clearly. They were not callous men. They were faithful ones. They had obligations of their own, duties of purity that the law required, a temple to reach, work that served more people than the single man in the ditch. The man had fallen outside the boundary of what they were responsible for, and they kept that boundary the way conscientious people keep the commitments they have been given. That is not an excuse invented later to let them off. It is the situation as they understood it, and it made perfect sense.
That is why they are the ones we understand from the inside, the ones we honestly relate to. Most of us did not come to this work to pass anyone by. We came because we believed that giving and receiving were among the few human things still able to bind us to one another. And then we learned the work, and the work taught us its boundaries: what was in scope and what was not, whose need fit our mission and whose we would refer elsewhere.
We were trained, as the priest and the Levite were trained, to stay inside the lines drawn for us and to treat staying inside them as a kind of faithfulness. The priest and the Levite are early ancestors of the specialist-technician we met in our last essay, the one whose narrowed competence becomes a license to ignore everything outside it. The blinders are not a failure of attention. They are how the work gets done, what lets a person stay focused on the matter at hand while refusing the distractions at the edges of their vision. Their training told them where to look, and looking there meant the man in the ditch fell where no one was assigned to look. He was a distraction from the work; and they had learned, faithfully, to keep walking.
What the Samaritan Did
So what did the Samaritan do that they could not? Two things, and the first makes the second possible.
The Samaritan did not keep his distance; and that, before anything else, is what set him apart. The priest and the Levite saw the body in the road and kept their distance. The distance they kept was not only the width of the road. It was the distance that lets you take in a thing and move past it, to register a need as a fact about the world rather than a claim on you.
To be near another person, Zygmunt Bauman explains, is already to be obligated to them. Not because you have chosen to be, not because a rule assigns it, not because you have weighed whether they fall inside your existing obligations, but simply because they are there and you are there and you have not arranged to be unreachable. The claim arrives before you have agreed to anything. You can refuse it, but you cannot prevent its existence. This is why the Samaritan’s stopping was not, at its core, a decision. By the time there was anything to decide, he was already on the hook. He had not sealed himself off, and so the man got through.
Being on the hook does not run on the logic of a bargain. The Samaritan becomes responsible for the man before the man could possibly do anything in return; and the man, unconscious in the ditch, clearly cannot reciprocate. Something may come back in time; but nothing about the crossing depends on it, and nothing about it can be known in advance. A claim that acts only once it can predict its return is not a gift; it is the opening move of an exchange. The gift moves toward the other without knowing what, if anything, will come of the relationship.
Bauman wants us to grasp that distance is not a neutral fact. It is a way of letting ourselves off the hook before we ever learn what would be asked of us. And proximity is, as Bauman argues, one of modernity’s subtractions. Among the things modernity set out to clear away were the pouvoirs intermédiaires, the particular bonds that tied a person to their own: the local, customary obligations that bound one to their neighbor rather than to humanity in the abstract. Modernity believed it could subtract the ethics of nearness and engineer enough distance that we might pass a hundred strangers in a day and owe none of them anything. Like its other subtractions, this one did not quite work. The obligation was not abolished, only held off. The claim is still there, waiting at the edge of every nearness we have not arranged to avoid. The priest and the Levite understood the arrangement. They kept the width of a road between themselves and the man, and the width of a road was enough.
A Seeing That Does Not See
Having crossed, the Samaritan sees. This is the second thing, and it is easy to pass over because we think we already know what it means to see a person in need. The priest and the Levite saw the man too. They saw a body, maybe a corpse, a ritual problem, a category the law had taught them how to recognize and route. That kind of seeing can be done from across the road, from a distance, without proximity. It takes in everything except the person, and it sorts what it takes in into a case. The Samaritan’s seeing is the other kind. It is the attention that takes the other as a someone rather than a something, and it cannot be done from the road. It asks him to kneel down in the dirt, to bring his face near the ruined face of a man he was raised to hate, and to stay there long enough that the category burns off and a person is left.
The difference is not how much each man saw but what each was looking at. The priest and the Levite demonstrated a way of seeing that did not see at all. They observed the man completely and beheld nothing, because what they saw was a category. The gift requires that we see a person, and that is the seeing that the apparatus cannot perform. We have built a whole practice of looking that documents without beholding: the intake form, the needs assessment, the donor profile, each a thorough record of having observed someone. None of it is the seeing that beholds. The Samaritan did not ask for the assessment, because the assessment was never going to show him the man. He had to kneel down to see that.
What the Crossing Becomes
Once we have crossed the road and truly seen, we find that the gift wants more than the single act on the roadside. It begins as a crossing toward a stranger, but it does not end there. The parable itself points past the rescue, to the inn, the return, the open bill. The crossing wants to become a staying. That is what proximity is for. Not the one act of help, though it starts there, but the long nearness that turns the person we crossed toward into someone we know.
This is the part we have lost, and Illich saw the irony in it more clearly than we do. Our admiration for the Samaritan was never enough to keep us doing what he did. Our modern instincts got the best of us when we began building institutions that could do the crossing for us, avoiding the messy work of climbing down into the ditch ourselves. But an institution cannot do what the Samaritan did. It can register a need, sort a case, process a claim; but it cannot get down in the ditch and see a person because an institution is not a person.
And that is what the gift asks of us. The bond it wants is the kind that leaves us willing to get into the ditch, not once in a while on a road we happen to be traveling, but in the ordinary course of our everyday lives. This is what an inclination toward proximity means, and it is not native to us; it has to be formed. The gift was never just about meeting needs. It was about crossing over to someone we were not bound to and seeing them as a person rather than a category, a need, or a problem to be solved.
- Jason Lewis, Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed
This was the first essay in the second half of Taming the Gift, where the project turned from naming what has tamed the gift to recovering what might set it free. To learn more about the project, visit here.