Stories and altruism

Seeing Life in a Day changed the way I see the world, and was a key step in preparing me to be interested in effective altruism when I first heard about it (roughly a year later).

The film shows hundreds of snippets of ordinary life around the world, creating an overwhelming effect of "everyone is basically the same and matters equally" (at least for me). The notion of caring more about people from, say, my own city no longer made any sense to me after the film ended.

Perhaps not EA-related, but as a refreshing change from the apparent focus on villains in both "literary" and "genre" fiction, I'd recommend Anna Funder's 'All That I Am' and 'Stasiland'. They are based on the stories of resistors to the Nazi regime and the East German GDR regime, respectively. 'Stasiland' is non-fiction (long-form journalism) and also includes stories from informers/ex-Stasi police, but most of the focus is on the resistors. 'All That I Am' is based on the life of a person whom the author, Anna Funder, knew personally.

Hotel Rwanda is pretty good.

The movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) caused me to reflect on how people -- including myself -- might rationalize their contributions to harm, or their lack of responsibility for preventing it.

Thanks a lot for writing this. 

One thing I started recently is collecting instances of people acting altruistic and courageous and reading about these when I need motivation (their Wikipedia articles or a text I wrote myself etc.). These examples can go from very small acts to big ones. Reading about actual examples of people standing up to the social norms or laws of their time to do the right thing gives me a lot of motivation to keep pursuing an altruistic path even in the face of difficulty. One example I came across recently is a farther who supported his daughter when she refused to marry a man who raped her (a so called “rehabilitating marriage” which was the custom (and law!) in mid 20th century Sicily). He did so although their town  ostracised them and even burned down their farm. 

Also there is a good amount of great blog posts which I find really motivating. The ones I can think of from the top of my head are:

•  Happy Smallpox eradication day (500 Million but not a single one more)
• Happy Stanislav Petrov day (What almost was)
• Happy Stanislav Petrov day (There is a button)
• The enemy might not have a face but you still have to fight him
• Secular Solstice Eve Speech: Stories
• On Caring

Thanks for posting about this! The experiences I've had with art feel like a big part of what motivates my altruism.

One of the ways art can encourage altruism is by rendering real the life of another person, making you experience their suffering or joy as your own. Many pieces of art have this effect on me, too many to name -- indeed I think of it as a defining quality of good art.

Another way art can encourage altruism is by taking a zoomed-out perspective and engaging with moral ideals in the abstract. This you might call "humanistic". I've listed mostly these below, as art of the other type is too numerous to name.

Books

- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin is very meaningful to me as a vision of what a society where we cared "sufficiently" about others might look like.

- All Kurt Vonnegut, a very humanistic writer. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is explicitly about a philosophically-minded billionaire who decides to give his wealth away to the poor, and the consequences of that decision.

- George Saunders, another very humanistic writer. Tenth of December is great. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-semplica-girl-diaries is a great one of his about the banality of evil.

Poems

- https://www.pw.org/content/akhmatova_by_matthew_dickman

- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/11/trouble-poem-matthew-dickman (Content warning: suicide)

- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52173/what-work-is

Movies

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Jackson_Heights (a long, quiet, slice-of-life documentary that jumps between people)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_Hanging (the Japanese police botch an execution, causing the criminal to lose all his memories of the crime; the police, panicking, try to jog his memory so they can execute him like they're supposed to)