The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  Christie was pretty sure that she herself could, but she made a noise of mild agreement. It was Mrs. Foster’s prerogative to tease cats, to ask questions and ignore the answers, or any other behavior she had a mind to engage in. Now that she was Mrs. Foster’s employee, rather than her nurse, she was obliged to put up with such things.

  Mrs. Foster gave up on the cat and turned back to Christie. “It’s nice we’re giving money to the food pantry. And the affordable housing program too. You have to start with the basics. Food and shelter.”

  “You can make a real difference,” Christie said, hoping she didn’t sound entirely fatuous. She was here at Mrs. Foster’s request, since Mrs. Foster said she preferred such updates to all those tiresome written reports, which Christie suspected she did not read. Christie had brought her medical bag along and checked Mrs. Foster’s vital signs and asked the routine questions about her well-being. Although there seemed no need. Mrs. Foster was enjoying a spell of elderly good health, as if giving away money had been just the tonic for her. These days her makeup was always gallantly applied, her fingernails lacquered either rosy pink or a dark plum shade that she told Christie was called “Man Eater.”

  As for Christie, she was discovering unexpected and not always attractive talents in herself. She could do the things necessary to running a business, if you thought of the Foundation as a species of business. She was learning to read financial statements and grant applications; they no longer made her feel thunderstruck by her own ignorance. She issued press releases and made phone calls to strangers, with more ease than she might have imagined. She tackled spreadsheets. She held people to account, she was unmoved by the excuses and sullenness of bad employees. She told sass-mouth Janelle to either get off her cell phone or go home for good, and when Janelle left, she didn’t stop her. When Kenny didn’t take his meds and started following everyone around, standing too close and asking them intense personal questions, Christie put him on medical leave and changed the building’s locks.

  It had been Mrs. Foster’s wish that the Foundation employ the otherwise unemployable: the drug-addled, the belligerently untrained, the mildly nuts. Christie had gone along with this, not because she’d thought it was a good idea, but because it seemed her job to follow instructions. Now she was retooling the office staff one by one, trying to make it into something other than a sheltered workshop. She didn’t discuss this with Mrs. Foster, since one of her new, unappealing talents seemed to be strategic sneakiness. Besides, she wanted the Foundation to succeed, she wanted to do a good job.

  They were beginning with a series of small-scale initiatives, making contributions to already-established organizations. A mental health outreach program. Groups that provided youth mentoring, or community-based medical screenings. Christie was familiar with some of these from her work at the clinic. She had her own opinions about which of them got results and which of them were badly managed, and she made decisions accordingly. Those applying for the grants made efforts at flattery and courtship, and these efforts annoyed or amused her. At the same time, she was beginning to enjoy the small amounts of power her position gave her. She believed this was another unwholesome development, one more of her recently discovered and distressing moral failings.

  “But I can’t help feeling,” Mrs. Foster said, still distracted by the sleeping cat, “that all these very practical efforts—and this is in no way meant as a criticism of you, my dear, because I think you are entirely wonderful—that these basic, practical things don’t really address the kinds of broader issues I had in mind.”

  Christie didn’t entirely disagree with this, but she needed to be cautious. “What broader issues are those?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something”—a wave of Mrs. Foster’s manicured hand, the knuckles now larger than the fingers themselves, which were so wrinkled as to appear corrugated—“significant. Now, this is going to sound insulting, and I don’t mean it that way, I don’t mean for you to take it at all personally.”

  Christie braced herself for the insult that she was not meant to take personally. “. . . but you can be a nurse, and take care of everybody’s small, immediate needs, or you can be the researcher who cures cancer.” Mrs. Foster sat back, pleased with her rhetorical flourish.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good example. Or a fair choice.”

  “It’s a figure of speech. Oh heavens, don’t sulk. Would it make you feel better if we gave money to a nursing school? I’m just saying, we haven’t yet hit our stride. Found our true calling.”

  Christie said that she assumed that living up to the mission statement would be a gradual, evolving process. Glibness came out of her effortlessly these days.

  Outside, a power saw started up. Christie could see a portion of the backyard and the drive, where the boy who served as Mrs. Foster’s handyman and houseman was making a racket. He always seemed to have some noisy carpentry project going on these days. He’d set up a workbench and Christie watched him lifting one board and then another, bending down to position them, then using a circle saw to slice them through. She didn’t know his name, but he was always around, and Christie believed, from something Mrs. Foster had said, that he lived on the premises now. Another of Mrs. Foster’s projects. Christie wondered what was wrong with him, since there was most often something wrong with the people Mrs. Foster bestowed her favor on. But she didn’t like this line of thought, since then she had to wonder what was wrong with her too.

  She’d crossed paths with him a few times as she came and went, but they’d never spoken, and it would have been awkward to start doing so now. He was unnervingly good-looking, young and tall and trimly muscled, with dark blond hair and dusky, sunburned skin. She was almost embarrassed to look at him, yes, it embarrassed her, she’d thought she was beyond any such stray thoughts or urges.

  Or say she wasn’t. She didn’t have to do anything about it.

  Mrs. Foster was still on the trail of her argument. “Well, suppose you managed to give everybody what they needed, food and shelter and medical care and whatnot. Got rid of the real inequalities and wants, made everyone share.”

  “I think that’s called communism.”

  Luckily, the cat raised its head just then and stared at them with its question-mark face before it leapt from the windowsill, and Mrs. Foster had not seemed to hear her unwise wisecrack. “Say you did all that,” she went on. “Wouldn’t people still act badly? I mean, be greedy and violent and unpleasant?”

  “Probably. I guess.” More like, of course.

  “Because people are naturally self-centered and awful,” Mrs. Foster stated, more cheerfully than you might imagine.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think you can generalize. It’s more like, people are inconsistently virtuous.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly the way I started thinking. How imperfect human nature is. That’s when I came up with my idea.”

  “And what is that?” Christie asked, as she was meant to, a small, spinning cloud of apprehension moving toward her over a near horizon.

  “We could pay people to be good.”

  • • •

  By the time Christie left Mrs. Foster’s house, the cloud had taken the form of attacking winged monkeys. Mrs. Foster’s new idea sounded, well, kooky. Would you hand out dollar bills for good deeds? Would you have to set it up like drug testing? Would you try to turn bad people into better ones? What about people who were already good? Mrs. Foster had not gone into great detail. It was likely that she had not yet considered the details. What was wrong with giving away food and housing vouchers? Why couldn’t she just endow a library?

  Mrs. Foster had told Christie to “give some thought” to this new mission and call her in a couple of days. It might be possible to stall, to say she was working on it, and hope that Mrs. Foster would forget about the whole thing. But that was wishful thinking. It was more likely that Mrs. Foster would set off full-s
peed in all directions, perhaps start talking it up with the board members, and Christie would be the one who’d have to put out the fires.

  When she got home she called Mr. Kirn, and was unexpectedly put right through to him. Mr. Kirn was most often busy doing more important things. “Let me make certain I understand you,” Mr. Kirn said. “‘Pay people money to be good.’ I don’t suppose she said how much money?”

  “No, and she didn’t define ‘good’ either.”

  “Maybe she was just thinking out loud.”

  “Maybe,” Christie said, and waited for the idea to work itself through his lawyer’s brain. For want of any better alternatives, he was the only board member she turned to for advice. Not that she had much in common with him. Or perhaps this new job was making her more Kirn-like—a thought that depressed her.

  “How, exactly, do you think she wants this ‘project’ to work?” Mr. Kirn asked. “Like a psychology experiment, with questionnaires and interviews?”

  “I don’t think so.” Christie tried to sort Mrs. Foster’s vague directives into something resembling a course of action. “More like a tent revival. Advertising for people who want to ‘improve their moral nature.’ Preaching to them about virtue and personal responsibility.”

  Mr. Kirn sighed. “And then?”

  “Something about them signing a contract, and getting a check. I know. Think of all the con artists. How fast the money would go.”

  “Huh. I suppose you could think of it as incentivizing behavior. In the same way the law does. Although then you get into negative incentives. Penalties for bad behavior.”

  “I don’t know how set on this she is. But I wanted to give you a heads-up, in case she talks to you.” Meaning, of course, that she hoped he would see it for the bad idea that it was, and join forces with her.

  “Huh,” Mr. Kirn said again. Christie guessed they might both be thinking of the hazards involved if Mrs. Foster insisted on moving forward, how foolish the Foundation might be made to look. You couldn’t imagine that Mr. Kirn would enjoy looking foolish, even by association.

  Of course, neither would she. And she felt guilty, disloyal to Mrs. Foster for maneuvering behind her back like this. As if she had become too attached to the idea of a job and a salary (although out of principle, the salary was not large), rather than acting out of any feeble altruism.

  “I’m glad you called,” Mr. Kirn said. “Let me give it some thought and get back to you.”

  They hung up. Mr. Kirn called her again a half-hour later. “Tell her you want to hold a conference. A conference to examine the relationship between economics and behavior.”

  “Is there a relationship?”

  “We don’t know yet. We haven’t examined it. That’s what the conference is for. You’ll have to think up some catchy title. And get speakers lined up. I’ll talk to some of the other board members. You can rent space in a college or somewhere. And you’ll have to hurry, because it takes time to organize these things.”

  “Hold on a minute. Why would we want to have a conference?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t stay on the phone, I’m due in court. You have a conference because then you don’t have to do anything else. Think about it. I have to run.”

  Christie hung up. She couldn’t help feeling she’d just made a deal with the devil. Not that Mr. Kirn was the devil. But how neatly and easily he’d come up with a perfectly cynical idea.

  She took her shoes off and did some spine stretches, rounding then flattening her back. Her back had been acting up ever since she took on the Foundation job, which she thought meant something organic and sinister and subtly wrong was announcing itself. She sat down at her little shrine, which she’d been rather neglecting lately. Every time she tried to clear her mind, all her small and large responsibilities pestered her. The name of God is Truth. The name of God is call Mr. Sebastian about the next session of the Zoning Commission and see if it was too late to get an item on the agenda about the need for low-cost multifamily housing.

  She had wanted to engage with the world. And now the world was engaging right back.

  She didn’t succeed in meditating, because she didn’t really try. But by the time she stood up, she had decided that if there was to be a conference, and especially if there was going to be all the work and effort of a conference, then it would have to be undertaken with an open mind and an open heart, and it would be meant to accomplish something.

  We do not so much look at things as overlook them.

  Mrs. Foster liked the idea of a conference. She liked the idea of people meeting in assembly rooms with microphones and coffee cups, having impassioned discussions. She wished there to be distinguished guests and hobnobbing. Christie laid it out for her, assisted by some judicious follow-up from Mr. Kirn. She had come up with a few possible study-session topics. How could you best explore the issues and questions that linked economics and behavior? Did poverty in itself lead to moral failings, such as crime? Was “goodness” something that could be objectified and measured? Did society benefit directly from individual virtue, and therefore have incentive to promote it? Did our concepts of goodness have their foundations in religious and spiritual practice? What about the notion that money was the root of all evil, and those monks and nuns who felt it necessary to deny themselves material wealth? If people were paid to be good, would you be setting up a kind of capitalism of virtue, with everyone competing among themselves to be the most worthy and rewardable?

  “Congratulations,” Mr. Kirn told her in one of their flurry of phone calls. “Those are exactly the kind of windy, unanswerable questions that you organize a conference around.”

  “I’m not intending to simply waste everyone’s time,” Christie said stiffly.

  “Of course you aren’t,” Mr. Kirn reassured her. It was that easy for him to switch tones. He probably argued both sides of his legal cases, just for practice.

  “We’re planning on two months from now, right before Thanksgiving. It won’t be very large. It can’t be for a first-time conference. But it’s something you could build on in the future. There could be different topics each time. Workshops. There’s no reason you couldn’t have some practical applications. Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m not.”

  “It’s more like sniggering.”

  “I apologize. I’m not laughing at you. I’m envious. I wish I had your energy. Your positive attitude. Your belief in possibility.”

  “By which you mean, naive.”

  “Promise me, if you are ever on a witness stand, do not volunteer characterizations of yourself. No. I meant it’s admirable. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of ugly situations. Human beings who make you want to resign from the species. As have I. And yet you persevere.”

  “As do you,” said Christie, wondering if Mr. Kirn was being sincere and if there was any possible way of telling.

  “Not at all the same thing. So much about a law practice is competitive. Who wins what. So much ego involved. I have to say, it’s what keeps me going. But you operate out of a”—he paused, either to find the right words, or for effect—“disinterested interest. You really are a remarkable young woman.”

  “Thank you.” Christie’s interpersonal radar chimed a warning. A vision of the sort considered “unbidden” rose up of Mr. Kirn’s pink and gleaming face. And surely there was a Mrs. Kirn? “I’d say that Mrs. Foster is pretty remarkable also.”

  “Absolutely,” said Mr. Kirn, but with decelerating enthusiasm. “Let’s talk again soon, shall we?”

  She didn’t have time to worry about Mr. Kirn, or even time to worry about whether she should be worried. There was too much to do in the way of the Foundation’s ordinary operations, and now the conference on top of it. Fortunately, one of the original hard-luck hires was turning out to be an excellent worker. Her name was Imelda and she had felony convictions for check fraud and
identity theft. In most places this would not be considered a desirable résumé. But Imelda was one of the prison ministries program’s success stories, with a new husband and a new baby girl, and if you didn’t believe that people could turn their lives around, why bother with the enterprise of humanity in the first place? Besides, the skills she had used in her previous criminal life—confidence, cajolery, cunning—served her well in dealing with vendors and booking agents and the media.

  Christie was able to get one genuine celebrity for the conference, a best-selling author of inspirational books who would be in San Francisco as part of a national tour. The rest of the panelists would be local notables with expertise in fields such as sociology, in philosophy, in economics, and religious studies. Mrs. Foster was persuaded to add to the existing budget for their honoraria. A nearby seminary had conference facilities available. The machinery of publicity was set in motion. The Foundation’s new website bloomed with information about the conference, which was called “Investing in Our Better Selves”—not catchy, but Christie hoped it conveyed something aspirational, not just another investment seminar.

  People began to send in their registration fees, a rush of them at first, then they dribbled in until they reached thirty, or half of what they’d hoped for. Time began to grow short. Christie and Imelda sat together in front of a computer, refreshing the web page every so often to see if other registrations had come in. They wanted enough of a crowd so that it wouldn’t look forlorn, and they wanted to cover some of the expenses. Imelda said, “I don’t suppose we could hire some people to go. You know, like placeholders.”