The Future of Altruism

I continue my discussion of altruism, one of the most important human evolutionary adaptations.

President Barack Obama was swept into office on a tide of enthusiasm. But he is one idealistic altruist, allied with a few other idealistic people, and can only work through a slow and contaminated mass of administrators. At least, President Obama has made efforts to create a “transparent” administration, even to the extent of placing minutes of departmental meetings online. This could not contrast more strongly with the preceding administration, particularly the notoriously secretive office of former Vice President Dick “Dick” Cheney. We Americans dare to expect our government to be altruistic. The majority of Americans believe Barack Obama is altruistic, but remain unconvinced about his appointees, many of whom were financial executives receiving large compensations.

Altruism evolved in communities. The death of communities, and their replacement by multinational corporations, may prove to be the death of altruism. When, for example, all food is produced by a few global corporations, we have to take what they offer. Contrast this with farmers’ markets, where you buy food face-to-face from the people who produce it. When the people who run a community or a state live in it, they are much more accountable to their neighbors. This is the reason that conferences of mayors or of governors have much more bipartisan cooperation than Congress. The local altruistic citizenry of nearly every community wants energy efficiency and a clean environment; but Congress listens to the moneyed interests of the coal, oil, and gas industries, who want us to burn as much fossil fuel as possible. When large corporations and political parties are in control of the world, there is no voice for altruism.

We have already gotten a few glimpses into what the world could be like if many countries suffered a breakdown of altruism. We call them “failed states.” The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the last decade of the twentieth century, or in the Sudan in the first decade of the twenty-first, show how people who had been living with a semblance of peace can suddenly erupt into insane violence. Just as the human brain is capable of altruism, it is also capable of classifying other human beings as non-persons and killing them with no feelings of empathy whatever. This is unlikely to occur except under highly unusual circumstances, but it is clearly possible.

It would take thousands of years for the genetic underpinnings of human altruism to erode away. Unfortunately, the cultural norms of altruism are essential for unlocking these genes. If we interrupt the cultural transmission of altruism, we may collapse into a nightmare world of dark conflict in which the old altruistic tendencies are groping around, unable to emerge.

A passage similar to this appears in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.

Altruism in Recent History

In recent decades, evolutionary altruism appears to have become more common in the human species. Even as recently as World War Two, people of civilized countries thought that there was absolutely nothing wrong with killing thousands of civilians who happened to live in an enemy country. The Firestorm of Dresden and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed reasonable to Americans, even though very few of the victims were actually responsible for German and Japanese aggression. The Rape of Nanking and the conquest of Europe seemed reasonable to Japanese and German citizens. While many soldiers had a hard time shooting fellow human beings, most soldiers and civilians approved of mass bombings of civilians whom they did not have to look in the eye. Somewhere around the time of the Vietnam War, this attitude changed. It was no longer acceptable to massacre a village, such as My Lai, just because there might be some enemy combatants there. Today, whenever an American bomb kills civilians in Afghanistan, there is a worldwide uproar. All around the world, people of every religious conviction or of no religious conviction are uniting in their rejection of torture, genocide, and war-related cruelty. This sounds like good news. I cling to it, because it is almost the only good news about the direction the world is headed.

But we must remember that this altruistic progress is the result of the beliefs and actions of individuals rather than of governments. Governments, at best, acknowledge the human rights that their people demand, and at worst suppress them. Government administrations do not advance human rights. The American government responded to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., first with hostility, then with acquiescence, and only after many years with admiration. The progress of altruism has always and only come from the bottom up. When altruists find themselves in positions of power, they also find themselves in positions of frustration, and seldom accomplish very much.

And it is usually not facts and figures that stir people’s hearts to create a change. It was not the list of deaths and battles in Vietnam that altered American opinion; it may have been a single Associated Press photograph of children running from the village of Trangbang on June 8, 1972, screaming in pain from the burning napalm with which they had just been doused. We are still an altruistic species, and when we see something like that, it moves the hearts of everyone—with the exception of psychopaths.

A passage similar to this appears in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, to be released soon by Prometheus Books. See my website for more information.