The Price of Love: Perspectives from a Cottonwood Tree

It has been a long time since I have asked Stan, who manages this blog, to post something for me. I am Fluff, the cottonwood tree (she/her/hers) who lives next to the strip mall near Stan’s house in Tulsa. My last message was a year ago. Stan and I talk a lot, though not in words. He usually says hi to me as he and his wife take a walk along the ditch that is charitably called a creek. Last week, he made an estimate of the number of pieces of garbage along this ditch. He came up with 3,200 pieces of garbage per mile.

Today, however, we talked about a book he is reading called The Price of Altruism. It is a biography of George Price, the man whose mathematical genius was revered by the greatest evolutionary theoreticians of the mid-twentieth century, such as the late John Maynard Smith and the late William Hamilton. The focus of our discussion was vagrants, like the one who has built a trash structure right underneath my branches, and like the ones among whom George Price lived and died.

 

Stan had some vague idea of who George Price was. There is considerable scientific literature about altruism, including many mathematical papers that analyze it. Altruism is when one animal is nice to, or at least offers some assistance to, another animal. Stan has been interested in this topic for a long time and even considered writing a book about it, a project that is now on indefinite hold. He has not had any interest, however, in mathematical models. As even the mathematicians admit, real animals very seldom behave the way the models predict they should. That is, the models work, except when they don’t. George Price was one of these mathematicians.

 

Most of the mathematicians were academics who led safe lives. Some of them, like William Hamilton, took risks by doing field work in challenging places. Some, like John Maynard Smith, stayed in their ivory towers. But George Price, as Stan understood his story, was convinced by his own equations that he should live a completely altruistic life, at which point he left the tower and poured out his generosity on homeless vagrants in London, among whom he died. He almost seemed to be a Christlike figure, who was one of the few people to completely pour himself out for poor people the way Jesus did. Jesus, who had nowhere to lay his head, and who said to live like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, who would forgive seventy times seven times, and who would give everything away, never expecting repayment.

 

But the evidence is clear: he was delusional and lost his grip on mental reality.

 

George Price seemed to be, without saying it in so many words, proclaiming that we should all be living Christlike lives of self-sacrifice. He did, in fact, undergo a Christian conversion, and believed himself to be living in a uniquely Christlike fashion.

 

Actually, Price underwent two conversions. In the first, he noticed, then based his life upon, coincidences. Very unlikely events became miraculous when they happened together. These coincidences showed his mental instability. In one case, he met a woman with the same name as, and on the same date, that he had met a previous girlfriend. To Price, this clearly meant that she should marry him. He also noticed coincidences in phone numbers. Of course, we understand that coincidences that we notice seem almost infinitely impossible, but there are millions of other events that we do not notice. But after a while he started to ignore coincidences. His second conversion was to a spirit of vague charity, in which he loved everyone no matter what they did, even to him.

 

This would make it seem that Price was a super-Christian.

 

But, Stan discovered that Price survived only because of the charity of colleagues and friends. He gave away all his money, but then depended on friends to let him crash on a couch, or on charities to provide him free room and board. That is, he was a couch-surfer back before the term existed. Brilliant as he was, he could probably have come up with an elegant, simple, and profound mathematical equation for optimal couch-surfing. In addition, the money he gave away wasn’t really his. His colleagues got him stipends so that he could write more mathematical equations like the ones that had earlier dazzled them. But he just took the money and did what he wanted. Price was, in effect, giving away scientific grant money (that is, British taxpayer money) rather than his own. This was not a Christian way to live.

 

Actually, one could make many of the same criticisms of Jesus. He waited for food to fall like schmoos into his mouth, but it was his disciples who managed the money and bought the food. Jesus was, in effect, couch-surfing and mooching as much as Price did. The same is true of other historical figures such as St. Francis of Assisi.

 

I told Stan to stop worrying about it. He is living an altruistic life already. True, he walked right past the vagrant under my branches without a glance. But Stan spends his money only on modest pleasures. He believes that whatever money and collateral—and even health—that he has belongs to his family, especially his daughter and grandchildren in France. He will not give his wealth (modest anyhow) to the vagrant and leave his family (the way George Price did his) without money and with a poor old man to take care of.

 

Perhaps most of all, the people to whom Price showed generosity benefited only briefly and slightly. By the time Price died, every one of the vagrants he helped was still a vagrant. The man everyone called Peg Leg remained the alcoholic he had previously been.

 

What a waste.

 

Stan was expecting some insights about altruism from Price—not from his math (Stan almost never gets insights from math) but from his personal example. In this, Stan was disappointed.

 

Now, from my perspective as a cottonwood tree. I do not care what happens to the rest of the world. In autumn, I let go of my leaves and they fly away in the wind. I do not recycle them; Nature does. I let go of my seeds in late spring, and do not care where they go. When I have a dead branch, I do not care whose roof it falls on. But, then, I am a tree. I cannot control where my leaves or seeds go. But you humans are in an existential crisis. You can decide what to do and when. You humans have the choice of good and evil for every little action you take. All I can say is, try to be as wise as you can. Optimize your goodness, realizing that your life is not your own, to dissipate in pleasure or to pour into black holes of charity. This is why I am glad I am a cottonwood tree, not a human.

 

Stan thanked me and went back home to write this.