Altruism

I have always been interested in paleo-anthropology. While we can learn a lot about human nature over the years by studying changes in societies throughout recorded history, the inescapable truth is that the human essence entered the world long before history began to be recorded.

Many of the popular ideas about the origins of human behaviour tend to fit with a stereotype we have of ourselves: the idea that we are barely restrained savages, crazy beasts who sheath their rabid nature beneath the thinnest veil of civilization. Famous seminal writers on the topic of primitive man (such as Desmond Morris of The Naked Ape fame) helped popularize the notion.

I subscribe to the opposite idea, popularized in Origins by Richard Leakey, of the famous Leakey family that made most of the early discoveries of fossil hominids. Leakey suggests that in fact the fundamental inward dispositions of human beings are cooperation and altruism.

Leakey points out that in the modern Earth's most primitive societies, we can see this altruism in full bloom. Of the !Kung , he says, "Youngsters do not contribute to the food economy until they are married, at around the age of twenty three in men and eighteen in women.... Childhood is carefree, adulthood is easygoing, and old age is relatively secure." (The old are venerated for their wisdom and do not work either.)

Like all good things, however, even altruism is capable of being used not only as a virtue, but as a vice. Leakey writes about this that "Unfortunately, it is our deeply rooted urge for group cooperation that makes large scale wars not only possible, but unique in their destructiveness. Animals that are essentially self-centered and untutored in coordinated activity could neither hunt large prey nor make war."

He argues that it is not our nature that makes us brutal towards other people, but the cultures and ideologies we develop. Most of us, in a one on one encounter with a stranger, will take a cautious, but altruistic stance. We willingly make small talk with a stranger if we can be reasonably assured of our safety (i.e. by being in a public setting.) We'll help a stranger in distress, without thinking twice about it.

Unfortunately, it is as societies that we often develop poisonous collective identities. A legitimate interest in collective self-preservation often becomes something uglier - a sense of uniqueness at the exclusion of others, or even a sense of manifest destiny. A pride in the achievements of a collective can become a chauvinism that dehumanizes the "others." The worst and most obvious example (I risk invoking Godwin) is obviously the Third Reich.

So perhaps it is best to remember when we form our collectives, that our collectives are groups of individuals. And the individual human is an altruistic being generally - a person disposed to putting him or herself in the shoes of another, and then acting accordingly. By exalting the dignity of the individual human being, we give our collectives the best example of who to emulate - the person.