The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (56 page)

Maybe so. But it remains true that pleasure is ephemeral; that its constant pursuit is not a reliable source of happiness (as not only Samuel Smiles but also John Stuart Mill noted); that we are built not to easily grasp this fact; and that the reasons for all this are clearer in light of the new Darwinian paradigm.

There are scattered hints in the ancient scriptures of an understanding that human striving — after pleasure, after wealth, after status — is yoked to self-deception. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that men "devoted to enjoyment and power" are "robbed of insight." To pursue the fruits of action is to live in a "jungle of delusion."
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The Buddha said that "the best of virtues [is] passionlessness; the best of men he who has eyes to see."
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In Ecclesiastes it is written: "Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire."
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Some of these utterances are, in context, ambiguous, but there is no doubt about the clarity with which sages have seen one particular human delusion: the basic moral bias toward self. The idea recurs in Jesus' teaching — "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone"; "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of
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thy brother's eye."
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The Buddha put it in plainer language: "The fault of others is easily perceived, but that of one's self is difficult to perceive."
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The Buddha saw, in particular, that much delusion grows out of the human penchant for one-upmanship. In warning his followers against dogmatic squabbling, he said:

The senses' evidence,

and works, inspire such scorn

for others, and such smug

conviction he is right,

that all his rivals rank

as "sorry, brainless fools."
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This grasp of our naturally skewed perspective is bound up with exhortations toward brotherly love. For a premise of these exhortations is that we are deeply inclined not to view everyone with the charity we extend to our kin and ourselves. Indeed, if we weren't so deeply inclined, if we didn't buttress this inclination with all the moral and intellectual conviction at our disposal, you wouldn't have to start a whole religion to correct the imbalance.

The renunciation of sensory pleasure is also tied to brotherly love. Acting with generosity and consideration is tricky unless you somehow escape the human preoccupation with feeding the ego. Taken as a whole, some bodies of religious thought are a fairly coherent program for maximizing non-zero-sumness.

The question remains: How did these bodies get started? Why has the doctrine of brotherly love so thrived? Leave aside for the moment that it is honored mainly in the breach, that even those who most diligently pursue it may manage to dilute their self-love only slightly, that organized religions have often been vehicles for violating the doctorine on a spectacular scale. The mere fact that the idea lives on in this species is curious. In light of Darwinian theory, everything about the idea of brotherly love seems paradoxical except for the
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rhetorical power of the term brotherly. And this alone, surely, hasn't been enough to sell the idea.

Proposed solutions to this mystery range from the highly cynical to the mildly inspiring. At the more inspiring end of the spectrum is a theory by the philosopher Peter Singer. His book The Expanding Circle asks how the range of human compassion grew beyond it primitive bounds — the family, or perhaps the band. Singer notes that human nature, and the structure of human social life, long ago got people in the habit of publicly justifying their actions in objective terms. When we urge respect for our interests, we talk as if we are asking for no more than we would give anyone else in our shoes Singer believes that once this habit is established (by the evolution of reciprocal altruism, among other things), the "autonomy of rea soning" takes over. "The idea of a disinterested defense of one's conduct" grew out of self-interest, "but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of group."

This extension has grown impressively. Singer recounts how Plato urged his fellow Athenians to adopt what at the time was a major moral advance: "He argued that Greeks should not, in war, enslave other Greeks, lay waste their lands or raze their houses; they should do these things only to non-Greeks."
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The growth of moral concern to the bounds of the nation-state has long since become the norm. Eventually, Singer believes, it may reach global proportions: star vation in Africa will seem as scandalous to Americans as starvation in America. Pure logic will have brought us truly in touch with the great religious teachings of the ages — the fundamental moral equality of everyone. Our compassion will, as it should, spread evenly across humanity. Darwin shared this hope. He wrote in
The Descent of Man
: "As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individ ual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and

In a sense, Singer is saying that our genes have been too clever
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by half. They long ago began cloaking raw selfishness in the lofty language of morality, using it to exploit the various moral impulses natural selection created. Now this language, as harnessed to pure logic, impels the brains they built to behave with selflessness. Natural selection designed two things for narrow self-interest — cold reason and warm moral impulses — and somehow, when combined, they take on a life of their own.

Enough inspiration. The most cynical explanation of why so many sages have urged an expanded moral compass is the one set out near the beginning of this chapter: a large compass expands the power of the sages doing the urging. The Ten Commandments, with their bans on lying, stealing, and murder, made Moses' flock more manageable. And the Buddha's warnings about dogmatic squabbling kept his power base from splintering.

Supporting this cynicism is the fact that the universal love espoused in many scriptures doesn't emerge from scrutiny looking truly universal. The odes to selflessness in the Bhagavad Gita come in a somewhat ironic context: Lord Krishna is spurring the warrior Arjuna toward self-discipline so that he will more effectively slaughter an enemy army — an army, no less, that contains some of his own kin.
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Ami in Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, after singing the praises of love, peace, gentleness, and goodness, he says, "[L]et us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith. These are wise words indeed, coming from the head of the household. The case has been made that even Jesus didn't really preach universal love, that his injunctions to love your "enemies," when appraised carefully, are seen to apply only to Jewish enemies".
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In this light, Singer's "expanding circle" seems an extension less of moral logic than of political reach. As social organization goes beyond the level of the hunter-gatherer band — to the tribe, the city-state, the nation-state — religious organization on an ever larger scale is feasible. So sages take the opportunity to expand their power — which means preaching a commensurately broad tolerance. Thus, appeals for brotherly love are comparable to a politician's self-serving appeals to patriotism. In fact, appeals to patriotism are, in a way, appeals for brotherly love on a national scale.
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There is a third theory that stands near the middle of the cynicism
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spectrum. Yes, it holds, the
Ten Commandments
may have made Moses' flock more manageable. But presumably many of the sheep benefited too, since mutual restraint and consideration bring non zero-sum benefits. In other words, religious leaders, however self-interested, haven't been simply foisting their interests on the masses. They've been finding overlap between their interests and the masses' interests, and the overlap has gotten larger; as the scope of social and economic organization has grown, and with it the zone of non-zero sumness, the, self-interest of people has lain in behaving with at least minimal decency toward larger and larger numbers of people. Religious leaders are more than happy to have their stature rise commensurately.

There has been a change not just in the scope of social organi zation, but in its nature. The moral sentiments were designed for a particular environment — or, more precisely, for a particular series of environments, including hunter-gatherer villages and other, earlier, societies that are lost in the mists of prehistory. It is safe to say that these societies didn't have an elaborate judicial system and a large police force. Indeed, the strength of the retributive impulse is tes tament to a time when, if you didn't stand up for your interests, no one else would.

At some point, things began to change, and the value of these impulses began to wane. Today, most of us waste great quantities ol time and energy indulging our indignation. We rail ineffectually at careless drivers; we spend a day working with police to find a purse snatcher, even though the purse contained what we earn in three hours' work and catching the thief won't change the odds of being victimized in the future; we smolder at the fortune of professional rivals, even though we are powerless to bring them misfortune and would profit from treating them with greater civility.

When exactly in human history some of the moral sentiments began to obsolesce is hard to say. But it is worth pondering Donald Campbell's insight that it is the religions of the ancient urban civilizations — "independently developed in China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mexico, and Peru" — that reliably produced the familiar ele ments of modern religions: the curbing of "many aspects of human
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nature," including "selfishness, pride, greed, ... covetousness, ... lust, wrath."

Campbell believes this curbing was needed for "optimal social coordination."
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Whether he means optimal for the ruler or optimal for the ruled he doesn't say. But we can take heart in the fact that, though the two are sometimes at odds, they aren't mutually exclusive. What's more, the "social coordination" in question may extend beyond the scope of any single nation. It is by now trite to say that the peoples of the world are more interdependent than ever. Trite but true. Material progress has greatly deepened economic integration, and various technologies have brought threats that humanity can lorestall only in concert, such as environmental degradation and nuclear proliferation. There may have been a time when it was commonly in the interests of political leaders to stoke their people's intolerance and bigotry to the point of international strife. This time is passing.

The Hindu scriptures teach that a single universal soul resides in everyone; the wise man "sees himself in all and all in him."
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As a metaphor for a great philosophical truth — the equal sacredness (read: utilitarian worth) of every human sphere of consciousness — this leaching is profound. And as the basis for a practical rule of living — that the wise man refrains from harming others so that "he harms not himself"
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— this teaching is prescient. The ancient sages pointed — however ambiguously, however selfishly — to a truth that was not just valid, and not just valuable, but destined to grow in value as history advanced.

In illustrating the "puritan conscience" of Victorian England, Walter Houghton described a man who wrote down all his "sins and errors" and habitually detected "selfishness ... in every effort and resolve. The idea goes back at least as far as Martin Luther, who said a saint is someone who understands that everything he does is egotistical."

This definition of sainthood reflects favorably on Darwin. Here is a characteristic utterance: "But what a horridly egotistical letter, I
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am writing; I am so tired, that nothing short of the pleasant stimulus of vanity & writing about one's own dear self would have sufficed." (Needless to say, this sentence followed a passage that would strike few people today as egotistical. He had been voicing anxiety, not confidence, about how his work aboard the Beagle would be received.)

Whether or not Darwin, by Luther's measure, fully qualifies as a saint, it is certainly true that Darwinism, by this measure, can help make a person saintly. No doctrine heightens one's consciousness of hidden selfishness more acutely than the new Darwinian paradigm. If you understand the doctrine, buy the doctrine, and apply the doctrine, you will spend your life in deep suspicion of your motives.

Congratulations! That is the first step toward correcting the moral biases built into us by natural selection. The second step is to keep this newly learned cynicism from poisoning your view of everyone else: to pair harshness toward self with leniency toward others; to somewhat relax the ruthless judgment that often renders us conve niently indifferent to, if not hostile to, their welfare; to apply liberally the sympathy that evolution has meted out so stingily. If this operation is inordinately successful, it might result in a person who takes the welfare of others markedly, but at least not massively, less seri ously than his own.

Darwin did a reasonable job of this. Though fairly attuned to, and disdainful of, other people's vanity, his general attitude toward others was one of great moral seriousness; he reserved most of his mockery for himself. Even when he couldn't help but hate people, he tried to keep his hate in perspective. Regarding archenemy Richard Owen, he wrote to his friend Hooker, "I am become quite demoniacal about Owen" and "I mean to try to get more angelic in my feelings." The point isn't whether he succeeded. (He didn't.) The point is that to half-jokingly apply the word "demoniacal" to one's hatreds is to show more moral self-doubt, and less self-importance, than most of us usually manage. (This is all the more impressive as Darwin's feelings were hardly eccentric; Owen, though a particular threat to Darwin's status by virtue of his disbelief in natural selection, was also a spiteful and widely disliked man.)
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Darwin came fairly close to the nearly impossible and highly commendable: a detached, thorough!)
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modern (if not postmodern) cynicism toward self, paired with Victorian earnestness toward others.