I woke up today wondering about altruism – the impulse to put another person’s interests ahead of your own. Is it all just, basically, people doing things out of a sense of obligation, drummed into their heads by religion or goody-goody liberalism? Or is there something fundamental that we all share, something that has enabled this counter-intuitive selflessness show up again and again throughout human history, uplifting us and guiding our better natures?
Animals do it: a bee, for example, gives up its own life when it stings an intruder. Somehow we humans formed hunter-gatherer bands (the original “is not a gang, is a club” social organization) and protected the weak. Darwin wrote that “each man would soon learn that if he aided his fellow-men, he would commonly receive aid in return,” and that over time, this habit became something that was actually passed down in our genes. And throughout human history, in fact, altruism shows up as the highest of all virtues.
In the Jewish faith, one of the primary teachings of God is “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). Christianity, of course, shows us Jesus dying on the cross for all of humanity, and proclaiming a “new commandment” in addition to the famous Ten: “that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34).
The everyday philosophy of our times is not only based on Judeo-Christian values, but also from the teachings of classical antiquity as well as pop culture. The Stoics in ancient Greece believed that a wise man would act for “reasons which do not further his own desires and projects” and would realize this “will benefit all equally, as well as himself.” In the great American film Bikini Summer II (1992), a couple of rich daddy’s girls meet a homeless man and take him home to care for him. In return, the bum teaches them about the real world and helps them start a band, thus proving the truth of the Stoics’ thesis.
The modern ethic, of course, is to put self before others. Ayn Rand holds that altruism is a form of theft. Reality TV shows are without exception (as far as I know, but then again I can’t stand reality TV so I never watch it) dedicated to the proposition that people need to fuck each other over in order to get ahead. And the unanswered question always seems to me to be who would want to live in a world that looks like reality TV? While it’s true that people do often behave that way, is it really so great that we want to marinate ourselves night after night in cut-throat behavior?
What seems to often get missed is that helping people out is fun. In fact, there are actual neurochemicals involved, which is kind of cool. A team of Israeli psychologists found that a group of individuals who displayed selfless behavior had a certain variant of the dopamine receptor gene, which is associated with feelings of pleasure. This corresponds to earlier U.S. studies that found that people who help others often experience a “helper’s high.”
There’s a grim kind of “eat-your-vegetables” Puritanism that’s often associated with volunteering and doing good, which obscures the fact that the helper’s high tends to be far more sustainable than the selfish kind. There’s really no end to the good that can be done, while there is a functional limit to the number of Benzes that you can actually enjoy. the second one doesn’t feel as good as the first, and by the time that you have a different S-class for every month of the year you may feel a certain jadedness set in. I’ve never heard of a volunteer being jaded after having made too many elderly shut-ins smile.
If the reality is that the things that our culture tells us make us happy actually don’t, and that the crappy boring things are really more fun…. what does that say about our culture? And what other things that are commonly accepted as true might be utter and complete bullshit?
