The Survival of the Altruistic
Marxists had a point when they observed that capitalist culture seemed to reward both individual and collective greed. The new science of evolution, as well as political economy, harped upon this point.
Reading Malthus’s Essay on Population in 1838, Charles Darwin experienced an epiphany—the relentless pressure of population growth could help explain why and how natural selection took place.26 Also inspiring, perhaps, had been the example of a parson who rejected the notion that God must be benevolent. Both men challenged the vision of a heavenly Father looking after his children, or a shepherd taking care of his flock. Their God seem more detached, sadly observing the cycles of demographic boom and boost and watching a gladiatorial contest for the prize of ‘‘most fit”.Advocates of laissez faire, like the English philosopher/sociologist Herbert Spencer, had long argued that fierce competition would bring out the best in individuals and society. Charles Darwin appropriated Spencer's phrase, the ‘‘survival of the fittest'' in his Origin of the Species. Spencer, in turn, developed the theory of Social Darwinism, which gradually replaced Malthusianism as a bludgeon against public assistance to the poor. Spencer was a militant individualist, insisting on the ‘‘permanent supremacy of egoism over altruism.''27 Evolution, after all, appeared to be a winner-take-all game.
In his later volume The Descent of Man, however, Darwin shifted tone, hypothesizing that some degree of altruism would give the tribe, or group, an evolutionary advantage. In a page that could have been lifted from Montesquieu's parable of the Troglodytes he wrote:
Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes: but in the course of time it would, judging by all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other tribe still more highly endowed. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world.28
Darwin did not fully explain his version of group selection, which remains a controversial issue within evolutionary theory today.
But his confidence in ‘‘coherence'' weirdly echoed Marx's confidence in class solidarity. The argument Darwin saved for last in The Descent of Man betrayed surprisingly sentimental views. There can hardly be a doubt, he explained, that we are descended from barbarian tribes. Was it necessarily worse to be descended from an ape? Recalling men who had enslaved women and butchered children, he declared that he would rather be descended from a heroic monkey who had saved its keeper's life, or an old baboon who saved a younger from a pack of dogs. It was a surprising turn of argument for a scientist, to claim that an altruistic ape was at least as good a forebear as a selfish man.Herbert Spencer also took pains to distinguish selfishness from selfinterest. He worried what might happen if women became selfish. Their individual interests were at odds with those of their children. The ultimate rationale for altruism was the survival of the family, and this, he noted rather presciently, implied an intergenerational contract: ‘‘a society, like a species, survives only on condition that each generation of its members shall yield to the next, benefits equivalent to those it has received from the last. And this implies that care for the family must be supplemented by care for the society.”29 In Darwinian terms, kin-based altruism would be rewarded, and members of a society were often either actual or potential kin.
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