The Price of Altruism Read Online Free PDF

meant being hungry and cold and losing all status—so be it. This was the Lord’s wish, and George would follow it, period. And if the Lord had determined that it was time for George to look after himself, then he would follow that command as well. 17
    But is it possible to penetrate further beneath the religious injunction? Is there a deeper truth lurking behind George’s own conscious explanation?
    Widening the lens may help. Altruism, cooperation, and morality had in one form or another occupied George’s thoughts from the beginning. Back in Chicago, working on uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project, George wondered why nations should hate one another and fight. Struggling to complete No Easy Way in the Village between instruction manuals for Sperry-Marine and bouts of drug-induced incapacity, he had racked his brain for the solution to the threat of mutually assured destruction. And yet, as he wrote to his editor, the world was changing too fast to get any kind of grip on the problem; unable to see the answer, George finally gave up.
    Then came Ferguson and the operation, and quitting IBM. Leaving one life, he acquired another; having crossed the Atlantic from America to England, he found himself swimming in the ocean of evolutionary theory. It was there, in search of the origins of family, that he became acquainted with the field of social behavior, with the dynamics of personal and collective interest, and most of all with the problem of altruism. Plunging into Hamilton’s kin-selection mathematics and emerging with his own elegant covariance, George came to see that in nature, at least, goodness came about for a reason. Delving into game theory and surfacing with the logic of animal conflict, he understood that reciprocity was a utilitarian affair. Whether altruism came about at the altruist’s own expense because it helped shuttle related genes into the next generation, or because it somehow ended up paying for the altruist later in his life, there was always an interested logic involved. Even when a “truer” altruism evolved under group selection it could only work if the good of one group was to triumph over the good of another. Whether conscious or brainless, intended or instinctual, altruism was never truly “pure.”
    But if science had painted a rather dour landscape of goodness, perhaps the spirit could transcend it after all. If ant workers helped their sisters only because it helped their genes; if a monkey helped another monkey only because he could cash in on the favor someday—perhaps man could do better. Perhaps George could do better. Inviting homeless strangers into his apartment was a beginning; in the vein of his constitutional extremism, giving them all he had and losing everything was the pushing of the envelope. If George’s own mathematics described a world where selflessness was always selfish, perhaps in his own actions he could prove that in humans this wasn’t necessarily so. If science could not provide the answer to the riddle of the origins of pure, universal goodness, if it could not even formulate the question necessary to fathom such mysterious depths, then perhaps George could find it elsewhere, in the fetid corners of Euston Station and the lonely benches of Soho Square. Perhaps pure selflessness resides in places science could never touch—in the unknown and unknowable recesses of the soaring human soul.
    It was a courageous bid, a bold examination, and much was riding on it. But if this was indeed George’s goal, then its outcome may best explain his demise. For in the final analysis selflessness only led to further despair: None of the homeless people he tried to help ever left the bottle, none returned to their families, none changed their ways. He himself had wallowed in misery, too sick and too hungry to be of any use even if he’d wanted to be. His own equation could reveal when altruism would evolve by benefiting the community despite being disadvantageous