In Does Altruism Exist? David Sloan Wilson accomplishes the unlikely. He addresses the wrong question to arrive at a brilliant breakthrough conclusion essential to the human future.
Though Wilson is too polite to say so, evolutionary biology for far too long has focused on the competitive side of evolutionary processes to the exclusion of the ultimately far more essential and central cooperative dimension. Thus, it has played to an ideological bias of those who would have us believe that unbridled competition for individual financial advantage is the key to human progress. This, to put it bluntly, is the ideology of the psychopath. Our acceptance of this ideological mantra as the foundational premise around which we have organized the global economy, goes a long way toward explaining why we find ourselves on a path to self-extinction.
Wilson is among those taking a deeper look at the data to observe that life is ultimately a primarily cooperative enterprise involving countless interdependent species that together self-organize through processes we barely understand to create and maintain the conditions on which they individually and mutually depend. The very fact that this dimension of life is so self-evident and pervasive perhaps helps to explain why we rarely take note of it. We see the competitive side more clearly, because it stands out so starkly against the background of cooperation.
By stepping back to observe and describe the deeper truth, Wilson makes a crucial, and long overdue contribution to our understanding of life. His work has sweeping implications for every aspect of the organization of human societies.
Life began with the simplest of microscopic cells. Life made its first great advance when these simple cells learned to create more complex and capable cells by interpenetrating one another to join their separate abilities in a single cell. These more complex cells than learned to join and reproduce to create ever more complex and capable multi-celled organisms. Science is only beginning to recognize the nature and implications of the processes involved. These are extraordinary examples of evolutionary advances achieved through learning to cooperate.
Our own bodies are a highly advanced example. We are each the product of tens of trillions of individual living, active, decision making cells, self-reproducing through extraordinarily complex and ultimately intelligent processes to create a human superorganism with capabilities far beyond those of any of the individual of which it is comprised.
The cells of an individual human body may go rogue and engage in a deadly competition with the rest of the body’s cells to maximize their individual consumption and reproduction without regard to the consequences for the community of cells that birthed them. We call the rogue cells a cancer tumor. Unless the rogue cells are removed, the near certain consequence is the death of body, which also assures the death of the cancer. The competitive strategy of the cancer cell provides a momentary advantage while assuring death in the slightly longer term. Our relationship to Earth has become much like that of the cancer cell to the body that birthed and nurtured it.
The success of the body as a collective enterprise of the tens of trillions of cells, depends as well on the coordinated cooperative activities of addition tens of trillions of “independent” microorganisms that perform a multitude of supporting functions, including breaking down the feed we eat into a form the body can digest. The body also supports them. It is appropriate thereby to think of our own body, not as a single organism so much as a self-organizing cooperative community of organisms. The many complex and interconnected processes by which these many trillions of individual living organisms engage in cooperative self-organization take place entirely beyond our sight and therefore beyond our awareness.
On July 1, 2015, I experienced a stroke. A blood clot lodged in a small artery and cut off blood flow to a small section of my brain responsible for certain vision functions. The brain cells immediately began organizing to create other pathways to get blood to these cells and to compensate for the visual impairment. The healing process continues as I write this commentary on Does Altruism Exist?
It would be ridiculous to describe the response from the undamaged cells as an act of altruism. Rather they naturally do what responsible members of any self-organizing community do—mobilize to address any threat to the integrity and wellbeing of the community.
This is the larger reality behind Wilson’s recognition that the very concept of altruism is the product of a ridiculously simplistic individualistic frame of understanding that views service to another as an act of self-sacrifice. There are countless situations in which the interests of the whole and those of its individual members are so interdependent that attempts to distinguish between service to self and service to others are pointless.
This is the essential nugget of Wilson’s conclusion. In the end, he leads us to recognize that the title of his book frames a meaningless question that itself reveals the primitive state of human understanding of one of the most basic aspects of life. He points to possibilities for the organization of human society that go far beyond our current simplistic assumption that our only choice is between a capitalist system based on extreme individualism and a socialist system based on extreme collectivism. In a healthy living system, there is no distinction between the well-being of the individual and that of the community.
In a living community, the health and well-being of its individual members ultimately depends on the health of the community that creates and maintains the conditions essential to the existence of the individual. The basic concept is familiar to the members of traditional tribal communities.
It falls to those of our time to develop appropriate organizational mechanisms for managing relations between self-organizing local communities in ways that serve the needs of the local community while scaling to the global level to maintain the health and vitality of the whole. No amount of money will substitute for the health of Earth. The money serving, profit seeking global corporation has no evident role in a healthy living system.
The key appears to be, as Wilson spells out in his final chapter, to learn to organize on a global scale as a coherent system of self-organizing, self-governing local communities rich in personal interaction and mutual caring. Investment in community building at various levels is essential. The legendary wholly self-reliant individual popularized by Western culture is a fiction—and always has been.
We humans will survive and prosper only to the extent we begin to think and act in terms of living systems and in which people organize in integral partnership with the rest of nature as placed based cooperative communities in which humans and other organisms work together to maintain the conditions of their common existence. This is why a society organized around placeless global corporations concerned primarily or exclusively with maximizing short-term financial gain can never secure sustainable livelihoods for all of humanity.
Wilson’s work is an essential contribution to moving beyond the simplistic ideological fallacy that serves to legitimate an economic system now in a near terminal state of self-destruction.
