Steering Toward the Omega Point: 7. Altruism’s Path and the Rebirth of Spirituality

David Sloan Wilson’s career has been a gift to both biology and spirituality. In biology, his track record has been clear: demonstrating that cooperation on a group-selection level is as crucial a determining factor – if not more so – than competition as a driver in human evolution.

Unpacking this, Wilson’s body of work shows how groups of people are motivated to make decisions that benefit the group, with groups making decisions benefitting the collective being more resilient and generative than groups where it’s everyone for themselves – precisely the social Darwinist “survival of the fittest” model that is often the publicly-held caricature of evolution’s meaning and import in our society.

Religious and spiritual leaders have long held an interest in Wilson’s work, given the seeming resonance between The Golden Rule so many faith-paths hold as ideal and his observation of group-beneficial behavior. As a result, the science-and-religion Templeton Foundation has commissioned Wilson to continue work initiated under their auspices by theologians Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton a decade ago. The results of this latest foray into the world of evolution, altruism, and spirituality are published in Wilson’s latest book, Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others.

The questions seem straightforward enough:

• What is altruism?
• Is altruism alone enough to be a driver to human and ecological flourishing?
• Do our historic religions provide a reliable basis for altruism at the level of ideals and behavior?

This brief interaction is no replacement for reading Wilson’s concise book, but the answers in short seem to be:

• “Intentional action intended ultimately for the welfare of others that entails at least the possibility of either no benefit or loss to the actor.”⁸
• Almost, but not quite.
• No.

The above definition was created by religious scholar William Scott Green as part of the Neuser-Chilton study, echoing the ideals of the coiner of the term altruism, French educational philosopher Augustus Comte in 1851.

Humans, it seems, have adapted to function well in group-seeking and group-promoting behavior where the circle of common-good empathy expands to the boundaries of the group – but no further. Giving a nod to developmental stage-models like those of Don Beck (in Spiral Dynamics) or Jeremy Rifkin (as outlined in The Empathic Civilization), the human story can be seen as one where we have, slowly but surely, expanded our circles of empathy and belonging from individual to family to tribe to nation to religion. Growing, trans-national, Axial Age religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and later Islam) represented a positive leap forward in empathetic group-selection on-behalf-of action as they created an “Us” that was ever-more-expansive, swelling beyond the emerging nationalistic consciousness that preceded them.

Thus Wilson says, “Most enduring religions promote altruism expressed among members of the religious community, defined in terms of action. In other words, religions cause people to behave for the good of the group and to avoid self-serving behaviors at the expense of other members of their group.”⁹

But the difficulty in naming this pure altruism according to Green’s definition, Wilson points out, is that there’s always an “Us” that is self-interestedly served and a “Them” that’s excluded. The purportedly altruistic actions that religion inspires are always beneficial to the in-group. Being a realist, Wilson accepts this as a pragmatic given and seeks to solidify and expand in-group belonging and group-level pro-social decision-making. That said, he longs for an altruism that can be inspired at the level of thoughts and feelings, and on behalf of all. If religion can facilitate this, Wilson would be all for it. But if it can’t? What next?

Altruism beyond Religion
Presence International is a 40-year-old nonprofit that seeks to tell a better sacred Story than those articulated by religion, a Story full of love and motivational power that aids the common good of our planet and humanity. We work with what is commonly named the “Judeo-Christian” Scriptures, or the Bible – arguably one of the most potent source-texts of Western culture and civilization, for good and ill.

When we read this Story, we certainly see elements within it that can attach itself to the dominant religious consciousness present at the time it was written. For instance, Jesus’ observation “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”¹⁰ is an observation borne out of his hearers’ stage of empathetic development: Laying down one’s life for friends was the upper-threshold of self-sacrifice they could consider.

We also see that Jesus encouraged them to go a step beyond this, though, in teaching “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? …Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

This idea – of practicing indiscriminate benevolence toward those deemed in the community and out, the well-behaved and ill-behaved – was as revolutionary then as it is now. And in the Narrative, Jesus embodies this in a sacrificial death on-behalf-of humanity. In the collective memory of this action, it isn’t seen as beneficial to Jesus, himself:

“Let what was seen in Christ Jesus be seen also in you –
Though his state was that of God,
yet he did not claim equality with God
something he should cling to.
Rather, he emptied himself,
and assuming the state of a slave,
he was born in human likeness.
He being known as one of us,
Humbled himself obedient unto death
Even death on a cross.”¹¹

While beliefs about the meaning of Jesus’ death differ among those claiming him as their inspiration, early in the Narrative we see a general understanding that his death was used by God as a move toward relationship and reconciliation between divinity and humanity for the common good, even “while we were God’s enemies.”¹² It was enemy-love practiced on a cosmic level.

Now: the question is: Have those seeking to follow the way of Jesus embodied this sacrificial intent and action for the Out-group – for enemies? We accept Neusner, Chilton, and Wilson’s analysis that all too often, religion has not. But if altruism is the evolutionary pull that ultimately decides which groups survive, we see the rise of the religiously unaffiliated – sometimes called the spiritual-but-not-religious or The Nones – to be prophetic, and to be expected given our reading of this sacred Story as one which includes religion but ultimately points beyond it toward humanity’s future.

The seeds of this paradigm shift from religious in-grouping to ubiquitous spirituality itself can be found all the way back in the first century C.E., in this same Narrative. What Jesus initiated, his followers saw themselves as carrying out as his very embodiment – the “Body of Christ.” They lived and loved, dined and died, with an understanding of doing so “on behalf of” not only themselves, but all humanity. They saw themselves as fulfilling this function, not for all time, but within a relatively-limited apocalyptic time-frame. Apocalypse means revealing, and the picture they saw being revealed was an inclusive one:

“Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the first fruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death… When [the Father] has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.”¹³

For reasons too extensive to fully engage in this brief engagement, we see the Narrative’s built-in eschatological timeframe to be that of a single generation, as its hearers understood them –40 years.¹⁴ This early “Body of Christ” understood their group-beneficial benevolent behavior to have a wider frame of reference –being a blessing to all humanity and revealing a Spirit that transcends any one narrative, save that of universal human belonging.

Does Altruism Exist? calls us to work together across multiple disciplines – scientific, political, entrepreneurial, and social – to discover an on-the-ground empathy greater than our fears. We believe that spirituality is the connective story and presence that energizes all of these endeavors. In the momentum of evolutionary growth, religion is seen as a necessary, stage-appropriate development that once moved us forward, but is now holding us back. As more of us wake up to the self-transcending elements in our own sacred stories, we at Presence want to affirm our capacities for greater love, justice, benevolence and true altruism, on behalf of the sacred connections of the Divine, ourselves, each other and our planet.

References

[8] Wilson, David Sloan. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. (New Haven, 2015) Pg. 82.

[9] Ibid, pg. 79.

[10] John 15:13, New International Version.

[11] Philippians 2:5-8, Christian Community Bible translation from the Philippines, as cited in Cynthia Bourgeault‘s Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.

[12] Romans 5:10, New International Version.

[13] I Corinthians 15:20-28, New International Version.

[14] For an in-depth biblical, theological, and historical exploration of a limited time-frame apocalyptic frame, see Max King’s The Spirit of Prophecy (1971, 2003), or this series on the Presence blog: http://www.presence.tv/category/eschatology-101‍

[15] Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything, 2nd edition. p. 96–109