ON HUMAN NATURE by Edward O. Wilson

Author:Edward O. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-10-31T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7. Altruism

“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” With that chilling dictum the third-century theologian Tertullian confessed the fundamental flaw of human altruism, an intimation that the purpose of sacrifice is to raise one human group over another. Generosity without hope of reciprocation is the rarest and most cherished of human behaviors, subtle and difficult to define, distributed in a highly selective pattern, surrounded by ritual and circumstance, and honored by medallions and emotional orations. We sanctify true altruism in order to reward it and thus to make it less than true, and by that means to promote its recurrence in others. Human altruism, in short, is riddled to its foundations with the expected mammalian ambivalence.

As mammals would be and ants would not, we are fascinated by the extreme forms of self-sacrifice. In the First and Second World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, a large percentage of Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to men who threw themselves on top of grenades to shield comrades, aided the rescue of others from battle sites at the cost of certain death to themselves, or made other extraordinary decisions that led to the same fatal end. Such altruistic suicide is the ultimate act of courage and emphatically deserves the country’s highest honor. But it is still a great puzzle. What could possibly go on in the minds of these men in the moment of desperation? “Personal vanity and pride are always important factors in situations of this kind,” James Jones wrote in WWII,

and the sheer excitement of battle can often lead a man to death willingly, where without it he might have balked. But in the absolute, ultimate end, when your final extinction is right there only a few yards farther on staring back at you, there may be a sort of penultimate national, and social, and even racial, masochism—a sort of hotly joyous, almost-sexual enjoyment and acceptance—which keeps you going the last few steps. The ultimate luxury of just not giving a damn any more.

The annihilating mixture of reason and passion, which has been described often in first-hand accounts of the battlefield, is only the extreme phenomenon that lies beyond the innumerable smaller impulses of courage and generosity that bind societies together. One is tempted to leave the matter there, to accept the purest elements of altruism as simply the better side of human nature. Perhaps, to put the best possible construction on the matter, conscious altruism is a transcendental quality that distinguishes human beings from animals. But scientists are not accustomed to declaring any phenomenon off limits, and it is precisely through the deeper analysis of altruism that sociobiology seems best prepared at this time to make a novel contribution.

I doubt if any higher animal, such as an eagle or a lion, has ever deserved a Congressional Medal of Honor by the ennobling criteria used in our society. Yet minor altruism does occur frequently, in forms instantly understandable in human terms, and is bestowed not just on offspring but on other members of the species as well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.