Selfish Genes and Better Angels
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part Four
There’s an old story about a sage sitting on the bank of the Ganges. In the water he sees a scorpion drowning, so he reaches in and scoops it out, and is promptly stung. A few moments later the scorpion is drowning again; again he lifts it out; again he’s stung. This goes on long enough that a bemused onlooker finally asks why he keeps saving a creature that keeps hurting him. The sage replies: it is the nature of the scorpion to sting, and the nature of the person to save.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought that this, the ability to see yourself in another, was the real engine of selfless service. Separateness, he argued, is an illusion produced by our perception of time and space, and under the right conditions that illusion falls away. He believed his “true being actually exists in every living creature as truly and immediately as it is known to my consciousness only in myself.” The formula for this realisation, borrowed from the Upanishads, is tat tvam asi, thou art that, and Schopenhauer called it the ground on which all genuine, unselfish virtue rests. (This German philosopher was riding a wave of European fascination with that literature at the time. The things people did before Netflix.)
Which brings us to compassion, a word that literally means “to suffer together.” Sounds like a laugh a minute. Unlike empathy, which lets us see another’s perspective, and altruism, which is the selfless act that compassion tends to prompt, compassion itself is the baseline feeling that gives us the positive inclination to help. Frederick Buechner described it as “sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live in somebody else’s skin… the knowledge that there can never be peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy for you too.” Dacher Keltner at Berkeley argues compassion is an instinct we should all have automatically, and Harvard’s David Rand has shown that helping is often our first response, in adults and children alike.
So if we’re wired to help, what’s stopping us from reorganising our lives in the name of the planet?
Part of the answer is that our motives are a good deal murkier than we’d like. Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, argued that the noble-looking emotions (compassion, love, altruism) are really selfish acts in disguise, an expression of the gene’s “law of universal ruthless selfishness.”¹ Abraham Maslow, more generously, thought our deepest driver was dissatisfaction: his hierarchy of needs runs from hunger and safety up through belonging to the summit, self-actualisation: the realisation of our innate potential. Maslow believed self-actualising people were the future of the world, the best leaders and helpers, precisely because of the perspective they’d earned.
And then there’s the small matter of what information we even let ourselves receive. Intellectually, we all love to be right. (Don’t disagree with me; I know that’s correct.) The idea that keeps surfacing here is confirmation bias, and the internet has turned it into an epidemic. I’m old enough to remember when we got our news from a fixed handful of sources; now everyone is a publisher and an expert, and we can hand-pick the outlets that only ever tell us we were right all along. Professor Dan Kahan argues that people take their information from those they trust and already agree with, which, he notes, is roughly why animal videos outperform climate coverage online. I’m not judging; I’ve been known to walk into some rarefied gathering and open with “who’s seen Love Island?” We all enjoy aspirational viewing.
The darker end of this is conspiracy theory, which I’m genuinely intrigued by: it’s the creative potential of the human mind at full tilt. It tends to serve as a coping strategy for an underlying anxiety, offering a comforting sense of superiority, separation and immobility, and appealing to our old appetite for tribalism. Edward Snowden makes the sharp point that “the truest conspiracies are met with the least opposition”: that real, working conspiracies like mass surveillance or the debt industry hide in plain sight, overshadowed by the sexier fictional ones. Which is partly how someone can look at the climate news and conclude it’s all a scheme by some carbon-loving extraterrestrial to make the Earth more habitable for them.
Ken Wilber adds one more twist: sometimes our motives are shaped by our level of consciousness itself. He uses the example of students protesting a war: noble from the outside, but look closer and you’ll find two quite different protests happening at once, one moved by compassion and one by an internal sense of superiority hunting for something to be angry at. Wilber even has a name for the way narcissism can dress itself up as spirituality, “Boomeritis,” because a person can arrive at anything, Buddhism included, from a self-centred standpoint.
So our motives are tangled: part instinct, part gene, part ego, part the stories we’ve chosen to believe. Which raises the question we are circling: if we changed the way we see reality, could we actually change what we value?
I think we can. And I think it starts, awkwardly, by going inward.
Notes
“Selfish gene” is a metaphor, and a famously misread one. Dawkins wasn’t claiming that people are selfish, or that genes have intentions. His point was that natural selection acts at the level of the gene, and that behaviours persist if they help copies of that gene survive. The phrase gets wheeled out to justify human selfishness far more often than Dawkins would allow. I use it here for the argument it makes about hidden motives, not as proof that we’re all secretly awful.