Altruism v. charity

It’s the end of the holiday season, but the memories are fresh in our minds.  Since Christmas is supposed to be a season of giving, let’s use those memories to respond to a request that I defend the assertion that “Nature selects against purely altruistic behavior”.  Jump in the car of your imagination, crank ‘er up, and drive with me to the local Wal-Mart parking lot of two weeks ago…

You park the car near the back of the lot and get out into the cold wintry air.  It’s gently snowing and there is a brisk wind coming in from the north and west.  You can see your breath, snow is crunching under your boots, and you begin walking towards the door, dodging the occasional slushy puddle from where some fellow sat in the truck, waiting for his wife rather than going in, and the truck melted the snow.  When you get closer to the door, someone goes to plaid as they back their car out of their parking spot at ludicrous speed, without looking, forcing you to come to an abrupt halt.  As the sounds of your cursing cease to echo off the front of the rock monstrosity that is a Wal-Mart, a ringing is heard, along with a boisterous “Ho Ho Ho”.

Glancing up between your scarf and your sock hat, you spy jolly ol’ St. Nick standing by the door, ringing a hand bell.  Out in front of him is a little plastic well, maybe a bucket, with an odd assortment of loose change and a handfull of bills down at the bottom.  On the well, a sign describing the name of some charity which is humbly asking for your donation to help others during the holidays.  You go by the Santa, into the store and do your shopping, more concerned with the welcome blast of heat than you are the Santa’s bucket.

After you finish shopping and paying for your goods, you’re pushing your cart out the door, and as you roll by the Santa, freezing his naughty bits off standing out in the cold ringing that bell, you drop the change the cashier just handed you into his bucket, and he nods, telling you “Thank you”, and giving you a good curdling with his halitosis as a gift for your generosity.

Isn’t altruism wonderful?

<hideous screeching sound of a needle being dragged off a playing record>

Hold up.

That’s not altruism.

al·tru·ism

Zoology Instinctive cooperative behavior that is detrimental to the individual but contributes to the survival of the species.

Yahoo ^[1]

The qualification for altruism is that an effect which is “detrimental to the individual” occurs as a result of an action.  You are in no way harmed by tossing some change at a drunk begging for money.  Not in this day and age.

Modern civilization has done an awful lot for humanity.  The division of labor is a powerful thing, and it has effectively removed all the challenges of living for the average American.  Up until essentially the last 100 – 150 years, the amount of work required for you to grow your own food, find your own water, and provide for your own shelter and clothing took up 100% of your time, and even then, it wasn’t always enough.  Back then, giving of yourself might actually be the difference between the receiving stranger getting through the week, and your kids getting through the winter, a situation which really is a no-brainer for most of humanity, isn’t it?

I’m here to tell you, humans aren’t altruistic when it’s life and death.  You never see anyone giving so much to charity that they and their kids are kicked out of their homes, or go hungry for weeks on end, now do you?  That’s what altruism really is, y’all.  That’s why the Progressives need the government to force us to be altruistic at the end of a gun barrel.  That’s why religions try to bribe us to be altruistic by promising us intangible rewards we can’t get until after we die.  We have to be bribed or forced to commit altruistic acts, because they harm us, as individuals.  There is nothing threatening your existence if you part ways with some pocket change.

As a proof of this, examine the reaction of the species when someone who is truly altruistic happens to live.  Mother Teresa was the only person I can recall who was even somewhat altruistic during the last century, and we revered her because she was so uncommon.  As popular as she was, she certainly didn’t inspire many millions of others to follow her example, now did she?  And how did nature reward her behavior, the ceaseless, selfless drive to which she dedicated her life?  She didn’t have any kids, she was too dedicated to taking care of other people’s children to have any time for her own genetic material…

Guess that genetic line got cut off?  From an evolutionary standpoint, Mother Teresea was an unsuccessful attempt.

Thus we come to the difference between altruism and charity: Charity is a value-for-value exchange.  You give the hungry bum a couple of dollars, you get happy feelings in return. Your life is in no way threatened or harmed, thus, we’re not dealing with an altruistic behavior.  The high and mighty feeling some people apparently get when giving to a charity is what they’re paying the money for. 

M. Simon hit this on the head in my post on Tiger Woods (here ^[2]).  Once the government begins to force your giving, you cease to have claim to any feelings of moral goodness, and the act ceases to be charity.  It becomes robbery.  We can examine the proof of it.

In reality, altruism is a horrible thing, and only someone with a really sick paradigm would revel in it.  Let’s take a look at something I discovered when I was researching this post.  It’s from the Wikipedia article ^[3] for altruism, specifically the section being offered up as proof that altruism occurs in nature, in the face of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution:

An interesting example of altruism is found in the cellular slime moulds, such as Dictyostelium mucoroides. These protists live as individual amoebae until starved, at which point they aggregate and form a multicellular fruiting body in which some cells sacrifice themselves to promote the survival of other cells in the fruiting body.

Oh, the beauty of altruism, some small segment of the population selflessly dying so that their brother and sister slime molds may live on!  Hogwash.  You know what I see when I read that?  I see this:

The slime molds were starving.  As they cast about for a solution to their starvation, they eyed some of their less fit, somewhat plump brethren.  Giving in to their desire for life, the great mass of slime molds banded together, rose up, and murdered their less fortunate brethren so that they may continue to live on their remains.

See?  One researcher can look at that and see “altruism”, I look at it and see “democracy” and “a mob killing and looting”.  I guess it’s all in semantics, eh?

You know what?  We should celebrate the fate of the of the Donner Party!  That’s slime-mold-like altruism at work!  Granted, the people were already dead, but we need to put aside those feelings of revulsion at the act, and give thanks for the dearly departed-then desecrated who made life possible for the rest of the people!  What a noble thing.

Or we should rejoice every time we watch the nature channel and see the old, the young, the lame, and the sick wildebeests “sacrifice” themselves “for the good of the herd”, not cry and get upset by thinking of it as “The predators killed the young, the old, and the sick with no complaint from the rest of the herd”.  It’s beautiful altruism at work…

No, nature does most certainly select against altruistic behavior, as it does any behavior which doesn’t increase the chances of you passing on your genetic material.  Humanity is not constantly engaged in activities which threatens the existence of the actors, no on is committing real acts of altruism, no one is giving so much that their life is being threatened without any reward for themselves.  Trying to compare the charity of giving some money out of your pocket to altruism is like trying to compare giving someone a paper cut on their pinky to first degree murder, not even in the same ball park, from a moral nor an evolutionary standpoint.

P.S.  M. Simon:

If you examine the paragraphs in my Tiger Woods post on the theory of natural selection being the founding for morality, you’ll see that I was satisfying Mr. Hamilton’s rule when I mentioned that family was a secondary genetic priority.  Your family has enough of your genetic material to satisfy the natural impulse to protect your genetic material, thus the reason you look after your family is because you are getting some form of natural reward from it.  That’s not altruism.