On Altruism

Reading Lewis Thomas's The Medusa and the Snail and he provides some wonderfully quirky symbiotic relationships to consider when thinking about how we, as a society, tend to think in terms of 'social darwinistic' perspectives, honoring 'individuality' and, naturally, disdaining 'socialism'--or worse, as Ayn Rand might opine, 'altruism'.

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us, they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls....Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it.

As Thomas notes, language is the supreme social endeavour. We use it as ants use touch and smell. We are bound by the commonality of language and its very use predicates against separation and isolation. To suggest, via the mechanisms of language ,that we somehow not depend on each other, that we remain solitary, is, as Lewis notes, something that really can't be done with a straight face.

Libertarians take note. We are-- by nature-- related, symbiotic and, further, altruistic. In fact, as Thomas suggests, maybe altruism is our most basic instinct? Maybe it was that cutting against the grain of selfishness that led to human civilization as we know it. And maybe, the flipside is also true. When we jettison 'love' or 'altruism', in favor of isolation and meager 'personal' responsibility, we begin that slow devolving step back down toward the lonely ameoba and the insanely isolated land once ruled by thimble brained dinosaurs.

My suspicion is that most of biology--and all of the ants--laugh at the libertarian's serious contenance set so earnestly in trying to convince everyone else that only the invdividual's responsibility to himself matters. If so, why bother to say anything? Why, indeed, even bother to communicate if it gains you nothing in an immediate fashion? And why use that most socialistic and socially dependent instrument imaginable--language--to communicate it?