The pseudo-Darwinist conspiracy

Society would collapse if it weren’t for the uniquely human impulse to cooperate and
collaborate. So why, asks Mary Midgley, do we persist in believing that competition is the
only way forward?

The term Darwinism has, in recent times, come to suggest that savage, unbridled competition is
the ruling principle of life in nature and must therefore rule in human society, too. Darwin’s views
have, as neurobiology professor Steven Rose remarks, been seen as “justifying imperialism,
racism, capitalism and patriarchy”. Today, he adds, “journalists refer to boardroom struggles
and takeover battles for companies as Darwinian”.

All this is actually the opposite of what Darwin wrote when he discussed human and animal
societies in The Descent of Man. There, he traced the origins of sociability in animals and
pointed out how many kinds of creature show a direct concern for one another. He showed how,
as we go up the evolutionary scale and the creatures’ lives become more complex, mutual
concern increases and cooperation becomes as noticeable as competition. In humans, the
development of intelligence has deepened these social tendencies, making us more aware of
one another’s feelings than are most other species. This has also made us notice conflicts
between our various motivations towards others – conflicts that distress us so much that we are
constantly inventing ethical systems to try to sort them out. That human need for morality is,
Darwin said, a central characteristic of the species.

This idea is not, of course, just a sentimental fancy.

Darwin is looking at human life factually, “from the point
of view of natural history” – in fact, as an ethnologist –
and he is struck by this remarkable capacity for
cooperation. He does not downplay the brutal and
selfish side of human lifebut, as he says, even the most
primitive human societies feel the force of at least
some standards that are meant to impose order on
their conduct. People are always aware of one another
as, in some sense, their fellows. A society that lost this sense of fellowship could not remain in
business at all. Accordingly, says Darwin, Hobbes’ idea that all human action springs from
selfish calculation of one’s own individual interest is not realistic. Often, we do not calculate at
all; often, too, we are self-destructive. But just as often, we want to collaborate with others and
to help them. And this is perfectly consistent with what goes on throughout the rest of nature.

As Brian Goodwin remarks in Nature's Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture: “There is as
much cooperation in biology as there is competition. Mutualism and symbiosis – organisms
living together in states of mutual dependency, such as lichens that combine a fungus with an
alga in happy harmony, or the bacteria in our guts, from which we benefit as well as they – are
an equally universal feature of the biological realm. Why not argue that ‘cooperation’ is the great
source of innovation in evolution, as in the enormous step, aeons ago, of producing a eukaryotic
cell... by the cooperative union of two or three prokaryotes?”

Wilful misunderstanding

Why, then, have Darwin’s supposed followers misunderstood his views in this way? It must be
because evolutionary theory has been invaded during the past half-century by something that is
not really relevant to it at all, namely psychological egoism. This is the belief that self-interest is
the only possible motive for human action, or, as Thomas Hobbes put it, that “of the voluntary
acts of every man, the object is some good to himself”. Hobbes shouted this principle in
deathless prose as a reaction against the religious wars of his day, wars in which kings who
claimed a divine right called on people to die for them in their arbitrary squabbles as a sacrifice
for the supposed good of God and their country. This, said Hobbes, simply doesn’t make sense.
You can’t pursue your own advantage once you’re dead.

Hobbes therefore spearheaded a strong reaction against the feudal vision, which showed
people as organic parts divinely situated in a natural system. He and his followers paved the
way for a kind of social atomism, a notion of individuals as essentially separate – so separate, in
fact, that nothing would ever connect them except their own individual choice. (Think Nietzsche,
think R D Laing.) These two opposite visions have continued to fascinate people in our culture.
Both are undoubtedly natural human attitudes. Yet both are so extreme – so hard to incorporate
into actual institutions – that we cannot easily work out how to map their relation. We have
tended, therefore, to give up even trying to relate them and have instead oscillated between
them in a rather uncontrolled manner. We have repeatedly reacted against the more glaring
defects of whichever ideal was fashionable by invoking its opposite in an effort to correct it. And
during the past half-century, this oscillation has been going on in a most interesting way.

In Britain, during the Second World War, public spirit was strong. As always happens during
wars, people were caught up in a sense of community, a conviction that they were sharing in a
crucial enterprise. During the war, too, there was much serious speculation about the public
good – about what needed to be done afterwards, not just to avert more wars but also to reform
society altogether. When peace came, this resulted in efforts to support the welfare state, such
as the formation of the National Health Service.

For a while, this fervour persisted, but it gradually began to flag. Rationing, which had been
accepted, if not welcomed, in wartime, came increasingly to be resented as an imposition, an
intrusion into our lives. Restrictions of all kinds, such as those on foreign travel, began to grate.
Neoliberal economists, chanting the glorious uses of the market, became hugely persuasive.
Ex-Marxists converted ecstatically to monetarism. Thus the popularity of the post-war Labour
governments, which had ridden in on the original flux
of public spirit, began to falter, and they were eventually turned out by the Conservatives.

Born selfish?

It was in this climate that the word ‘selfish’ was suddenly introduced as a key term in
discussions of evolution. In two bestselling books – E O Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) and
Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976) – it appeared as the name for a trait that infallibly
makes organisms successful in natural selection. Officially, both writers claimed that the sense
in which they were using the word had nothing to do with human motives. It was, they said, just
a metaphor – a (perhaps rather awkward) term for the tendency to increase one’s genetic
representation in future generations. Both writers, however, used the word freely and vigorously
in its ordinary everyday sense to describe human motivation. Wilson, in fact, argued the
psychological-egoist position about humans at some length, concluding (like Hobbes) that
“compassion is selective and often self-serving... it conforms to the best interests of self, family
and allies of the moment".

Dawkins, though he spent less time on the point, was just as convinced about it, stating flatly
that “we are born selfish”. It is true that most of his discussion is about the selfishness of genes
rather than of people: “The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.” Nevertheless, he described
this in exciting, anthropomorphic terms: “Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have
survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world.” As a result, his
readers could not fail to take the whole story as a fable, a mirror held up to human life, rather
than merely as the quite dull statement that one gene gradually displaces another in evolution.
The disciples who followed this lead assumed without reservation that ordinary, literal
selfishness had been shown to be the ruling force in human life.

At a more academic level, too, egoism became the default explanation to be given for every sort
of behaviour. Scholars began to puzzle about ‘the possibility of altruism’ as if they hadn’t seen
mild altruism going on all round them every day of their lives. As Bishop Butler pointed out in
protest against Hobbes, humans aren’t actually full-time rational calculators. We do what we
want and sometimes – even if rarely – what we want is to be nice to other people.

With the popularity of Dawkins and Wilson on the rise, however, this fact of life seemed largely
to have been forgotten. Psychological egoism, which had become sharply discredited since
Hobbes’ day, began to look respectable again. It appeared to have been justified by the theory
of evolution, exactly as it had for a time in the 19th century. Sociobiological thinkers hotly denied
that they were actually reviving the social Darwinism of prophets such as Herbert Spencer, who
had used the idea of natural selection to justify odious forms of political exploitation. It is true
that Dawkins and Wilson did not draw immediate political conclusions, although some of their
followers did.

The trouble is, however, that if you treat self-interest as the only possible human motive, rather
than as just one aspect of life among others, you unavoidably justify policies that would make
human society not just nasty but also unworkable. Social life depends on cooperation,
compromise and sociability. Since it has run in this way for many ages – however
unsatisfactorily – it is not realistic to suggest that motivations for this do not exist.

Nor – as Darwin pointed out – will it do to suggest that what keeps this process going is actually
only calculating self-interest. Many creatures who certainly do not have the intelligence to
calculate their future interest show cooperation and sociability. A meerkat that leaps up on a
bush to act as sentinel hasn’t worked out that warding off predators will be the best way to
increase his later reproductive representation. He just feels like doing it because he knows that
it is needed.

Adequate natural motives for outgoing, friendly behaviour must, then, exist, both in humans and
in other species that regularly show this kind of behaviour. This fact was particularly obvious to
Darwin because of his deep interest in other social animals. In any case, the point is surely such
a clear one that it is reasonable to wonder why so many biologists have recently failed to see it.

The main reason for this, I would suggest, has been the temper of the age, in which a wave of
unrealistic individualism, centred on the myth of the markets, made it seem as if there were
indeed no such thing as society. Misreading Adam Smith, people supposed for a time that a
mass of unrestricted individual choices would now magically coalesce into success and
profitability for all. It was natural, too, to project this imaginative pattern on to the vast, dark field
of evolution, which had always served as a kind of magic-lantern screen for the display of
contemporary dreams.

A reductive interpretation

Besides this mood of the times, however, there are two other considerations that recommend
these egoistic explanations. One is the fear of humbug, the unwillingness to appear simple-
minded, which often makes people accept cynical accounts of motive rather than risk being
laughed at for being naïve. The other, which is more interesting, is the desire to make the
workings of natural selection appear simple by reduction.

Darwin had thought that there could be selection between groups as well as between
individuals, and that this explained how sociability had developed. E O Wilson, who has quite
ceased to preach sociobiology, finds this idea extremely interesting and is now developing it. In
the 1970s, however, the only allowable view was that real competition took place only between
genes, which were the ultimate individuals. This transferred the drama to the molecular level,
where exciting developments about DNA were taking place, and it seemed to offer the same
kind of simplification that 17th-century physicists had achieved by atomism, when they reduced
matter to its ultimate solid particles.

The imaginative gain here is obvious, but, unfortunately, so is the price. Physicists have, of
course, long stopped relying on atomism. They no longer look for ultimate particles, but instead
deal in forces and fields, in relations and interactions at many different levels. As for the genes,
their radical independence was never a reality. They actually work as integral parts of their
genome, with which they must unfailingly cooperate.

As Denis Noble points out in The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes, the genome itself is only
part of the cell, which is part of the organism and so on. Dawkins handsomely recognised this
point on the 25th anniversary of his book’s publication when he explained that he now
considered its title somewhat misleading. It should, he said, really have been called The
Cooperative Gene. This is fine but, by then, the book’s message had already been delivered.
The supremacy of selfishness in human life was already being widely treated as a scientifically
established fact. To get past that message now, we shall need to do some further thinking.