One compensation for being late with a review is the opportunity to correct for any distortion perceived in previous reviewers. I realised this might be necessary for The Origins of Virtue when I saw its author, Matt Ridley, shaking his head vigorously when someone at a meeting praised him for having written a Blairite manifesto.
"Virtue" is used to stand for all conduct that departs from unalloyed selfishness; and this may have encouraged such misreadings. Virtue is an inherently contestable concept. At my local underground station I am faced on most mornings with the following choices: giving money to a beggar; giving it to a busker; contributing to a bona fide charity.
The number of permutations is indefinitely large. There is the question of how much to give and the option of dividing it in different proportions among more than one of the alternatives. Nor can one rule out the more political approach of making instead a donation to some Old Labour group, which one might hope will make the disadvantaged less dependent on charity. Nor for that matter can one rule out the opposite extreme of donating it to a radical right group devoted to ending the "dependency culture."
Nevertheless Ridley is right not to squander space on such distinctions. For he has not tried to write a philosophical disquisition on virtue, individualism, collectivism and the like. He is engaged in the more useful task of trying to bring together evidence from the biological and social sciences bearing on the nature of Man as a social animal.
No sermonising on the supposed central message can be a substitute for reading the book in all its detail. This is no hardship. For it is engagingly written-starting with an account of the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin's escape from jail. It is not didactic or schematic; but the price for the readability is that the reader has to make up his own mind about what it all amounts to.
Ridley's central concern is to persuade the reader to step out of his human skin and look back on his species with all its foibles "and ask him how he would characterise the behaviour of this funny-looking large ape." As a start, "social: lives in large groups with complex inter-relations among individuals."
Although the author's fundamental allegiance is to evolutionary psychology, he is at home in many other fields such as basic economics, cultural anthropology and modern politics. Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers into foxes who see many small things and hedgehogs who see one big thing. Ridley is essentially a fox and his book is accordingly a series of related essays.
The reason for the stress on altruism-which is what Ridley most frequently means by virtue-arises from a revolution in biology in the 1960s. The new idea was that individuals do things, neither for their own good nor for their groups, but for the sake of their genes. Good here means providing the greatest chance of their making replicas of themselves. An instance is old age and death. These make no sense from the point of view of the survival of an individual; but it makes perfect sense for the genes to jettison a body after it has performed its reproductive function.
Selfish genes may thus pursue their reproductive ends through various kinds of unselfish behaviour on the part of individuals who are their carriers. There is kinship altruism when an organism reduces its own chances of reproduction for the sake of other organisms with which it has some genes in common. It would be rational, for example, to attach as much weight to the life of two brothers or sisters, or eight cousins, as to one's own life. There is also reciprocal altruism. Some degree of self-sacrifice for reciprocal advantage is programmed into the behaviour of many organisms on the basis that-if others do the same-the reproductive chances of its genes are maximised.
Reciprocal altruism among primitive hunter gatherers is largely confined to sharing meat, where it makes obvious sense. Otherwise a carcass exceeding immediate needs would be left to rot. At other times families would go hungry if unlucky in the chase. Sharing of prey makes sense as a risk reducing activity. But such mutual sharing is not necessary when it comes to plant food normally obtained by the gatherer. The human world, like that of other animals, is a complicated mixture of self-interest and altruism.
An altruistic disposition is obviously helpful in many activities where there are spillovers (what economists call externalities). If people avoid leaving litter, if companies avoid dumping lead and governments take account of the drift of polluted air into other countries the world will become a better place in which to live and fewer resources need be devoted to politics, rule making, and litigation.
There are however many other influences on human co-operation discussed by Ridley and overlooked by reviewers of communitarian disposition. For instance, he puts great emphasis on specialisation, division of labour and trade. "There is simply no other animal that exploits the law of comparative advantage between groups. Within groups the division of labour is beautifully exploited by the ant, the mole rats and the huia birds. But not between groups." Here the driving force is avowedly self-interest; and Ridley kindly cites my caution that self-interest need not mean callousness or spite or even selfishness in the narrow sense.
Ridley's ultimate view of human -as well as other animal-nature is far from benign. People in the last analysis are "calculating machines intricately designed to find co-operative strategies only when they assist enlightened self-interest."
In the animal kingdom crimes such as murder, rape, cannibalism, infanticide, theft, torture and genocide are almost ways of life. Ground squirrels eat baby ground squirrels; mallard drakes drown ducks during gang rape. Parasitic wasps eat their victims alive from the inside.
The author is careful to avoid "the trap of pretending that our dim and misty understanding of the human social instincts can be instantly translated into a political philosophy." His tentative conclusion that we should build on the social trustworthy and co-operative aspects of human nature is mild enough. But his interpretation favours good clean money over bad dirty power. For example he points out the reason why the north and south of Italy has diverged is that while the south had had strong monarchies and godfathers, the north has had strong merchant communities.
He believes that social contracts between equals, and generalised reciprocity between individuals and groups are the most vital of human achievements. But unlike others of egalitarian instincts he is suspicious of government. "We are not so nasty that we need to be tamed by intrusive government, nor so nice that too much government does not bring out the worst in us, both as its employees and its clients."
The author's ideal is devolution to closely knit local communities. He is here reminiscent of Simon Jenkins's book Accountable to None. But unlike Jenkins he is too realistic to place much hope on reviving our present kinds of local government. He lives near the once great city of Newcastle which has been transformed from a hive of enterprise and local pride, to government by an impersonal series of agencies staffed by rotating officials whose main job is to secure grants from London. The city is now notorious for shattered neighbourhoods where violence and robbery are so commonplace that enterprise is impossible.
I am more sceptical than either Ridley or Jenkins about the value of everything that is small and local. Human beings have been for much the greater part of their existence members of hunter gatherer bands of 150 or so. Nevertheless life in such communities must have been stifling for the nonconformist or anyone whose face did not fit.
In any case Ridley makes an all-important qualification on the value of reciprocal altruism, as normally practised. This is that altruism is confined to group members. "Like chimps, we are xenophobic." All human preliterate societies and all modern ones as well, need to have an enemy, a concept of them and us.
"Lethal inter-group violence is probably a characteristic we share with chimpanzees. But we have brought something special to it; weapons." The groups do not need to differ in the territory they occupy, their ethnic character or their religion. In Constantinople during the Byzantine empire chariots were divided into blue and green, initially to make the teams in races more easily distinguishable. But soon the whole city was divided into blue and green factions which led to the massacre by greens of 3,000 blues. Later in the Nika riots most of the city was burnt, including Santa Sophia. Peace was restored when the notorious empress Theodora persuaded the blues to storm the hippodrome.
Football hooliganism, or the senseless strife of Serbs and Muslims is of the same nature. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate. "These are the consequences of tribal thinking which itself is the consequence of our evolutionary heritage as coalition building, troop living apes." The hatred of non-members has survived the disappearance of tribal society into the inter-related world of today.
Religions have originated in beleaguered cults in tribally divided violent societies. Genocide was a central part of God's instructions in the Old Testament, as when Joshua killed 12,000 heathens in one day and gave thanks to the Lord afterwards. In most cultures the injunction against killing other human beings refers to members of one's own tribe.
It was the damage done by the excesses of group loyalty which Bertrand Russell had in mind when he said that there were a great many circumstances in which people fall below enlightened self-interest rather than rise above it. And among them were most of the occasions in which they were convinced they were acting from idealistic motives.
The relationship of groups to the modern global society linking all human beings is the big unsolved problem. Neither the author nor the reviewer has a prescription for tackling this "groupishness" which could yet destroy the species. It has often been said that the human race could be united by a threat from another planet-a facetious thought experiment from which no one has yet been able to frame constructive proposals.
The origins of virtue
Matt Ridley
Viking 1996, ?20
