The pseudo-Darwinist conspiracySociety 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.