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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ANALYSIS
SCRATCH MY BACK
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Andrew Dilnot
Producer: Nick Booth
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast Date: 23.11.00
Repeat Date: 26.11.00
Tape Number: TLN045/00VT1047
Duration:
Taking part in order of appearance:
Kristen Renwick Monroe
Professor of Political Science, University of California in Irvine, author
of The Heart of Altruism
Professor Gary Becker
Nobel laureate and Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
Dr Janet Radcliffe Richards
Philosopher, Reader in Bio Ethics, University College London and author of
“Human Nature after Darwin”
Professor Richard Dawkins
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford
University and author of “The Selfish Gene”
Ian Linden
Director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations
Margaret Harris
Professor of Voluntary Organisation, Aston Business School
DILNOT : Scratch your back ? – well if you scratch mine. That’s
as near as we get to altruism these days, isn’t it? We all know that
altruism is dead– the triumph of economics and biology has explained
that only by self-interest can we feed ourselves, and through self-interest
have we evolved. So it’s no surprise we’re sometimes embarrassed
if we’re caught indulging in a quick bit of kindness on the side. But
there’s still a lot of it around, as American Political scientist Kristen
Renwick Monroe found after interviewing hundreds of people.
RENWICK MONROE : There is a woman I interviewed who was working for
a camp for abused children - children who’d been physically and emotionally
abused and she was telling a story about working with a little girl who she
worked with for months and the little girl would never smile, she just would
kind of sit there very impassively and then one day Isabel said she gave
me this smile and she said I just felt so wonderful. This was what it was
all about and I was so happy that I’d been able to establish some kind
of a bond with her. So I asked her, I go to a lot of conferences with economists
and I’ll tell them about this woman who says how good she felt at doing
something and the economist will say, well sure, that’s why she’s
doing it - she’s buying that pleasure for herself through her altruistic
deeds. Then she cut me off and said, oh those people are very cynical.
BECKER : One economist once said that what economist’s economise
on is love. It would be hard to organise a modern economy on the base of
altruism - it’s there but it’s not the dominant form of behaviour
that motivates people in their market transactions.
DILNOT : Professor Gary Becker a Nobel prize-winning economist from
the University of Chicago, known for his pioneering work explaining almost
everything in economic terms. And now we find biologists explaining what
we once thought were altruistic acts in self-interested terms. Janet Radcliffe
Richards is a philosopher and reader in Bio Ethics at University College
London.
RADCLIFFE RICHARDS : We’ve always understood how evolution could
allow for altruism for parents to children because unless the parents looked
after their children, those children would not have survived. So we understand
that. The other way is a rather more complicated way and it’s analogous
to our ability to co-operate. We know perfectly well that if we can get into
a group of people who all agree to co-operate, we can do better for all of
us than if we all go for ourselves individually. Now, the interesting thing
is that the same kind of thing can happen at the level of the genes. If the
genes throw up individuals who have genuine concerns for other individuals,
that group may turn out to be more successful than a group thrown up by genes
who made only selfish individuals.
DILNOT: Kinship altruism - looking after those who share your genes,
and reciprocal altruism - looking after those who might look after you, seem
to have replaced altruism with selfishness as an explanation for behaviour.
These arguments have seeped into our consciousness and for many have emerged
as an assumption that whatever we do, we’re really doing it for ourselves.
But that idea makes people like Kristen Renwick Monroe pretty angry.
MONROE : I have an article that I’ve criticised both the economists
and the evolutionary biologists and the evolutionary psychologists for it’s
analogous to putting a fat lady in a corset - you kind of get her all laced
up and she looks great but it does a kind of fundamental distortion to the
underlying of reality and I think that their explanations of altruism are
really attempts to smuggle in self-interest. Altruism isn't really altruism.
It's kin selection or group selection or reciprocal altruism or a lot of
other phrases that they have.
DILNOT: So is altruism really nothing more than a cunning way of looking
out for Number One? Or are we really capable of genuine selflessness?
There’s no doubt, as Professor Gary Becker argues, that in modern market
economies, self interest is at the heart of much of what we do.
BECKER : Adam Smith, you know, the greatest of all
economists, said more than two hundred years ago, you can't depend for your
bread on the altruism or goodwill of the seller. You have to depend on his
interest, namely that he sells it to you, he gets something in return for
doing it.
DILNOT : Well as a way of describing many of our simpler actions,
like buying bread, this seems fine. But the world we live in is complicated,
full of lasting relationships which only work if we co-operate with and support
each other. No problem, according to our famously hard-headed economist.
All sorts of apparently generous acts are understood and nurtured in modern
commerce, like those of the caring manager.
BECKER : The successful companies give morale to their employees
and not each employee tries to take advantage of every opportunity to slack
off or to benefit themselves at the expense of the company. That's what a
good manager does, that's what a good leaders in any organisation do. They
give spirit to everybody in the department and you're willing to make some
sacrifices. Usually it requires a belief that somehow people are out there
looking out for you too and that can create enormous enthusiasm in what we
would, I think, ultimately call altruism.
DILNOT : Economists can explain sacrifices made for others, so long
as there’s some expected payoff. If the company cares for its people,
the people will want to care for the company. Provided everyone is playing
the game, economics can go beyond narrow selfishness to a spirit of co-operation
which professor Becker calls altruism - but its still ultimately based on
self-interest. And if finding selfish roots for apparently altruistic acts
is all economics and biology can do, they’re surely guilty as charged
of squeezing away at that fat lady in her corset we heard about earlier.
Is there any way Professor Gary Becker can deal with the truly altruistic?
BECKER : The basic framework of an economist who is to assume
that people try to get as much as they can out of any situation they’re
in, to do as best they can, what they’re trying to achieve is left open
and people are willing to spend some of their income on trying to help others,
whether the baker gives a poor family bread and says, ‘ok, it’s
on me, forget about it’, or we give charitable contributions. That can
be part of the aims of individuals. Economists don’t have problems with
doing that. Let me give you an example. I see somebody drowning, all I have
to do is take a … some kind of float, move out a little bit in the water
without great risk to myself and throw that to them and they can do that.
Now, that’s some discomfort to myself. If I was literally completely
selfish and nobody was watching me, I wouldn’t do that because there’s
some effort to myself - I don’t care about the person. If I had a little
bit of altruism, I’m willing to go to a little effort to have a huge
effect on the other person, in this case, saving the person’s life,
I can do it - and I would do it. So, in a lot of situations, you just need
a little bit of altruism, you can radically change the situation and economists
are quite comfortable with having many situations where there is enough altruism
that the outcome can look very different that what it would be if everybody
was literally selfish and we can analyse those situations.
DILNOT : Not the ragged trousered philanthropist, but the wet trousered
economists. So there’s no need for people to be selfish for an economist
to understand and explain their behaviour. If your aim is to help others,
then as long as you choose the most effective way, the economists are happy.
They’d only have a problem if rather than throwing the life belt, you
jumped in, even though you couldn’t swim. But being able to explain
the behaviour isn’t the same thing as explaining where the objectives
come from, or what they are. Here, economics really doesn’t help. May
be its time we turned to the biologist at the centre of this debate, a man
who’s commonly accused of advocating selfish behaviour. In the 25 years
since his book the Selfish Gene was published, Professor Richard Dawkins
has had to work hard to explain what he meant. The title alone has been taken
to mean that he’s arguing we are selfish to the genetic core. Fair enough?
DAWKINS : There were various misunderstandings which were so foreign
to my way of thinking that I didn’t even anticipate them in the first
edition. Some people, some philosophers even, thought that I was advocating
human selfishness couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was,
actually, literally accused by a prominent left-wing commentator of assisting
to get Mrs Thatcher into power - a ludicrous suggestion for I’m a passionate
anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and the sort of society that I want
to live in. Anybody who says that has completely misunderstood what science
is about, has completely misunderstood that science is about the truth of
what is actually out there - which is Darwinism - there’s no getting
away from that. But that is poles away from saying that that’s any
justification whatever for a particular kind of conduct.
DILNOT: So while the Darwinian truth is there, it’s not the whole
truth of our experience and what we can do?
DAWKINS : That’s right. The Darwinian truth is there but it
doesn’t tell us what we have to do.
DILNOT : You may well be surprised to hear the high priest of selfish
gene theory advocating an anti-Darwinian society. And if the truth out there
is really Darwinian, how can altruism be possible? Janet Radcliffe Richards.
RADCLIFFE RICHARDS : This was the idea of Darwinian evolution, that
any species that survived could do so only by looking out for it’s own
self-interest and, therefore, the only kind of character that could be produced
by evolution was a purely selfish one. Now that was the traditional, classical
Darwinian view. The interesting thing about the gene theory is that this
produced a totally different way of looking at Darwinian evolution where
you see the gene as the main thing that evolves. The gene is selfish in
the metaphorical sense that only the genes that make themselves survive are
going to be around, the others aren’t. But the interesting thing about
neo-Darwinism is that the selfish gene was exactly what made it possible
to see how individuals could be altruistic.
DAWKINS : There’s absolutely no logical problem with our wilfully
contradicting the “desires of the selfish genes”, we do that every
time we use a contraceptive.
DILNOT : Richard Dawkins.
DAWKINS : Contraception is fundamentally anti-Darwinian, anti-genetic
thing to do and we do it happily. We are taking the desires that natural
selection gave us - the desires for sex - and we are separating them from
the original Darwinian purpose and we do that with great gusto - that’s
not a problem. If we can do it for contraception we can do it for other things
as well. We can build a society which is fundamentally anti- Darwinian in
tone. We can build a society based on welfare, based on the idea that the
strong care for the weak and long may we continue to do that. It’s an
anti- Darwinian thing to do and that’s something that I’m all for.
DILNOT : Now, all of that sounds as though some of the forms of altruism
that you’d like to see more of go beyond kinship altruism, recipriate
altruism - there are these forms which we can explain development of using
Darwinian theory but then there’s something more than that which we
can aspire to that goes beyond them.
DAWKINS : Yes, there’s a kind of easy altruism and a hard altruism
that has to be explained. The easy altruism is kinship altruism, reciprocal
altruism. But I think there’s a harder problem still - what you might
call real altruism - altruism which couldn’t conceivably ever have been
thought of as hoping for reciprocation, giving money to charity in secret
and insisting that your name is not publicised. Even giving blood for which
you get precious little reward - that kind of giving, the sort of real grief
that one feels, empathising with somebody else who’s feeling grief with
somebody who’s bereaved, say. You can say that in our ancestral past
it wasn’t just the behavioural rule - be nice to everyone you meet,
which would have worked it was also a kind of psychological disposition,
a real emotional feeling which governs your behaviour. What natural selection
built in was a deep seated emotional, psychological sympathy for distressed
individuals and I think that makes sense. We have a problem of explaining
those subjective feelings which are so incredibly real - we’ve got to
do it in a Darwinian way because we are Darwinian products. There’s
no other explanations - we’ve got to make the best of our Darwinian
explanation and that’s sort of the best shot I can do at the moment.
DILNOT : So we’ve finally got to real altruism. And Richard Dawkins
thinks he can explain how these powerful concerns for other people are rooted
in evolution. Genetic understanding of our evolution, like economics, might
be consistent with the developed altruism we see around us. But that still
leaves us with the question of where the values that inspire these anti-Darwinian
acts now come from? Ian Linden, director of the Catholic Institute for
International Relations, finds them in God.
LINDEN : Many people see missionaries, Christian missionaries as some
kind of hang-over from the Victorian period but I've worked, in the past,
with missionaries in Zimbabwe during the war years when the Zandler forces
were coming to power and I remember very clearly a mission priest saying,
‘oh you go in the second car, I'll go in the first car’, and the
first time I wondered what on earth is that all about? And it was of course
that the first car hits the mine in the road and the second car didn't. And
he did it as sort of simply as somebody might usher you through a door. It
was absolutely unconscious, it wasn't a big deal. It was just that I was
a visitor, he lived there all the time, he was a missionary and if anybody
was going to go up in the air, you know with losing their legs and so on,
it was going to be him and not me and anyway his interpretation of what his
life should be was the sort of person that says you go in the second car.
DILNOT : Was it, at the time, a very powerful act?
LINDEN : It was powerful when I thought about what it meant because
at the time I hadn't immediately spotted what it was all about. He was saying,
I’m willing to sacrifice my life and I’m willing to reduce the
risks to your life because that is my vocation as a priest. Yes, afterwards
when I thought about it, it did make me reflect enormously on just what that
man was all about.
DILNOT : Some of the most dramatic examples of real altruism are tied
up with religion - Mother Theresa is the one that instantly springs to mind.
But as political scientist Kristen Renwick Monroe reminds us, religious
belief isn’t the only source of altruistic impulses.
RENWICK MONROE : First of all I don’t think people always think
about altruism, I think a lot of times it’s non-conscious calculations,
it’s a very spontaneous act but, in terms of what that says about yourself,
I think it suggest that you’re really … you feel yourself tied
to the other people in some way - you see some kind human connection there
which I think is very important
DILNOT : And this is a very basic force, the recognition of common
humanity. Kristen Renwick Monroe lived for a while as a neighbour of author
Thomas Keneally. His novel about war profiteer turned altruist, Oskar Schindler,
inspired the film Schindler’s list - The story is shot in black and
white, with a moment of vivid colour amid the grey, as Schindler - riding
his horse on the hills above Krakow - stops to watch the ghetto being cleared.
RENWICK MONROE : And he sees a little girl who’s wearing a red
coat and he notices her and there’s a kind of moment where there’s
some kind of a human connection that is made there. That he sees that this
is not just one of many people in a mob that’s being carted off or just
a bunch of people that he doesn’t have any ties to but he’s …
there’s something about her that calls and speaks to his humanity and
I think that’s the turning point in the movie when he changes.
DILNOT : Schindler is shocked into recognising strangers as fellow
humans, a sense that what is happening to all these people is happening to
people like him, that he shares a special bond with them that calls him to
take enormous risks with his welfare for their sake. This acknowledgement
of fellow feeling, like religious faith, is a potentially universal source
of altruistic motivation. But this all seems a long way from Adam Smith and
Charles Darwin. Richard Dawkins wants an anti Darwinian society. Where do
the values to inspire that come from?
DAWKINS : I think those values are to be explained in history, in,
strictly human history - a very unique process of generation by generation
- accrual of wisdom, knowledge. Generations of political philosopher’s,
legal philosopher’s, even religions have all made their contributions
to a melting pot of historical inherited wisdom - inherited in the cultural
sense, wisdom. That’s where those values come from - that’s what
distances us from our ancestors of 50,000 years ago who, in terms of their
brains, would have been the same as us.
DILNOT: And, in a sense, would it be fair to say that what we’ve
been fairly loosely calling real altruism is acts often influenced by those
kinds of values where the perpetrator of the act is putting her or his obvious
self interests second to some other objective?
DAWKINS : Yes, I think so and, in addition to those historical influences
I talked about, those would never have had the chance of success unless there
was some kind of Darwinian underpinning that built in tendency to emphasise,
to sympathise which probably did arise in our Darwinian past.
DILNOT: So evolution may well have given us the basic tools to
create a culture in which selflessness can thrive. Richard Dawkins
isn’t arguing that our real altruism is inconsistent with Darwinian
explanations, just that there is a great deal more to be said. After all,
our modern values have developed far too quickly to be explained by biological
evolution. If we want to understand altruism today, we have to investigate
not just biology or economics but those values systems that have made us
such extraordinary creatures. But are those value themselves always for the
good? Ian Linden.
LINDEN : Altruism cannot be simply captured as a word for virtuous,
simply for virtuous conduct. It can also, contextually, amount to a
form of madness. It's altruism within a value system that we find
unacceptable and reprehensible. I mean we don't consider the worship of the
Japanese emperor as a particularly desirable set of values. Therefore, crashing
of aeroplanes into boats in the Pacific, we consider something verging on
the insane.
DILNOT : Suicide bombing may seem an extreme example, but when values
clash, the results can be frightening – the bombing of abortion clinics,
attacks on scientists experimenting on animals are motivated by just such
clashing evaluations of what is right. When altruism shades into fanaticism,
pure motives can easily lead to bad outcomes. What about the reverse,
can impure, or at least mixed motives lead to good outcomes?
HARRIS : The best way to involve volunteers is to tap in to whatever
it is they feel they are looking for from doing the volunteering
DILNOT : Margaret Harris, Professor of Voluntary Organisation at Aston
Business School.
HARRIS : I've done a lot of work in churches and synagogues, for example,
and they are often seen as a very good example of people doing good work
with a pure heart and a pure soul. Of course, that is in many cases true
but what I've also seen is people very much involved in their churches
because they are lonely, because they have suffered bereavement, because
they have moved into a new area and need to make new networks, new contacts.
Because it gives them a status in the local community. In my view, all of
those motivations are perfectly acceptable, do not in any way detract from
the worth or the usefulness of what those people are contributing to their
churches.
DILNOT : Recognising, as we have earlier in the programme, that
‘real’ altruism is possible, doesn’t mean that we should always
be searching for the purely altruistic act. We’re going to find people
doing ‘altruistic’ things for all sorts of reasons, and if we want
those things to be done, we should simply accept that. So the advice from
the professional is to relax about exactly why people are doing things for
others. But can we get more people to do more of it? Janet Radcliffe Richards
has just finished writing ‘Human Nature after Darwin’.
RADCLIFFE RICHARDS : I do think altruism has to be learnt and fostered
- that unless you learn altruism as a child, in a context of reciprocity,
where you treat people well and they treat you well, it seems as though you
never get far with it because you learn to treat other people with suspicion
and automatically to presume they're against your interests.
DILNOT : Another student of neo-Darwinism arguing that values need
to be imposed on the outcome of evolution. But what is there beyond teaching
values that might stimulate more altruism. How would American economist Gary
Becker encourage people to be more generous?
BECKER : One can do it although it's a delicate issue - reduce
the role of government in supporting certain types of charitable activities
and transfers because we do know that when government goes in in a significant
way in certain areas, people's private altruistic contributions diminish
and so I would be careful about the areas where we think we can foster altruism
in the private sector, and there are certain areas like in medical or some
welfare payments, and try to encourage those maybe in … at the expense
of reduced governmental activity. That would be one thing I would do.
DILNOT : You can almost certainly get more giving by creating more
need, but that’s a risky road if you think government’s doing essential
work in, say, health and welfare. Pulling out will certainly encourage more
giving, but there’s no guarantee that will fill the gap left by the
state. And, of course, one way of thinking about taxation and public spending
is that it’s a form of communal or, perhaps, reciprocal altruism. Anyway,
Margaret Harris believes it’s risky to draw inspiration from the United
States.
HARRIS : Our politicians are very fond of looking at the United States
and drawing lessons for this country. In particular, they look with envy
at the high levels of donation and volunteering and assume that somehow we
could achieve similar levels in this country. I think that assumption is
very misplaced. If you think about how the United States began, it was
essentially a society of voluntary non-profit self-help activity. The roots
here are very much grounded in the relationships between the state and other
sorts of activity. And, in more recent times, we have had what we have used
to refer to as the welfare state in which our default assumption was that
if we had a problem or a need, the state would provide for it. That has never
been the default assumption in the United States. So the circumstances of
the two countries, both historically and today, are very different.
DILNOT : Simply cutting back the role of the state wouldn’t make
us more generous overnight, and it’s important to remember that although
there’s more giving in America than in Britain, the amount is still
tiny compared to government welfare activity. The historical, cultural and
social context is crucial in determining altruistic behaviour. Janet Radcliffe
Richards argues that biology alone won’t make us as good as we’d
like to be.
RADCLIFFE RICHARDS : You couldn't be a total altruist and still survive
in evolution. You have to be a limited altruist. For instance, if you're
altruistically concerned with your relations, that means you are less concerned
with people who aren't your relations and, in the social context, the interesting
thing seems to be that although you can produce a species which flourishes
if its members reciprocate in various ways and are nice to each other,
unless that species also has a mechanism built into it for being very
angry with cheats and ostracising them, it's not going to succeed because
the cheats will outnumber them and outbreed them.
DILNOT : Over thousands of years, we’ve developed altruistic
values and ever more sophisticated ways of allowing them to flourish, including
the punishing of people who ‘cheat’. So if we use all that knowledge
and wisdom, can we be confident of overcoming our selfish genes and even
evolution itself?
RADCLIFFE RICHARDS : One of the alarming things about evolution is
that it isn't in the least bit concerned about how happy creatures are. It's
only concerned with whether they keep going and this is one of the interesting
things about us as a species. We've started to think about the two separately.
We've started to say evolution has made us have this kind of life - well
it's pretty miserable in a lot of ways, let's see if we can make it better.
And what effect that will have on our evolution, I don't know.
DILNOT : Richard Dawkins argued earlier for an anti-Darwinian society,
based on the idea that the strong can care for the weak. The further flowering
of our altruism, separating what we should do from our genetic impulse. But
how worried is he that recent decades show more signs of being a selfish
age than an altruistic one?
DAWKINS : I’m not much of an observer of the zeitgeist. I suppose
if I’m forced, I would say that whatever may be happening from decade
to decade, I think there’s little doubt that we’re living in a
far less selfish age than in past centuries and in the middle ages, say.
I think the momentary changes in intellectual fashions as decade gives way
to decades are relatively trivial and uninteresting. From century to century,
I think we’re on a good trend and we are, undoubtedly, a much nicer
sort of people than they were in medieval times.
DILNOT : So the next time you catch yourself tempted by a quiet bit
of altruism, don’t worry about it, you’re not breaking any laws,
even economic or biological ones. Caring for other people, even when we
don’t need to or gain by it is part of what’s great about being
human. We may not fully understand it, but why not celebrate it anyway.