“These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will—a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper.”
--“The Audacity of Hope” by Barack Obama
Part of what makes President Obama so popular is his ability to excite the qualities of humanity that we deem most important. While John McCain was bragging about the fierce world of capitalism, Obama spoke of compassion for our fellow man. Long, from an economic and political standpoint has the world tried to balance between the Darwinian competition and Kropotokin mutual aide. I would like to believe, perhaps foolishly, that the world is beginning to evolve towards the mutual aide, side of the sphere and perhaps fierce competition is becoming extinct.
If you look around the visible world of evolution, you can almost begin to see how nature is leaning towards compassion. This hopeful conclusion was supported by Kropotkin who hypothesized that natural selection favors creatures who are able to work together to support one another. “During which scores of thousands of thiese intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest—in all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.” (Kropotkin 399) Nowak also cites biological evidence to suggest that compassion is desirable in natural selection: “In ecology, symbiotic associations are increasingly seen as fundamental. Biologist find examples of cooperation at the level of cells organelles and even prebiotic molecules.”(Nowak 404) This all made sense to me. While violence and hatred has always been present in human and animal society, I would like to think that modern society is a little more stable Even within memorable American history society has evolved to be more compassionate. Sixty years ago segregation caused the suffering of millions of African Americans across the country and now a black man is elected to the nations highest office.
Kropotkin developed the theory of Mutual Support watching heards of deer migrating
As I continued reading today’s articles however, this notion that human society “evolving” to become more compassionate not only seems underdeveloped but a little frightening. For to say that a species is evolving towards a trend is to say one trait is being favored over others. But in this situation, if “compassion” is our “trait” then how is it being selected? Is human culture deciding to be more compassionate, or is compassion a physical make up or our being, dictated by hormones and chemicals.
Not Comforting to think of thoughts as chemical reactions.
Edward O. Wilson suggests that “self knowledge (in which compassion would fall under) is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.” (Wilson 409) And that the “hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA.” (Wilson 410) I will admit this to be one of the most distressing parts of Plan II Biology. We spent several lectures learning how all of our emotions were determined based on hormone levels. This would suggest that the complex thoughts I pride myself on are not profound or unique, but rather chemical reactions, of which I have little conscious control. To further illustrate this point I saw an episode of 60 Minutes in which they did a story about how brain scans were being used to read thoughts. Apparently the chemical reactions of thoughts are so predictable that a computer has been developed to actually read human thought based on brain scans of chemical activity.
An important addition to the idea that compassion is merely a physical trait that instills chemical reactions is that hatred and violence would also be mere chemical reactions. “The hypothalamic-limbic complex of a highly social species, such as man, “knows,” or more precisely it has been programmed to perform as if it knows, that its underlying genes will be proliferated maximally only if it orchestrates behavioral responses that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction, and altruism…. Love joins hate; aggression, fear; expansiveness, withdrawal; and so on; in blends designed not to promote the happiness and survival of the individual, but to favor the maximum transmission of the controlling genes.” (Wilson 410) Here it gets very depressing, because if humans have evolved to balance compassion and competition, then that means those nasty “bad” qualities man kind has labeled are not totally controllable and yield “three putative implications of an innate human nature:
First, if the mind has and innate structure, different people could have different innate structures. That would justify discrimination and oppression.
Second, if obnoxious behavior like aggression, war, rape, clannishness, and the pursuit of status and wealth are innate, that would make them “natural and hence acceptable.
Third, if behavior is caused by the genes, then individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions.” (Pinker 472)
Pinker continues in his article to try and prove how this proves not every action and emotion is based on biology, but also influenced by human experience and reactions. Still one has to wonder with all the evidence that emotions are correlated to chemical reactions, how much control we have over our emotions and thus our actions. Maybe we are influenced by experiences, but maybe we only experience certain things because of what our DNA allows us to allow ourselves to experience. Maybe this great moment America had was a choice to evolve into a more compassion country, but maybe it was natural selection dictating our actions so that “the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”
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