24. ALTRUISM

In one of his New York Times columns, David Brooks addressed the issue of altruism — the practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. This sounds like another clue. Here are highlights from Brooks.

“Western society is built on the assumption that people are fundamentally selfish. Machiavelli and Hobbes gave us influential philosophies built on human selfishness. Sigmund Freud gave us a psychology of selfishness. ‘Children,’ he wrote, ‘are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.’ … Classical economics adopts a model that says people are primarily driven by material self-interest. Political science assumes that people are driven to maximize their power.

“But this worldview is clearly wrong. In real life, the push of selfishness is matched by the pull of empathy and altruism. … As babies our neural connections are built by love and care. We have evolved to be really good at cooperation and empathy. We are strongly motivated to teach and help others.

“As Matthieu Ricard notes in his rigorous book Altruism, if an 18-month-old sees a man drop a clothespin, she will move to pick it up and hand it back to him within five seconds, about the same amount of time it takes an adult to offer assistance. If you reward a baby with a gift for being kind, the propensity to help will decrease, in some studies by up to 40 percent. … When we build academic disciplines and social institutions upon suppositions of selfishness, we’re missing the motivations that drive people much of the time. … Worse, if you expect people to be selfish, you can actually crush their tendency to be good.”

Brooks suggests that we tend to look at situations through both economic and moral lenses. When material incentives are employed, we tend to see situations through an economic lens. “Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, ‘What’s in this for me?’”

“To be a good citizen, to be a good worker, you often have to make an altruistic commitment to some group or ideal, which will see you through those times when your job of citizenship is hard and frustrating. Whether you are a teacher serving students or a soldier serving your country or a clerk who likes your office mates, the moral motivation is much more powerful than the financial motivations. Arrangements that arouse the financial lens alone are just messing everything up.”

Brooks reminds us that in the early days of our democracy, “there were plenty of institutions that promoted the moral lens to balance the economic lens: churches, guilds, community organizations, military service and honor codes.

“Since then, the institutions that arouse the moral lens have withered while the institutions that manipulate incentives — the market and the state — have expanded. Now economic, utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world. We’ve wound up with a society that is less cooperative, less trusting, less effective and less lovely.

“By assuming that people are selfish, by prioritizing arrangements based on selfishness, we have encouraged selfish frames of mind. Maybe it’s time to upend classical economics and political science. Maybe it’s time to build institutions that harness people’s natural longing to do good.”

Q: To what extent do you agree with Brooks and practice a natural longing to do good?