Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

These claims, that humans are wired to pursue self-interest, to compete, and to be vigilant to the bad rather than the good, are no doubt familiar to you. In fact, they lie at the heart of the intellectual traditions that have shaped Western thought. These core assumptions guide the thinking of founding figures in fields such as psychoanalysis, economics, political theory, and evolutionary theory:

 

 

The very emphasis of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

SIGMUND FREUD

 

Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.

AYN RAND

 

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

MACHIAVELLI

 

The natural world is “grossly immoral.”…Natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.”

GEORGE C. WILLIAMS

 

These deeply ingrained assumptions tilt the jen ratio of our culture toward extremely low values, and they have led us astray in our pursuit of the meaningful life.

THE MIDLIFE CRISIS OF HOMO ECONOMICUS

 

Social life would be a strange affair if humans had no sense of self-interest, no competitive drive, no attunement to the bad in the world, if their jen ratios had no input into the denominator. Just ask the parents of children with Williams syndrome. These children often have elfin features and intellectual deficits (for example, language delays, distractibility, difficulties controlling attention). Yet they can possess a fascinating combination of savantlike talents: They may sparkle in conversation, be exquisitely sensitive to music and loud sounds, and be preternaturally at ease with others. Unsettling from the parents’ perspective is that children suffering from Williams syndrome often have little sense of individuality, few boundaries, and a pure and at times problematic interest in the welfare of others. They tend to catapult themselves into friendly relations with people they have just met—the pimply checkout guy, the traffic officer, the psychotic panhandler hustling a dollar reciting poetry about the end of the world.

Clearly we are wired to pursue self-interest, to compete, and to be vigilant to the bad. Those tendencies make evolutionary sense, they are built into our genes and nervous systems. They are part of human nature. But that is half the story. Several lines of thought suggest that Homo economicus, and its proponents, are experiencing a crisis in faith, that this model of human nature is only part of our story.

Economists themselves have asked whether maximizing self-interest is always the core motive of human action. This questioning found galvanizing expression in a 1988 book, Passions Within Reason, by Cornell economist Robert Frank. Frank offers a series of observations that reveal humans to be more than bar-pressing rats seeking that pleasure-center buzz. Here’s one: From the perspective of maximizing personal desire, why do we tip a waitress after grabbing breakfast in a diner in a town we will never set foot in again? There really is no personal gain to this costly act, no promise of reciprocity, no speeded-up service the next time we frequent the restaurant, no burnishing of our reputation in the eyes of the other diners who witness our largesse. Our economic lives, Frank observes, are punctuated by actions that harm our self-interest while enhancing the welfare of others: generosity toward co-workers, acts of charity to faraway children and the protection of other species, buying Girl Scout cookies at exorbitant prices. The health of long-term bonds, Frank continues, depends upon high jen emotions like compassion, gratitude, and love.