We know how paradoxical we can be, how wayward, selfish, and blinded by passion; how easily our reasoning minds can dupe us. We know that we are, indeed, “predictably irrational,” as behavioral economist Dan Ariely writes, and we are well aware of how hopeless we can be at foretelling the outcomes of our own oddball choices and self-contradictions. Americans have watched our national level of well-being sink by half in the past fifty years. It hardly seems accidental that moral science is exploding simultaneously with global endangerment and declining happiness stats. There’s a tick-tocking urgency behind this coincidence, a perfect storm of destructive and instructive forces assaulting our moral consciousness. Alongside our deepening knowledge of what makes us good is an increasing awareness of what makes us monstrous. We know that while goodness may be universal, it is also fragile. We’re all too aware that while empathy can be easily aroused, it can also be quickly forgotten. “Human goodness appears when we least expect it, under conditions that are little understood and difficult to create,” we’re reminded by psychologists Anne Colby and William Damon. “It can arise in settings that seem devoid of anything but sheer evil vanish in the midst of fortune and happy companionship.” Political scientist James Q. Wilson expresses this even more bitingly: “We are softened by the sight of one hungry child, but hardened by the sight of thousands.”
This is not because we’re secretly malevolent. Human contradictions have nothing to do with original sin or the presence of some corrupting, unkillable serpent slithering through the garden of virtue. This is an essential point. Western culture has bequeathed to us a fairly horrendous image of our inherent nature. Sigmund Freud, who almost single-handedly defined the psyche for a majority of people in the West, made declarations about humanity that are enough to put anybody on Prozac. “I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole,” complained our first scientist of the mind. “In my experience, most of them are trash.” I beg your pardon? People care about their brethren, Freud actually believed, “in order to gratify their aggressiveness, to exploit [their neighbor’s] capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.” No kidding?
When the notion of the “selfish gene” was misappropriated from a book about biology, this downcast view appeared to be backed up by the discovery that our chromosomes themselves were inherently vicious. Scientists have been trying to set the record straight ever since. “Evolution is a process that systematically favors selfishness,” one biologist wrote. “But evolutionary theorists define selfishness in significantly different ways from people who make moral attributions [italics mine]. There is no necessary connection between psychological and genetic forms of selfishness.” Please read those sentences twice. “Those who see fit to maximize their profit and pleasure at the expense of others may well fail to propagate their genes,” this scientist continued. “On the other side of this coin, those who are willing to sacrifice their interests for the sake of others . . . may well propagate more of their genes than those who are not.” In spite of such expert protestations, there’s been a widespread, perverse refusal to acknowledge what Richard Dawkins (who coined the phrase “selfish gene”) actually meant. Frans de Waal, one such critic of the evil-gene school, compared this irrational belief to imagining a species of meat-eating animals who’ve managed to trick themselves out of a taste for flesh. How could humanity have “unearthed the will and strength to defeat the forces of its own nature,” asked de Waal, or duped itself into being something it wasn’t, “like a shoal of piranhas that decides to turn vegetarian?” The misanthropes didn’t have much of a clue.
There’s been a widespread, superstitious fear in our culture that if we were to err too far on the side of self-approval—as a general way of seeing ourselves—the species would tip irreversibly into the wanton abyss. “Never forget”—the slogan of those who fear that the Holocaust will be repeated if we glance away from its memory— becomes, all too easily, “never forgive.” This is the danger of negative focus; it fulfills self-prophetically. Any therapist worth his hundred bucks, even a Freudian, will tell you that healing and wisdom come from locating our strengths and building upon them. This is not a denial of evil.
It’s just a smarter approach to promoting goodness, considering how the brain works. Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s first self-help author, was saying this back in the 1880s. “Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good,” wrote the author of “Self-Reliance.” Sholem Asch, the Jewish writer, agreed: “It is of the highest importance not only to record and recount, both for ourselves and for the future, the evidences of human degradation, but side by side with them to set forth evidences of human exaltation and nobility. Let the epic of heroic deeds of love, as opposed by those of hatred, of rescue as opposed to destruction, bear equal witness to unborn generations.” Since our brains are wired to learn through suggestion, mirroring, repetition, and guidance—not self-hatred—“elevation” (a newly identified emotion that we will explore at length later) is a more effective path for encouraging positive self-awareness.
The positive psychology movement, begun by Martin Seligman in the late 1980s, was seminal in shifting public discourse from what’s wrong with us to what’s right. This movement has provided a much-needed counterbalance to the overpathologized, half-empty-glass refrain of a narcissistic culture obsessed with its own darkness. Seligman argued that psychology had lost its way; that the mental health field had become obsessed with the dark side of human nature and blinded us to what was good, noble, brave, even occasionally selfless, in ourselves. Doctors had the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) to define our maladies, but psychologists didn’t even have a language with which to talk about the upper reaches of our psychology. Years of research helped Seligman create a diagnostic list of six human character virtues—wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence—as well as three dozen sub-traits (the idea that temperance includes forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation, for example). Our ethical bag of goodies began to open, including the self-transcending emotions of wonder and awe.
Elevation—the emotion of being uplifted—explains a lot about why our species has thrived in spite of extreme destructiveness. This is a fascinating point. If it weren’t for the power of elevation, Barack Obama would not be in the White House. Grassroots movements in general would lose their power to prevail against the odds. Positive psychology has shown us that humans gravitate toward the good and the hopeful. The truth convinces us most of the time. We’re magnetized, as a species, by beauty. Indeed, goodness, truth, and beauty form a golden triangle of human ideals—the things that make life worth living. In the presence of beauty, goodness, and truth, we find ourselves illuminated, connected to something larger than ourselves. In the words of Descartes, “This great light in the intellect generates a great propensity in the will.” This is because “the brain is preset for kindness,” as Daniel Goleman tells me. We are rewarded, inwardly, by loving; it’s different from feeling aversive in the world. We aspire to be better people not for some abstract reason but because we long for a good life and the wisdom to enjoy it. A good life is one based on self-understanding, which leads to deeper connection to others, which leads to dedication to something greater than (but not excluding) individual happiness. “An ethical life is one in which we identify ourselves with other, larger, goals, thereby giving meaning to our lives,” Seligman insisted when we spoke.
Not only do less selfish people tend to be happier, they also live longer and have better physical health than their self-centered counterparts.
This book will show you how and why. While we are certainly ethical creatures in progress, and struggle daily to bridge selfishness with compassion, our native inclination—“the herd instinct in the individual,” as Nietzsche called it—falls decisively on the side of connection. Good people—meaning the vast majority of us who do as little harm to others as possible—not only live longer but leave more offspring. This process, repeated through thousands of generations, is what pumped our neocortex to such freakishly large proportions. Evolution has proved, incontestably, that “a group of cooperative altruists will outcompete a group of selfish cheaters,” as moral psychologist Marc Hauser writes. This is why values such as honor, altruism, justice, compassion, and mercy have come to define human aspiration. The Greeks had a word for such aspiration— arete—meaning excellence, virtue, or goodness, especially of a functional sort. “The arete of a knife is to cut well. The arete of an eye is to see well. The arete of a person is goodness,” explains Jonathan Haidt.
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Mark Matousek was a Senior Editor at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and a contributing editor to Common Boundary Magazine, where his back page column, The Naked Eye, appeared from 1994-1999. His first book, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story (1996) was an international bestseller. He published his second memoir in 2000, The Boy He Left Behind: A Man’s Search for His Lost Father. Check out Mark’s eponymous website here, or find him on Facebook or Twitter.
Very true, about not forgetting to exalt the good of man. Of course, feminists, and by extension this website, does not ever exalt the good of man. They don’t praise his self-sacrifice, his willingness to get up and do the worst, most dangerous, of jobs without complaint. When mines collapse, workers are hurt, not men. Men climb forty stories on rinky dink metal beams without safety harnesses, and stood with one man on the outside of a pole on loose planks and the other on the inside of the pole, on the other side of the planks, as they affixed… Read more »