Still, here is how he interprets a specific kind of behavior he calls “soft-core” altruism, that is, the kind whose benefits redound to the altruist and near kin rather than to his tribe or nation. That he chooses to give this subject a chapter in a book on human nature is itself a cultural choice, one made by Spencer before him, since the possibility of truly selfless behavior has been a point of dispute in this genre since well before Auguste Comte. Wilson says, “Soft-core altruism … is ultimately selfish. The ‘altruist’ expects reciprocation from society for himself or his closest relatives. His good behavior is calculating, often in a wholly conscious way, and his maneuvers are orchestrated by the excruciatingly intricate sanctions and demands of society. The capacity for soft-core altruism can be expected to have evolved primarily by selection of individuals and to be deeply influenced by the vagaries of cultural evolution. Its psychological vehicles are lying, pretense, and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is more convincing who believes that his performance is real.” Michael Gazzaniga has translated this insight into sophomore-speak: “Everyone (except for me, of course) is a hypocrite. It apparently is just easier to see from the outside than the inside. As we just learned, to pull this of, it helps not to consciously know that you are pulling a fast one, because then you will have less anxiety and thus less chance of getting busted.” Steven Pinker takes a different view. There is a book, he says, that “complains that if altruism according to biologists is just helping kin or exchanging favors, both of which serve the interests of one’s genes, it would not really be altruism after all, but some kind of hypocrisy. This too is a mixup…. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.” So for him our conscious motives are entirely distinct from the biological reality that actually prompts behavior. This is a high price to pay for exculpation, in its way the ultimate statement of the modernist impulse to discredit the witness of the mind.11
For Wilson, despite his mention of maneuvers and excruciatingly intricate sanctions and vagaries of cultural evolution, complexity is all forgotten. It seems a sociobiologist can bring his perspective to bear on hypothetical actions of a particular kind, without reference to the circumstances in which they might occur, and without what in the circumstances must be called the observer prejudicing the results of his hypothetical observations. No point inquiring of an altruist, should some individual instance of the general phenomenon be found. Should he report other motives than the sociobiologist observed in him, we have already been cautioned against the lying, pretense, deceit, and self-deceit to which his kind — the world over, apparently — are prone. Every seemingly selfless act is really a matter of quid pro quo, whether it occurs in ancient Mesopotamia or modern Japan. We must all know this, since according to Wilson we all use strategies of deception to conceal our true motives from one another. But if we do all know it, how can it be that we expect to deceive one another? What accounts for the impulse to conceal a calculus of fair exchange — the generous act and its socially determined reward — assuming this is what altruism really amounts to?
Herbert Spencer had arrived at the conclusion a century earlier that altruism has its rewards. Yet he concedes the possibility of truly selfless behavior — which, he says, is attended by more than mere reciprocity. “Those [actions] which bring more than equivalents are those not prompted by any thoughts of equivalents. For obviously it is the spontaneous outflow of good nature, not in the larger acts of life only but in all its details, which generates in those around the attachments prompting unstinted benevolence.” Spencer’s posture is every bit as secular as Wilson’s. He is every bit as capable of understanding that altruism brings its returns — public health reforms keep cholera at bay — and yet he can also allow for true generosity. His little portrait of good nature seems almost Dickensian in the context, frank notice of the fact of human community and the pleasures of it, a consideration reliably missing from the sociobiological reckoning of motive and behavior. This may simply be a consequence of his writing more than a century before William Hamilton made his cost-benefit analysis—r × b c — purporting to show that kinship altruism could be brought under the aegis of self-interest by the understanding that it enhanced the likelihood of survival of one’s genes, the formula by which true monism was achieved. Over the years old altruism, the capstone of the Comtean positivist system, had evolved into an insubordinate datum in the grand scheme of rational self-interest, daring to trouble even Darwin himself, who found it among bees. Finally, by means of a mathematical formula, the truth was revealed and the sutures of the system closed.12
I find it hard to believe that kinship altruism was where the real mystery lay, however, since the wish to live on in one’s descendants is not unusual, even if the words in which it is expressed have lacked imprimatur. Hamilton’s formula may have made the generosity of families toward their members comprehensible to the Darwinian mind, but it only sharpens the problem of stranger altruism, which does often appear when a need accessible to help is made known. Most of us have engaged at some time in the imaginative act of identification with the imperiled or suffering. We rehearse it often enough in ballads and novels and films, presumably refining our capacity for self-deception. I should note that later researchers applied game theory to the problem of stranger altruism and worked through the problem to their own satisfaction. They used the “prisoner’s dilemma,” which, to this poor humanist, seems liable to have prejudiced the outcome, since the given of that game is that each player tries to find a solution least harmful or most beneficial to himself.13
Wilson’s use of lying, pretense, deceit, and, crucially, self-deceit to explain the reality behind manifest behavior is an important aspect in which Wilson has taken on an inflection of the modern that is not yet apparent in Spencer. A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires. And — an important corollary — certain well-qualified others do know them. I have spoken of the suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness and experience among us, and this is one reason it has fallen silent. We have been persuaded that it is a perjured witness. This is that rare point of convergence among the very diverse schools, Freudianism and behaviorism, for example, that have been called modern, and its consequences have been very great. If I seem to contradict myself, saying in the first place that subjective experience is excluded from this literature and then that it is impugned in it, this contradiction is itself a feature of the genre. Wilson finds in the experience of the altruist “lying, pretense and deceit.” Granting that he has said one thing three times — for emphasis, I suppose — he has nevertheless described the intense and calculating interior state of one who ventures a generous act, a state which, since it includes even self-deceit, disqualifies her or him from reporting another set of intentions. What evidence does Wilson offer for the truth of what he says? None at all. He only impugns contrary evidence, the persisting delusion among us that we ourselves do sometimes act from generous motives, and believe that we see others act from them. This is also typical of parascientific argument.