“We are survival machines… blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”

The picture of human nature painted by Princeton Professor and science journalist Robert Wright in his book “The Moral Animal: Why we are the Way We Are – the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology” is not a very flattering one.

According to Wright, the human animal spends its life desperately seeking status because we crave social esteem and the feel-good biological chemicals that flood our bodies when we impress people.

Though we claim to be independent thinkers who hold fast to our moral values no matter what the consequences, the reality is that we become self-promoters and social climbers when it serves our interest.

What generosity and affection we bestow on others has a narrow underlying purpose, aimed at the people who either share our genes or who can help us package our genes for shipment to the next generation.

We forge relationships and do good deeds for people who are likely to return our favors. We overlook the flaws of our friends and magnify the flaws of our friend’s enemies. We especially value the affection of high status people and judge them more leniently than strangers. Fondness for our friends tends to wane when their status slips, or if it fails to rise as much of our own and we justify this by thinking “He and I don’t have as much in common as we used to“.

Wright says that we do all these things, mostly unconsciously, because of the evolutionary roots of human behavior that have been passed down throughout the 2 million year evolution of the human species – these behaviors are programmed into our genetic molecules.

The book explores many aspects of everyday life while looking through the lens of evolutionary biology. It borrows extensively from Charles Darwin’s better-known publications (including On the Origin of Species) to provide evolutionary explanations for the behaviors that drive human social dynamics.

Below are just a sample of the provocative questions Wright tackles in his book:

Why are humans more monogamous than other animals?

The birth cycle of the human species, unlike most animals, takes a long time. Human mothers carry their babies for 9 months and their children require years of caring and development before they are capable of living independently.

Due to the long birth cycle, women only have a limited number of chances to pass on their genes to the next generation (about a dozen or so during their lifetime). Men, on the other hand, have unlimited chances to pass on their genes given enough supply of women.

From a male evolutionary point of view it makes sense that their genetic drive would be to have sex with as many females as possible. However, this is not in the best interest of the female. To increase the chances of survival, and the well being of her children, it was in the female’s best interest to select male partners who were high in a genetic trait that Wright calls “Male Parental Investment“. Men with high parental investment traits have loyalty characteristics that make them more likely to invest in a monogamous relationship with a single woman and their children.

Men who women perceived were more likely to stick around after their baby was born became more appealing to women and therefore more likely to successfully mate with them. As a result of this preference by females, the trait for high male parental investment evolved over time to become more genetically prominent in men across thousands of generations.

Why is a wife’s infidelity more likely to break up a marriage than a husband’s?

Jealousy is a natural emotion for human beings, but a 1982 experiment which asked participants to picture their partner either having sex with another person or forming a close emotional bond surprisingly showed that men and women experience jealousy very differently.

For the men, picturing their mate having sex with another person led to feelings of intense rage and anger while the idea of their mate being close friends with another male didn’t bother them as much. Women, on the other hand, showed the opposite reaction. They were much more distressed with the idea of their partner forming an emotional attachment with another woman than they were with the idea of one-time sexual infidelity. 

Wright attributes both of these responses to a natural built-in evolutionary reflex of the human species. It is the male’s unconscious desire to propagate their genes that drives their sexual jealousy. Picturing their partner in a sexual act with another man was enraging to them because of the possibility that another man could impregnate their partner, potentially resulting in them rearing a child that had another man’s DNA.

For females, it is not so much the thought of their mate having sex with another female that is upsetting to them; it is the danger that her mate will form an emotional bond with another woman and it will lead to him withholding some of the resources that her man provides to her and her children (so that he can share them with the new woman).

What makes a family prefer some children over others?

Wright claims that evolution has a role in influencing which child and specifically, which gender children the family prefers. Evolutionary psychologists explain that parents will tend to favor the child/gender that has the greater potential to carry on their family’s genes.

This ability to pass on genes historically differed based on what social class the family came from. In a poor family of low status, it was usually the girl who had a greater chance to marry “up” into a family that was wealthier. In wealthier families, it was the boys who were favorites to spread their family’s genes because of their power to find any woman or even multiple partners.

In a study of medieval Europe and nineteenth-century Asia, anthropologist Mildred Dickeman reported that killing females before their first birthday, was much more common among rich, aristocratic families than it was among poor and low-class families. And rich families much more frequently gave inheritances to their eldest son rather than their eldest daughter.

This evolutionary influence still carries on today. A 1986 research study of the island families in Micronesia found that low-status families spent more time with their daughters while higher status families spent much more time with their sons.

Why do humans have morals?

Why is it that humans seem to exhibit a higher sense of morals than other species? Is it because we are conditioned to do what’s right from a very young age, or is it something we are born with? If you ask an evolutionary psychologist, they’ll say that humans behave in a moral way simply because it helps us to fulfill unconscious Darwinian urges for the survival and propagation of our species. 

Our moral behavior is an evolutionary instinct from our past that helps us to survive while enhancing our image. In essence, doing good things for other people is to our advantage because it establishes a debt in our favor that we can cash in at a later date when we need help. For example, if you give food to someone who is desperately hungry, they are much more likely to assist you in the future when you need help to survive.

Wright refers to this concept as “reciprocal altruism“. Our altruism is not selfless. We will readily do good things for other people when it will improve our image and standing in the community or raise our overall social status.

On the other hand, we are not so quick to help others when doing good for others carries no benefit to us. It is clear that human moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with our self-interest.

Evolutionary Psychologists conclude that there is scientific evidence that what we do can be explained by the evolution of our species and the unconscious urges we have to pass on our genes. Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice — all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can be shown to have a firm genetic basis.

That’s the good news. “Given that self-interest was the overriding criterion of our design, we are a reasonably considerate group of organisms”, says Wright. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, we need to keep in mind that they didn’t evolve for the “good of the species” and aren’t reliably employed to that end.

Although I found this book thought provoking and many of its insights fascinating, I still like to believe that we are more than just animals doing things instinctually or robots running a program that was downloaded into us. I believe we are all endowed with a spirit that makes it possible for us to rise above our nature and resist the urges of what Biologist Richard Dawkins calls our “selfish genes”.

In the movie “The African Queen“, there is a scene where Humphrey Bogart claims that he can’t change his bad behaviors because “it is only nature”; but Katherine Hepburn responds smartly to the captain’s statement by saying: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

May you experience all the benefits and wonder of our miraculous genetic past, but also have the strength of spirit you need to overcome our built-in selfish instincts and motives. If you can do this you will become more than human!

Dancing Our Sorrow Away

When I was in College, the Jackson Browne album “Late for the Sky” was in heavy rotation on my apartment turntable. The album’s introspective songs had a certain appeal to a young man growing up and just starting to make his way in the world because they asked big questions about the purpose of life and how to think about all the tricky emotions that come with adulthood.

His song “For a Dancer” acknowledges one of the sad truths about life: that one day everyone and everything we love will be gone. Knowing this, Jackson sings that we owe it to those we love to make a joyful sound with our lives while we are here – and to do our best to spread seeds that will blossom long after we are gone.

Listen on Youtube to: Jackson Browne: “For a Dancer”

The final verse of the song reminds us that we all know people who have had a positive impact on our life (a teacher, coach, parent, friend) and who helped us to become who we are. Those people did great things for us, usually without knowing it. We are likewise called, Jackson sings, to have a positive impact on the lives we touch – even though we may never live to see the fruit of our labors.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Jackson Browne “For a Dancer“

The song was written as a moving meditation on the death of Browne’s friend; who died in a fire at a young age. Browne explained that his friend was an interesting guy; a great dancer; a great tailor who would make his friend’s clothes; an ice skater who skated for the Ice Follies. “He was a Renaissance man and when I wrote him the song – I was trying to express the idea that your life is a dance”.

I like that image of our life as a dance and that we never know when it will be our last time on the stage. When I think of dancing, I think of being uninhibited, of letting my body react to the beat of the music, and of sharing a joyful personal moment with my dance partner.

When you are busy dancing, you are not worrying about your troubles, or the problems that that you will face tomorrow. Dancing is one of life’s rare human rituals; a moment of pure expression when you are able to forget about your ultimate fate and just focus on making a joyful noise.

A recent Youtube video created by the School of Life Company echoed a similar philosophy about the benefit of living life in the moment. The video was a commentary on the cultural expression “…rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic“, that is often used by people when they want to convey the futility or meaninglessness of a task.

Those familiar with the fate of the Titanic know that the hull was damaged and that the ship was destined to sink; so for the passengers on that ship to concern themselves with the position of the deck chairs is a failure on their part to recognize the true hopelessness of their situation.

Our life situation can become a little like passengers on a doomed liner. Our larger hopes in life have not come to fruition. We have come to see that our career won’t ever flourish; our relationships will always be less than ideal; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies begin to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society is becoming more dysfunctional than ever and political progress looks highly improbable.

It can start to feel like our ship is going down and that it would be silly trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction in our daily life. It would be to live in denial of the facts. Our instinct instead is to become pessimistic and gloomy about our ultimate end.

However, there is a crucial element which makes our predicament different from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic. Those passengers only had a few hours to contemplate their fate before the ship broke apart and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Our ship is going down too, but much more slowly. It’s as if the captain has let it be known that our ship is sinking and we can’t be rescued… but it will likely be a decade or more before we meet our final fate.

So, though we can’t be saved, though the end will be grim, we still have options as how to use our remaining time. We are involved in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of passing the time and filling our days. Under those different circumstances, expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deck chairs‘ is no longer ridiculous at all, it becomes a logical step; one that can be turned into a higher calling.

When the larger hopes for our lives become impossible, we can learn to grow inventive around lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged, in spite of everything, can bring some light through the dark storm clouds that you know are ahead.

Consider, for example, that you are on a very gradually sinking luxury liner in the early 20th century, you might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket, dance the Foxtrot to the music of a string quartet, sing a cheerful song or settle into the ship’s library to read a good book – even as the water begins to pool at your ankles.

Or you might try to engage in a friendly game of shuffleboard on the slightly tilting deck; or decide to drop-in on a wild party in Steerage; help to comfort some despairing fellow travelers; or just try to have a deep and comforting conversation with a new friend – even though you can hear the sound of dishes smashing somewhere in a galley down below.

Of course your life would – from the big picture perspective – still remain a thorough disaster; but you might find that you were at least starting to enjoy yourself.

This kind of attitude and inventiveness is precisely what is need to help us cope with our state. Can we invest the days we have left with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely dark? Our culture teaches us to focus on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideal body and positive social change. What remains when those things are not attainable – when love will always be tricky, politics compromised, or the crowd hostile?

What is our equivalent to seeking the best spot for a deckchair on a sinking Ocean Liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests or hobbies; if political progress turns out to be perennially blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.

In doing this, we would be turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-B’s (what you do when you can’t do the things you really want to do). But there’s nothing wrong with that! It just may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in fact, more substantial and enjoyable than we imagined.

And after a while we might come to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along – only it has taken a seeming disaster to get us to realize how central they should always have been.

My mother has always been a model to me of this kind of inventive thinking and an example of someone who has always been able to discover new things to do when she can no longer do the things she loves doing.

Now in her 94th year, she has good reasons to be gloomy about her present condition. Her ship has been slowly sinking over the last two decades. She is the last surviving member of her large, close knit, family; she lost her beloved husband after 66 years of marriage; she reads about the passing of friends and acquaintances almost every day in the obituaries; she has lived through several strokes and cardiac operations to place stents in her arteries; she struggles with gradual loss of hearing, eyesight, teeth and memory as well as the humiliating indignities of incontinence and lack of mobility that come with aging.

Despite these life difficulties, it is not in my mother’s nature to be gloomy. She laments what she has lost, yet she finds a reason to be optimistic about her situation and to be happy with the things that she can do. Here are some of the ways my mother has learned to stay cheerful, smiling and engaged in her diminished old age:

• She has learned to navigate an iPad so she can keep track of the Facebook lives of her eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• She has become a late-in life sports fan, following with anticipation the exploits of her favorite New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox teams.
• She volunteers for her Church prayer line ministry, spending time each day praying for those in her parish who are in most need.
• She visits her husband’s grave regularly to sit in contemplation and tend to the flowers and plants.
• She tries to include some form of bodily exercise every day. Short walks with her walker outside on nice days, elderly chair exercises, rubber band stretching exercises.
• She communicates with her smart speaker to listen to music or hear the news (even though she worries about Alexa eavesdropping on her conversations).
• She stays engaged by reading books and bingeing her favorite TV shows.
• She visits French Youtube language web sites so she can enjoy hearing and practicing the French language that she grew up speaking.
• She has become the project manager of her house, assigning her children work to do around the house that she has historically done in the past and overseeing it to make sure it is done to her standards.
• She takes short field trips with her children to places from her past and shares happy memories of the people and events that shaped her life.

I co-share caretaker duties with my siblings and I feel blessed to spend one or two days every week with my mother. It has been a privilege for me to watch how she accommodates the frailties of old age without sacrificing her spirit. She knows the end is near, but she is not afraid; and until the end comes she is determined to wake up with a reason for living – and make sure the deck chairs are properly arranged on the deck.

May we too always find a way to dance our sorrows away.

I feel Alive when I’m Doing it

When the American poet and essayist Louise Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal“; I was intrigued to learn more about her.

I was not familiar with Glück or her work even though she had published 13 books of well-received poetry over a 52 year span, served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003 and was the recipient of numerous literary awards – including the the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Bollingen Prize.

While looking into Glück’s background, I learned that she was born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island. Glück’s mother was of Russian Jewish descent and her father’s parents were Hungarian Jews who emigrated to the United States and ran a grocery store in New York.

Glück’s father had an ambition to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law and achieved success when they invented the X-Acto knife. Glück’s mother was a graduate of Wellesley College. In her childhood, her parents taught Louise Greek Mythology and classic stories such as the life of Joan of Arc – themes of which she would mine in many of her later poems.

She began to write poetry at an early age, but as a teenager and young adult Glück struggled with anorexia. She described the illness as the result of an effort to assert her independence from her mother and as a way for her to come to terms with the illness and death of an of an elder sister. 

During the fall of her senior year she was taken out of high school to focus on her rehabilitation. She spent the next seven years in psychoanalytic therapy which she credited with helping her learn how to think and overcome her anorexia. During this time period she attended classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and worked part time as a secretary – which she said did not suit her temperamentally.

Glück has been married twice, both marriages ending in divorce, and has one son. She currently lives in Cambridge Massachusetts and is an adjunct professor at Yale University.

While the subjects of Glück’s poems are wide and varied, scholars have identified the most common themes in her work as trauma, death, loss, suffering, failed relationships, and attempts at healing and renewal.

The scholar Daniel Morris observed that even a Glück poem that uses traditionally happy imagery still “suggests the author’s awareness of mortality, of the loss of innocence“. The writer Linda Rodriguez noted that “Her poetry explores the intimate drama of family tragedies resonating through the generations and the relationship between human beings and their creator.”

Glück utilizes her focus on trauma as a gateway to a greater appreciation of life says Carol Malone, writing for the Best American Poetry 2020 book, and uses her acceptance of mortality as a way to become a more fully realized human being.

I listened to a 2012 Academy of Achievement interview with Louise Glück that I found very thoughtful. When asked why she still writes, Gluck responded:

“Because I feel alive when I’m doing it and much less alive when I’m not doing it. I write to discover meaning… It’s much less about who I am than the idea that nothing should be wasted. Also, writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too. Bad luck, loss, pain; if you make something out of it then you are no longer bested by the events.”

It’s that kind of thinking, I believe, that allows Glück to be brutally honest in her poetry. She is not writing for her audience per se, but for herself. To make herself feel more alive, to make sense of her experiences and to wrestle even the negative circumstances of her life into something positive.

Later in the interview, when she is asked how she feels about the accolades and awards she has received for her work, she responds:

“They are nice and make life more comfortable. But what I want is not capable of being had in my lifetime. I want to live after I die, in that ancient way, and there will be no knowing until that happens – no matter how many blue ribbons I have attached to my corpse.”

There is a maturity and wisdom in her recognition of the vanity of earthly awards, and of their ultimate meaningless in the face of eternity. It will remain a mystery what the afterlife has in store for Louise Glück, but, I like to think that it is certain she will continue to live on through the striking poems she leaves behind.

One such striking poem I came across while browsing through her Collected Works 1962-2012 is titled New World:

New World Poem by Elizabeth Gluck

This poem made me think about my general reluctance to wander far from home – and how my preference to focus more on the interior life than the exterior life may have contributed to “holding down” my more exuberant life companions.

Because my engineering and marketing career necessitated frequent travel, I came to realize early on that travel is overrated. It seemed to me the best part of most journeys is that moment when you finally return to the comforts of home.

I am not alone in this sentiment. It was Blaise Pascal’s opinion that all human evil comes from man’s inability to sit still in his room; and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his book Self-Reliance: “Travelling is a fool’s paradise, our first journey’s discover to us the indifference of places… Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home”.

Reading this poem reminded me that it is important for me to temper my preference for the quiet and contemplative life with a spirit of adventure as well – because I don’t want to be the lead strapped to the ankles of my beloved family or the wet blanket that prevents them from experiencing adventures that contribute to making life memorable and interesting.

Life is a balance and being a recluse can blind you to all that the world has to offer. Also, what good does it do to be floating free if there is no one to share it with?

Today, Louise Gluck lives in Cambridge MA but she has spoken in the past about falling in love with the state of Vermont when she first moved there in 1971 to begin teaching at Goddard College. She credits the move as being instrumental in helping her get past her writer’s block.

Tragically, a fire destroyed her Vermont house in 1980 resulting in the loss of all her possessions. After the fire, Louise reluctantly moved from the state where she felt so much at home.

When the reporters asked her what she intended to do with the $1.1 million dollar award money that came with winning the Nobel Prize, it made me smile when she said she was thinking of buying a house in Vermont.

Enjoy Vermont Ms Gluck – I hope you feel very alive there and maybe I will be lucky enough to bump into you someday during my New World travels to that magical Green Mountain state to visit with my beloved family connections.