The Price of Altruism

by Oren Harman

  With Drury’s encouragement, Trivers read Wynne-Edwards and David Lack, and wondered about group and individual selection. Then he signed up for a doctorate in zoology armed with a sturdy plan to study monkeys. But his adviser was a herpetologist, and pointed him to Jamaica and to lizards instead. “When I flew to Jamaica,” he remembered, “I took one look at the women and one look at the island and decided to become a lizard man if that’s what it took to go back there.”

  Spending hours peering into the world of his lizards, like Hamilton and Maynard Smith (and Darwin before them), Trivers came to believe that behavior was as much a product of evolution as were eyes and ears and fingers and tails. Looking into bird warning calls and cleaning symbioses in fish he came to see, like Aquinas and Hume and Adam Smith and the Dutch poet before him, that self-sacrifice could serve one’s interest if the chance was better than decent that the good deed would someday be repaid. Following up on Hamilton, he wondered if altruism might evolve between nonkin. This depended on the rewards of cooperation outweighing the costs of conflict, on being able to remember encounters, and on coming into regular contact with one’s neighbors. The theory of “reciprocal altruism,” as he called his new invention, was modeled as a prisoner’s dilemma, even though the actual proof of it as an ESS would have to wait until Hamilton got his hands on it. Still, Trivers was able to show that iterated encounters between nonrelated “players” would produce cooperative behavior since, in the long run, this provided more gain to the individual. On the principle “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” benevolence could be born of self-seeking: If promised in return, altruism would actually pay.37

  As Trivers continued to work on his models, across the Atlantic, Maynard Smith and an ailing George were putting the last touches to “The Logic of Animal Conflict.” Altruism was the opposite of conflict, just as spite was the negative of nepotism. But it bore a structural resemblance to pulling punches in a battle: The very same self-interested logic explained them both. On both sides of the Atlantic, game theory was being marshaled to bring home a century-old insight. Darwin (and Kropotkin) had been right, the “bulldog” Huxley notwithstanding: “Morality” (even if far from selfless) was an invention of Nature.

  Meanwhile at UCL, Harry Harris and Cedric Smith were doing all they could to hold on to George. “The whole point of this application,” CABS wrote in a new grant application to the MRC that spring, with minimal cooperation from George,

  is to take advantage of Dr. Price’s originality, ingenuity, and ability in developing new ideas about the theory of natural selection…. As will be seen from his curriculum vitae, he has only been formally working in this field for about 4 years at the Galton Laboratory; his previous work was of quite a different nature…. Nevertheless, his interest and natural abilities do seem to lie very much in the direction of this kind of work, even though he has come to undertake it only comparatively late in life.38

  Asking money from the government for someone like George took more than a share of explaining. He was unknown, had come from nowhere, and was now fifty years old. Besides, his requests and conditions were highly unusual. “I personally have been very impressed by the quality of Dr. Price’s ideas,” CABS continued. “But he tells me that for personal reasons he wishes to spend only about one year on the present project. The only way in which that would be practicable would seem to be through a grant to support him.” All too well aware of his customer, he added: “—failing that, he would presumably be compelled to look elsewhere for some quite different occupation.”39

  CABS was nearer the truth than even he might have imagined. For soon after returning home from the hospital, spurred by a vision of Christ, George underwent a second conversion. Two years earlier he’d written to Hamilton that God’s greatest test to man was that of agape, or charity and love. Luckily there were other qualities that counted in the Lord’s eyes—like obedience and intellectual receptiveness—for, candidly admitting the truth to his friend, “it doesn’t look as though I can pass purely on the basis of agape.”40

  But that was then. Now things were different. “Last February,” he wrote to Hamilton, explaining,

  I sort of “encountered” Jesus and found that I had never been a Christian at all but a Christian Pharisee and one of the world’s best hypocrites. Now I’m trying to become a Christian. As you know one of the things that Jesus commanded his disciples was to give up things that were dear to them (e.g. money) and follow Him. One thing he has had me give up is the book. It doesn’t really matter what the “true” date of Easter is—what matters is when people observe Easter. It’s people who count in Jesus’ eyes.41

  He was abandoning his biblical pursuits and reaching out to the world again. “I’d love to see you again, Bill,” he ended his letter to Hamilton. “You’re one of the people whose company I enjoy.” Pulling out childhood photos of his daughters, he wept in silence, alone in his flat. “Poor Annamarie,” he wrote to one of them, gazing at her picture:

  It was probably taken not long before I moved out. I’m sorry I deserted you like that, and I’m sorry I was such a poor father to you…. Looking at your picture now makes me wish I could do it all over again…. You were a very sweet little girl, and I did wrong to leave you and then was very neglectful of you afterwards. I wish there were some way I could do a little toward making things up to you.42

  He understood now, he wrote, that he had never really been a true Christian, believing in Christ intellectually but neglecting His teachings about mercy and humility. He was determined to make things right again. His first conversion had been brought about by coincidence and was “false.” This time it would be “real” and was all about love.

  Quickly he set about putting out old fires. “I write to you in very great shame,” he apologized in a letter to Rosemarie. To his old Harvard friend Henry Noel, with whom his communication had soured, he wrote to make amends and explain his new path in life. In his vision Jesus had whispered to him: “Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back.” Henry was in France now with his family, living Luke 6:30 too, only from the receiving rather than the giving end, he wrote back with a smile. Still, he was glad about his friend’s sudden change of tone. However much or little it might be like Dr. Skinner’s rats or pigeons, he thought, George’s choice to turn to agape was still a source of volition other than God’s will.43

  Whether George would agree was questionable, though reborn a new person, this time he’d keep his thoughts to himself. He was attending a new church now, Saint Mark’s Clerkenwell at Myddelton Square, about a forty-minute walk from Little Titchfield. The first time he went there, he wrote to Kathleen, as he was getting close to the white stone West Tower,

  I began to have a faint, vague impression of seeing Jesus walking before me bearing the cross. Two or three times since then I have felt that He gave me the message “Follow me.”44

  What this meant was clear to him: Suffering lay ahead. There was as much volition in this, he knew, as there was water in a desert—Henry’s sigh of relief notwithstanding. But George would accept his fate with open arms.

  Then, with no words of introduction, he wrote to Julia in America, beginning dramatically: “Dear Julia, Would you be willing to marry me again?”

  After those terrible letters I sent you I can understand if you don’t want to have anything to do with me. And if you think back over all the wrong things I did when we were married before, you will surely have doubts about marrying me again. Also I’m not in very good condition physically (a bit thin, tired), and I look quite a bit older now…and my financial condition is rather uncertain. And still another problem is that I am now hoping to live as a disciple of Christ’s, and this may force me to separate from you for long periods, and possibly even in some later year permanently. I don’t know what the future will bring…. However, this would be separation, not divorce, and we should still be man and wife even if separated (see Matthew 19:27 on th
e possibility of separating at Christ’s call). Thus there are many reasons why you might decide to say No, though I very much hope that you will say Yes. On the positive side, one thing I can tell you with much assurance is that you would find me much kinder than before.45

  It was perhaps not the most attractive proposal, but George meant it from the bottom of his heart. His plan was for Julia to come to join him in the summer, he hoped with Annamarie, Kathleen, and Dom. The lease for the flat at Little Titchfield was ending on June 24, but until then they could live together, somewhat cramped, perhaps, but as one big happy family. Then he and Julia could finally go for a proper honeymoon in France, something they had had neither time nor means for back in the summer of 1947. Then they could return to Britain to travel with the kids to the “bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond” and to Tintagel in Cornwall, where King Arthur is supposed to have been born, and to Canterbury and “lots of other places.” All the love and affection would help bury things past.

  Julia wasn’t sure about it all, she said to him in the first phone conversation they’d had since the sixties. But she agreed to come over in the summer, promises for a second wedding withheld. The pronouncements that Jesus wanted him to follow the path of suffering were worrying her. In truth, there was more to worry about than she knew of. For, opening his heart and his Little Titchfield apartment, George was already walking deep on the path of agape.46

  It began in late March, around the beer- and piss-reeking, rat-infested corners of Euston Station and Soho Square. It was there that he was seeking out London’s homeless and hapless dregs, men and women, young and old, down on their luck, those whom life had not smiled upon. “My name is George,” he’d introduce himself. “Is there any way I can help you?”

  Homelessness had been a part of London’s landscape from its Roman beginnings. In modern times, made doubly visible by photography and statistics and sustained by often harsh Victorian poor-law institutions and a smattering of charities, vagrants became a celebrated if regretted part of the scenery. Disguised as a down-and-out sailor, the American writer Jack London painted a dismal portrait of life in the East End in the 1903 best seller The People of the Abyss. There was Poplar workhouse, or “the spike,” as the shelter of last resort was known. There was “the Peg,” the Salvation Army barracks on Blackfriars Road in Southwark, where the homeless could turn up on a Sunday morning and, if they were lucky, be given a free breakfast. And out on the streets there were knifings, and broken beer bottles, and the stench of death, and the silence of suffering, and the battle for a bed at night, and the constant mumbling under the breath, audible but opaque, punctuated by a barrage of expletives.47

  In the winter of 1910 it was estimated that 2,747 people were sleeping rough in London. That number swelled after the Great War, when former servicemen, many of them disabled and disfigured, were reduced to begging on the streets. Air raids on the capital during World War II left an estimated one in six of Greater London’s population homeless at some point, and squatting became a way of finding a home that would become part of the city in the years ahead. In 1966 the television drama Cathy Come Home, about a working-class single mother living in the streets, made a profound impact on a sentimental public, leading to the formation of the housing charities Shelter and Crisis, and the night shelter for homeless teenagers in Soho, Centrepoint, in 1969. No one knew precisely their number, but by the time George made his way to Euston Station from Little Titchfield in the spring of 1973, an estimated 40 percent of England and Wales’s homeless—wet, grimy, and often inebriated—were living in and around the city.48

  Soon he learned that there were many ways he could help them: A quid here, a sandwich there, a cup of hot cider, a word to a policeman. Most of all, though, he could offer room and board, and, beginning in April, they were flocking to his home. There was Peg Leg Pete, a temperamental redhead who lost his limb clambering over a wall while being pursued—falling and catching his leg on a hook, where he remained suspended until the police arrived. There was Smoky (real name: Trevor Russell), a hardened alcoholic who had been in and out of prison more than thirty times. Smoky “was tough and ready to fight any man of any size,” George wrote to a friend; he couldn’t stay at any hostel in London, tales of his disturbances having become legion. There were Bernardo and Chrissy, a sweet couple who hadn’t had much luck and drank a lot. There was Aberdeen, another alcoholic with a mental hospital record, and a karate expert to boot. To all who stayed longer than overnight, George provided keys. At one point there were four men staying at Little Titchfield who had either done time or were wanted by the police and who were alcoholics or who had a record of insanity, each with his own keys to the place. One of the men had been in prison specifically for burglary.49

  Friends and acquaintances were starting to worry. He had written to Henry Noel that before his love conversion he had been “vile” and was trying to make amends by following “the path of total depravity.” Henry replied that it struck him that there might be a peculiar kind of pride in judging ourselves with more harshness than God Himself judges us. “Let God be the final judge—don’t try to out-God God.” The duty of charity, he reminded his friend, applied first and foremost to ourselves; George needed to snap out of this obvious “state of extreme.” “The other Price” too, the psychiatrist John Price from Maudsley, wrote kindly to offer George to come stay with his family in Northumberland. This might help, he hinted gently, “to give you a wider perspective during a time of decision-making.” Tatiana, for her part, wondered whether if he was feeding every man he himself was not growing hungry. Even Edison, all the way from the Village and still engrossed in Iyengar lotus-position yoga, implored his brother not to be so “damn self-critical. I really am fond of you,” he wrote in a rare exhibition of brotherly affection.50

  But as usual George Price was on a mission, fighting off any feelings of fear of the strange men in his apartment: “I told myself that if I was obeying Jesus, he would protect me against serious harm,” he wrote. And, it soon became apparent, Jesus really was protecting him: These were rustlers and cheats, men, it seemed, with little moral compunction. And yet, from April through June, besides a bottle of wine that was later replaced, nothing was ever stolen. The place was filled with heavy smokers, most of whom were semi- or fully drunk much of the time, but there was never a fire. The neighbors in the flat below were not too happy about what was happening above, but following George’s gentle explanations “soon became friends again.”51 Sure, he was giving out money freely now and leaving very little for himself. Sure, he was being taken advantage of. And sure, few of the men cared a hoot about him or would help him if he needed them. But this only strengthened his resolve.

  Catching wind of the fact that George spent much of his time on the streets now, giving to the derelicts he encountered, the Reverend R. F. H. Howarth from All Souls wrote to say that experience teaches that giving money to down-and-outs “is seldom more than an easy way out for ourselves.” But George’s experience was different; this was no version, however sophisticated, of a Trivers tit-for-tat. To Henry Noel’s concerned letters he replied that no, he had not deliberately put himself in a time and place where he would be asked for help. In fact he dreaded going down to Soho Square, where some of the fiercest and most violent hoboes held sway. But then he’d read 1 Thessalonians, and hear Jesus whispering to him: “Go back to Soho Square this evening.”52

  Soon he would have to leave his apartment. Suffering was on its way. Whether, as he’d written to Kathleen in March, there was ever really pleasure to be found in pain seemed beside the point now.53 Aquinas, Hume, Adam Smith and the Vietnam War notwithstanding, after fifty-one years, finally, George was learning to love.

  George Price in his University College, London, office, 1973

  Reckonings

  Toward the end of April 1973 the grant came through. Beginning May 1 George would be reappointed associate research fellow at the Galton, with a salary of £3,195 for a year of resea
rch on genetic polymorphism, “no fixed hours of attendance” stipulated. It was exceptional for the Medical Research Council to award one-year grants, not to mention for the Galton to demand so little; CABS’s imploring had evidently done some swaying. But in truth genetic polymorphism in nature was rather far from his mind now. In May he wrote to Julia that he was planning to find a large derelict house once the lease ended on June 24, and to start a “Jesus people” commune with twenty to twenty-five people. Clearly her lack of response to his marriage proposal meant that she wasn’t very interested. But she should still come along with the girls and Dom in the summer to stay with him there. He had no doubt that she’d be fond of Bernardo and Chrissy in particular.1

  To Mr. Norman Ingram-Smith of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields he wrote in more detail about his wish to help solve the “bag-storage-place-to-wash-and-change-clothes problem” of London’s homeless. There were two explicitly Christian communes in the city: the Children of God commune on Walterton Road and the Jesus Family commune in South Norwood. Both were full-time evangelizing outfits, and both prohibited drinking and smoking: “That’s fine for those who want that, but there are many people in London who enjoy helping others but who smoke and drink moderately and want to hold jobs. So there is a need for communes or co-ops with more permissive rules.”2

  The idea was to start such a commune by renting out a derelict house (not squatting; after all, the people living there would all have jobs, and it wouldn’t be fair not to pay rent), and opening it up as a haven for homeless who needed help. Each member would decide what part of his or her possessions and income were turned over for common use to the commune. Particular effort would be made to get some members with skills useful for rehabilitating old houses: plumb-ers, electricians, and so on. It would be a happy and friendly place, “with a bit of style and swing to it,” for advertising to help make communal life seem attractive. Members would be encouraged to invite guests for meals and to stay overnight or longer. But this would not be a one-off; it was part of a much bigger plan: