The Price of Altruism Read online

  on the international stage as among our groups of mice, or fish, or hens, or other animals, a subordinate always seriously challenges the alpha individual or nation. Although the challenger may be beaten back, often many times, eventually alpha rank is taken over by a new despot and the cycle starts again. In so far as any new international organization is based primarily on a hierarchy of power, as are the peck orders of the chicken pens, the peace that follows its apparent acceptance will be relatively short and troubled. Permanent peace is not to be won following the precedent established by the dominance of vertebrate animals.51

  If Nature was mankind’s moral compass, what was to be done? Was civilization condemned to eternal cycles of bloodshed?

  He cringed at the thought. To be sure, sea urchins and chickens had taught him that there were two forces acting in nature: “the self-centered egoistic drives which lead to personal advancement and self-preservation, and the group-centered, more-or-less altruistic drives that lead to the preservation of the group.” But how, ultimately, was the circle to be squared? Weighing the alternatives, he finally came down on the side of goodness. “After much consideration, it is my mature conclusion…that the cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital.” Hierarchy and dominance, after all, were a mark of the social vertebrates alone; if one considered the bigger picture, they were just one tiny branch on the great tree of cooperative life. Competition had arrived late in the evolutionary game. Man was a vertebrate, all right, but he needed to learn from the isopods.52

  To rise to the challenge he would have to break down barriers, not erect them. Gender, family, races, nations: all only ever led to division. Like isopods, independent humans didn’t have to be related to come to one another’s aid. They needn’t be of the same race or nationality. All they needed to do was to act toward one another as if they were closest of kin. It was the cooperative instinct of the individual, not the exclusive politics of the family, where goodness and altruism had come from. But now it was time to graduate to the next level. Once individuals came together, the “superorganism” could be born, gaining a life of its own. Then, like all good things, it would be selected by evolution.53

  Sitting slouched in his wheelchair, the “Hustlin’ Quaker” took a moment to reflect. It had been a long journey: from Indiana to Chicago, from believer to scientific pacifist, from ecologist of the individual to evolutionist of the group. His friend Emerson saw cooperation as a mechanism of homeostasis, a means to accomplish an end. But by now Allee had learned that life was much less utilitarian. Far from a means to an end, peaceful cooperation had been Nature’s initial design, her honeyed Garden of Eden. With such thoughts in his heart, he wheeled his chair down to the South End of Chicago, where he’d be helping to build interracial summer camps for black and white children. At long last he knew what he believed in: education as deliverance, biology as morality, the peaceful group, mercifully, both the end and cherished goal. Man had come a long way but mustn’t abandon the wisdom of his evolutionary past. It was time to return to the ways of the starfish.

  Behind guarded gates in terra cotta and putty white midrises just a block from the Santa Monica beach, they sat in swivel chairs in cubbies twiddling pencils and making jokes.

  There were no rules: Surfing, semantics, outer space, Finnish phonology, neurosis, the Arab class system, a hermeneutic study of the writings of Lenin, an analysis of the popular toy-store puzzle “Instant Insanity”…they could study whatever tickled their fancy. The official air force contract called it “research on intercontinental warfare,” but mainly they were being paid to “think the unthinkable”: How many casualties would there be if a nuclear bomb were dropped on Cleveland? How would Washington know? How should intercontinental ballistic missiles be developed? What were the odds of a Soviet attack, the pros and cons of an American one?54

  The RAND Corporation was a civilian nonprofit think tank chartered in March 1948. For an elite cadre of physicists, mathematicians, economists, and political scientists, it was the Cold War equivalent of Los Alamos. Pravda called it the “American academy of death and destruction,” and there were some wary Americans who concurred. Amid crew cuts, pipes, and practical jokes, a strange zeitgeist pervaded: the worship of the rational and the quantified, a geopolitical obsession, and a “weirdly compelling mix of Olympian detachment, paranoia, and megalomania.” Game theory was central. The head of the mathematics division, John Williams, wanted the very best men at his disposal. John von Neumann was at the top of his list.55

  His services had already been called for in battle. In World War II his students had devised bombing strategies for the air force designed to minimize the chance of pilots being shot down over enemy territory.56 Von Neumann himself advised Gen. Leslie Groves, military chief of the Manhattan Project, on where best to drop the atom bombs in Japan. (A note in his handwriting dated May 10, 1945, reads: “Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura.”) Whether it was a poker player staring down an opponent, a couple arguing over going to a film or the opera, firms bidding at auctions, or two nations building stockpiles of atomic bombs, von Neumann provided solutions. The bounce of the dice, the flip of the card, the raised eyebrow of a totalitarian ruler—all divulged an elemental truth: Human beings are self-seeking, rational agents out to maximize their gains in a fierce, competitive world. Game theory would teach them how best to wage their wars.57

  And so now, between “high-proof, high I.Q.” parties at Williams’s home in Pacific Palisades, the brilliants of the division went to work. John Nash, Paul Samuelson, John Milnor, Lloyd Shapley—all were there beside von Neumann. In September 1948 the young Kenneth Arrow was given the task of demonstrating that it was okay to apply game theory to nations even though it was formulated in terms of individuals. What his “Impossibility Theorem” showed was not encouraging for integration: It is logically impossible to add up the choices of individuals into an unambiguous social choice under any conceivable constitution. Except, that is, dictatorship. Just as people were beginning to swallow Arrow’s frog, Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood devised a game that did not bode well either. The Princeton mathematician Albert Tucker, also at RAND, named it the “prisoner’s dilemma.” A version of it goes like this:

  Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don’t have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch…. If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare—with minimizing his own prison sentence.

  The prisoners can reason as follows: “Suppose I testify and the other prisoner doesn’t. Then I get off scot-free (rather than spending a year in jail). Suppose I testify and the other prisoner does too. Then I get two years (rather than three). Either way I’m better off turning state’s evidence. Testifying takes a year off my sentence, no matter what the other guy does.” 58

  The problem was that if both prisoners were rational and self-seeking, both would reason exactly in the same way. What that meant was that they would both “defect” and get two years in jail, whereas had they “cooperated” and kept their mouths shut, they’d only have to serve one year—a better solution for everybody. It was a maddening contradiction of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand: The pursuit of self-interest does not necessarily promote the collective good. Nash, a handsome but strange genius who would soon fall into schizophrenia, had just
proved that there was an optimal solution to games played by many people in which interests were overlapping, not just diametrically opposed. It was an important extension of the “minimax theorem,” but was contradicted by the prisoner’s dilemma. Dresher and Flood figured that either Nash or von Neumann would solve the paradox. Neither ever did. The conflict between individual and collective rationality was real.59

  War or Peace, the Individual or the Collective: Where had and would true “goodness” come from? As always, man and animal, civilization and the wild, were helplessly entangled. New vocabularies had been developed by game theorists, economists, and ecologists: “integration,” “regulation,” “optimization,” “homeostasis,” “group selection,” “efficiency.” Each offered confident prescriptions. And yet the hard questions still remained: What was the natural state? Was it noble? Should it be followed? How and, ultimately, why? The battle of the nineteenth-century gladiators had not yet been decided. Huxley and Kropotkin’s legacy was alive.

  In February 1946 Allee had wheeled himself by mistake into an open elevator shaft, landed on his head, and cracked his skull. Soft spoken and gentle before the accident, he became domineering and tempestuous. As he recovered and returned to the lab, the world outside grew ominous: Capitalism and communism were locked in battle; the threat of thermonuclear destruction loomed; prospects of world government and peace seemed vanishing. Naturalizing ethics, too, felt more dubious than previously suspected. For a peaceful integrator the “superorganism” now looked more and more like a monster: Wasn’t democracy, after all, about individual autonomy and freedom?

  Quaker biology was a farce, “integration” a bogey. However much Allee would have wanted him to do so, man could not simply become a planarian. “It is fine for you to say that the study of animal population problems is the key to establishing the peace of the world,” a reply to one of his grant proposals to the National Research Council now read. “If you could prove that, there ought to be loads of money to help you do the work. But as it stands now, there seem to be too many links in the chain of reasoning connecting research in animal population and the peace of the world.”60

  When he reached retirement age from the University of Chicago, Allee moved to Florida, and on March 18, 1955, succumbed to a kidney infection. At the funeral someone said that by showing that cooperation could arise between unrelated organisms, he had brought the greatest word from science since Darwin.61 Shuffling their feet, loving mourners and even Friends tried to feel encouraged. But as they looked at the world around them an unmistakable glint of doubt had sneaked into their eyes.

  Just a year after Allee’s death and his own Senate confirmation hearing, von Neumann was invited to the White House to receive the Medal of Freedom. As always he was dapper with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his dark suit and a shiny war medal on his lapel. But he was not well. Shaking President Eisenhower’s hand from his wheelchair, he mentioned how he wished he could be around long enough to deserve the honor. “Oh yes, you will be with us for a long time,” the president replied, adding, kindheartedly, “we need you.”62

  The golden age at RAND had passed. Real problems, people were now saying, were simply too messy to be solved in a matrix.63 Science had not been a panacea after all. It had failed to deliver human nature.

  Von Neumann was dying of bone cancer. As his body deteriorated, he began to lose his mind. In a hospital bed he mumbled nonsense in Hungarian. At night terror-filled screams echoed from his room throughout the ward: Dementia had set in. To prevent secrets from being accidentally divulged, air force personnel with special security clearance were stationed outside his door.

  His brother Michael was at his bedside, reading Goethe’s Faust to him in the original German. Michael paused to turn the page. His eyes closed, von Neumann whispered the next few lines from memory. He died the next day, on February 8, 1957, convinced, as Orwell put it, of the “bottomless selfishness” of mankind.64

  “Dr. George R. Price—Researcher shows how to speed up invention,” from the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, January 20, 1957

  Hustling

  The American Society for Psychical Research had been founded in Boston in 1885, just three years after its mother society in London. William James, Harvard philosopher and psychologist, brother of the novelist Henry, and one of the city’s most illustrious sons, was a proud patron; the scientific study of so-called psychic or paranormal behavior was the society’s mandate; and its validation and broadcast its spur. Astonishing feats of levitation, clairvoyance, and telepathy had captured the American imagination. Bedazzled journalists reported from chiaroscuro inner sanctums on “materializations,” or the appearance from thin air of lost brooches, misplaced wills, hidden family heirlooms. There were “veridical” apparitions, “crystal visions,” and “hallucinogenic trances.” Was all this for real? people wanted to know; and could science somehow explain it?1 Two men, Joseph Rhine and Samuel Soal, would be the ones who would provide the answers.

  Even though the society’s own days were short-lived, the supernatural continued to gnaw at the nation’s mind. In 1911 Stanford University became the first major academic institution in America to pick up the challenge, followed by Duke in 1930. It was there, in Durham, North Carolina, that a former preministerial hopeful who had seen the light of science, abandoned theology, and in turn been disappointed by materialism, turned to the enigma of “psi.” Joseph B. Rhine had flip-flopped from faith in miracles to faith in physics to faith in something science could not account for. But amid these acrobatics one thing now seemed clear: Parapsychology was real.2

  Across the Atlantic in England, a first-class mathematician from Queen Mary College became interested in communication with the departed. Samuel Soal’s brother had died in the war, and like many grieving loved ones he turned to the mediums. Impressed by a particular instance of telepathy, he wrote a long entry on “spiritualism” for the Encyclopedia of the Occult. But Soal had exacting scientific standards, and moved methodically to test them. More than 128,000 card-guessing trials with 160 participants later, skepticism had emerged the victor. ESP, he reluctantly but also mockingly now pronounced, was “miraculously” an American phenomenon. Rhine was by this time the doyen of parapsychology, celebrated author of the best selling New Frontiers of the Mind. Crushingly, he soon became the butt of Soal’s relentless ridicule.3

  But then, in 1939, Soal took a second look at his old data, and what he found left his mouth dry and jaw dangling. Refusing to believe what his eyes had witnessed, he set up the most meticulous ESP experiments ever performed. The results, he now claimed, proved beyond a shadow of imaginable doubt that precognition and telepathy were bona fide. Two individuals, the celebrated London portrait photographer Basil Shackleton and a Mrs. Gloria Stewart, had beaten the odds against chance by enormous margins. Even when sender and receiver were miles apart, Shackelton and Stewart could predict future card picks. Statistics couldn’t lie nor, Soal claimed, could twenty-one prominent observers. Whatever the explanation, whatever the device, the regular laws of physics had been fabulously violated.4

  On both sides of the Atlantic believers finally got what they had asked for: a foolproof corroboration of the miraculous. Rhine and Soal were neither quacks nor impostors nor swindlers nor cheats; they were respected members of the scientific community. By 1955 their two-punch combination had entirely silenced the opposition, or so, at least, they believed. To anyone following the proceedings, the chilling implications were plain: Modern science would need to come up with an explanation; if it couldn’t, its entire edifice would collapse.

  Meanwhile in New York City Alice Price was communicating with the dead. “My dear dear hardworking wife” she wrote to herself from her husband who had died twenty-five years earlier. “I am so sorry that you must go through this awful struggle for your daily bread but soon your worst will be over.” Another letter, addressed to “Dear Friend,” pledged intervention on an impending Display deal: “Alice is unde
r such strain, and I am doing all I can to influence everyone connected to the deal…. Tell her that I am working overtime to bring things around as they should be. Sincerely, W.E. Price.” A third communication promised salvation: “I am sure you will be rewarded soon for your patience and Christian spirit,” it said in scribbled Scripture, and ended: “I am with you always, your Billy.”5

  Back in Minnesota the polio had left its mark on George: a limp that unsettled his gait and a right shoulder that forced him to bring his cup to his mouth southpaw to avoid completely soiling his face. He was back in his student quarters, alone, in the Minnesota winter. Most days he stayed at home. At the lab there was plenty of work on porphyrins, and a new project constructing a mechanical heart-lung. But he had lost any real interest. His heart was somewhere else. His work was so technical that only a handful of people would ever read it. The more he hibernated, the more he craved an audience, the more he wanted to write about things that people cared about. And so, limping and brooding and altogether searching; trying to get his body to the bathroom and his cup to his lips, George came to the rescue of modern science.6

  Or maybe it was to get Alice to stop writing those letters to herself. Whether he acted out of filial concern or gallant scientism, one thing was clear to George: Rhine and Soal were frauds. There were no two ways about it. Espionage agencies knew it. Earthquake watchers knew it. Houdini knew it. Even the great dead Scottish philosopher David Hume knew it, all the way beneath his Calton Hill tombstone. For if parapsychology were real, secret messages could be teleported by agents from the Kremlin. Catastrophes could be averted. Magic could be performed without trickery. If Rhine and Soal were right it meant that knavery was less probable than miracles, a possibility that Hume had found highly unlikely. Growing up with Alice, George had believed in ESP. He had even written to Rhine as a young undergraduate from Harvard to suggest clever ways to help prove it. But gradually, with science, incredulity had replaced faith, and for years now he had been internally fuming. “Is it more probable,” Tom Paine had asked in his The Age of Reason, “that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?” To George the answer was obvious.7