Free A Small Furry Prayer by Steven Kotler Page A

lasts a month, occasionally two. But Salty needed a year’s worth of vigilance just to keep him alive, and nothing about that year would be easy on her. What I realized in the parking lot is that Joy knew all this and was still cheering about a chance to save him.
    I’m inquisitive by nature and a journalist by trade, and my willingness to spend five hundred dollars on dog food coupled with Joy’s eagerness to spend a year on Salty had my attention. So I did what many reporters do when faced by ideas they can’t quite understand: ludicrous amounts of research. What I was trying to wrap my head around was altruism. Joy gave all of herself to her cause, and why did that happen? Where does this urge toward altruism come from? Is it biological, psychological, or cultural? All of the above? What about spiritual? The Hebrew word mitzvah means both “good deed” and “sacred commandment,” while the early Christians made Leviticus’s Holiness Code—love thy neighbor as thyself—a central component of their faith. Does this extend to animals? Even more fundamental, were these religious rules written down to promote an urge that genetically existed or to create a moral good where one was desperately needed?
    I quickly discovered a lot of people with similar concerns. The first philosophers to consider altruism were the Greeks, and they considered it unlikely. In The Republic , Plato wrote, “One loves something most when one believes that what is good for it is good for oneself,” and everyone from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius agreed. Epictetus took an even stronger stance: “Did you never see little dogs caressing and playing with one another, so that you might say, there is nothing more friendly? But that you may know what friendship is, throw a bit of flesh among them, and you will learn.”
    This bit of back-and-forth between early egoist philosophers and early altruist theosophists became the opening blows in a battle that’s been raging ever since. In the eleventh century, Thomas Aquinas tried to win a round by arguing that man’s selfish impulses must always bow before divine law. In the nineteenth, John Stuart Mill thought the difference was not duty to deity; rather, triumph of good schooling: “Why am I bound to promote general happiness? If my own happiness lies in something else, why may I not give it preference?” he asked in Utilitarianism , later answered: “By the improvement of education, the feeling of unity with our fellow-creatures shall be … deeply rooted in our character.” By the turn of the twentieth, in Ecce Homo , Nietzsche called all such talk rot: “Morality … has falsified everything psychological, from the beginning to the end; it has demoralized everything, even to the terrible nonsense of making love ‘altruistic.’ ”
    Nietzsche was the last to ponder the question without the aid of biology, as Charles Darwin had already joined the discussion. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin moved beyond morality and examined altruism through the lens of evolution. He considered it a question of where in the biological hierarchy natural selection exerts pressure. Was selection a multitiered effect, or did one tier have prominence? Were individuals favored over groups or vice versa? Could it work at the level of whole ecosystems? If selection acts exclusively at the individual level, Darwin reasoned, then altruism can’t evolve: “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.” But altruism makes sense at the group level: “Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe … an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over