Barbara L. Finlay and Supriya Syal, ‘The Pain of Altruism’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 615-17.
A very quick post. The argument from Finlay and Syal goes like this: (i) humans experience pain, and express distress, in situations that other animals, including other primates, do not (e.g. in childbirth); (ii) pain and distress engage us in social interactions, as we turn to others to/for help, and social interactions are beneficial to the species; (iii) over time natural selection favoured early humans who experienced and expressed pain, and thus derived the benefits of social cooperation; (iv) hence we are the way we are, with pain and altruism entwined. And there is also (v), the engaging idea that over time we have preferred, and genetically selected, animals which also express pain and reward our need to be altruistic in response.
This all seems quite Christmassy, doesn’t it? Maybe not, but nevertheless this will be the last post until the second week of January. But before the hiatus… this seems to me like a suggestive piece of evolutionary thinking, which could be pursued in literary examples. Fictions often deal with altruism, whether salutary or problematic. And of course they often deal with pain. Perhaps in some cases pain and altruism find themselves in strange, fraught relationships – in Endgame, or Not I, or Titus Andronicus. And in some cases, perhaps, failures to engage altruistically, or to be engaged with in that way, result from situations where characters do not express distress in the right way – Coriolanus, or Timon of Athens perhaps. I shall probably come back to this some time.
Very interesting. Is misunderstanding this relationship where Wells’s Dr Moreau gets it wrong?
Thanks, Simon, for this suggestion. Not having read ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ before, I gave it to myself as a Christmas present. It was very interesting to think about in relation to the pain / altruism dynamic of this post. It’d be good to hear more about why you made the connection. Pain is indeed central to Moreau’s plan to achieve evolution by vivisection: he changes animals by dipping them into ‘a bath of burning pain’. Pain also teaches his adapted creatures fear of him and of regression to animal states. Social interaction and altruism are nowhere to be seen, though. The question of evolution arises when Moreau discusses pain as something that must be left behind. I was struck, though, by how Prendick the narrator seems to find himself in a vulnerable state on several occasions — adrift at sea twice at the beginning, lost on the island, threatening to drown himself, asking the creatures for food. He is also very bothered by the sounds of pain from the puma, and then from what the puma becomes. His pain and fear are a sort of networking strategy, and he survives in the end.
Glad you enjoyed it! I was thinking in the first instance about Moreau himself – he thinks he has evolved himself past pain – but ends up getting killed, seeing his project fail – freedom from pain does not make you superhuman, rather making you more vulnerable instead; & yes, you’re quite right, it’s Prendick’s membership of this network that ultimately preserves him.
There’s a corresponding moment in The Time Machine too – the Time Traveller first meets Weena when she falls in a river and no other Eloi rush to save her – so good for the Time Traveller, but if the Elois’ degeneration they no longer have these networks of altruism they are surely doomed……