Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

by Karen Armstrong

But in many ways compassion is alien to our modern way of life. The capitalist economy is intensely competitive and individualistic, and goes out of its way to encourage us to put ourselves first. When he developed his theory of the evolution of species, Charles Darwin (1809–82) revealed a nature that, as Tennyson had already suggested, was “red in tooth and claw”; the biologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) believed that, instead of being imbued with Buddhist “love” or the “softness” of ren, all creatures were perpetually engaged in a brutal struggle in which only the fittest survived. Because it runs counter to the Darwinian vision, advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic. Today positivists, who believe science to be the sole criterion of truth, have argued that our genes are inescapably selfish and that we are programmed to pursue our own interests at whatever cost to our rivals. We have to put ourselves first. Altruism is, therefore, an illusion, a pious dream that is unnatural to humanity. At best it is a “meme,” a unit of cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that has colonized our minds. A “blessed” misfiring of natural selection, it has turned out to be a useful survival mechanism for Homo sapiens, because those groups that learned to cooperate forged ahead in the desperate competition for resources.