Roger F Malina July 3 2024
Published on this blog: Did you know Ants Exhibit Compassion, Empathy and Sympathy
July 3 2024
I love the wild connections in the ants piece. But I think we need some sharper distinctions. E. O. Wilson, whom I knew, was a leading figure in the recognition of eusociality in the insects, and his wonderfully counter-intuitive idea that humans were eusocial too.
It now begins to look as if there’s a whole evolutionary spectrum of compassion, from simple commensality or symbiosis, the cooperativeness of cells in multi-celled organisms and individual clones in a swarm, to the much more complex relationships of genetic individuals in a sexually reproducing species that are designedly different from each other. Some might define “compassion” as being an appropriate word only for the latter. And here things get complicated, but such species are ecologically obliged to compete for mates, privilege kin, avoid strangers, and defend themselves against oppression and exploitation; to be able to deceive and recognize deception, and to develop internal mental models of each other. Konrad Loranz defines love among territorial animals (and all animals are territorial in one way or another) as making an exception for an individual from the natural rule of aggression. Here compassion becomes a beautiful emergent feature, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Below is a poem about the emergence of love.
Fred
The Genealogy of Love
1.
If love did not exist,
How might it be invented?
What would be needed first
Is something just presented.
If nothing is at first,
Whatever’s next must be
Not nothing, but a burst
Of possibility;
Existence–“standing forth”–
The prime ingredient
Being itself the birth
Of all things consequent.
To be, though, carries that
Exclusion principle:
Whatever is, is not
Anything else at all;
For otherwise the All
Is but a bland suspension:
Existence is a fall
Into a state of tension.
Symmetry must be broken
To make distinctiveness:
Matter must be awoken
Out of the formlessness.
2.
But love’s not gravity,
Nor friendship a black hole;
Love needs identity
Not mergence in a whole.
Stars must be kindled, that
The elements be forged,
Each with its habitat,
By its own flavor urged.
Space must be found to cool
A place for chemistry;
Carbon must found its school
Of wild diversity.
3.
But compounds are not love
Nor valence make desire;
Some other step above
Is needed for that fire;
The search for quiddity,
Uniqueness in the strife,
Calls for an entity
We cannot but call life.
The seeking to be other
Than just the common flow
Culminates as the mother
Of the live world we know.
But to be something needs
That something else not be;
Death, then, is born, that feeds
The less free to the free.
4.
And so desire was born,
Both engine and its fuel:
To flourish and to spawn,
To conquer and to rule.
And pain came too, to scare
The creature from its bane,
Futures sprang forth from there,
The choice of loss or gain;
Sex and the choice of mate
Ensured a future where
The gene could cheat its fate
By learning how to share:
The future of the seed
Outweighed the present fact,
The mother felt the need
To feed and to protect;
The self itself grew forth,
To recognize its kin,
To judge the greater worth
Of what now lay within;
Beauty no longer was
Things’ artless elegance;
Design emerged, because
Sought for the mating dance.
5.
The miracle was done:
The future was now real:
But only for the one
Able to know and feel;
And at each step the pain
Mounted as more was given,
How precious was the gain!–
Hell the fit price of heaven.
Love, born of time, gives birth
To death, time’s instrument:
The chronicle of Earth
Discovered what it meant:
A billion years of grief
On every living world–
What kind of strange belief
Could praise it unconsoled?
A god, then, had been born
Out of the urge to be;
But from love’s fruitful horn
Came endless agony.
6.
And so that Hebrew poet
Saw what needs must be done:
Someone who’d come to know it
Must claim to be its son,
And take on him the guilt
Of love’s long savage crime,
Paying for what love built
In suffering and time:
No truth can now undo
That poor Jew’s reckless claim:
For if it were not true,
It should be, all the same.
Fred Turner 2024