The Price of Altruism (49 page)

But is it possible to penetrate further beneath the religious injunction? Is there a deeper truth lurking behind George’s own conscious explanation?

Widening the lens may help. Altruism, cooperation, and morality had in one form or another occupied George’s thoughts from the beginning. Back in Chicago, working on uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project, George wondered why nations should hate one another and fight. Struggling to complete
No Easy Way
in the Village between instruction manuals for Sperry-Marine and bouts of drug-induced incapacity, he had racked his brain for the solution to the threat of mutually assured destruction. And yet, as he wrote to his editor, the world was changing too fast to get any kind of grip on the problem; unable to see the answer, George finally gave up.

Then came Ferguson and the operation, and quitting IBM. Leaving one life, he acquired another; having crossed the Atlantic from America to England, he found himself swimming in the ocean of evolutionary theory. It was there, in search of the origins of family, that he became acquainted with the field of social behavior, with the dynamics of personal and collective interest, and most of all with the problem of altruism. Plunging into Hamilton’s kin-selection mathematics and emerging with his own elegant covariance, George came to see that in nature, at least, goodness came about for a reason. Delving into game theory and surfacing with the logic of animal conflict, he understood that reciprocity was a utilitarian affair. Whether altruism came about at the altruist’s own expense because it helped shuttle related genes into the next generation, or because it somehow ended up paying for the altruist later in his life, there was always an interested logic involved. Even when a “truer” altruism evolved under group selection it could only work if the good of one group was to triumph over the good of another. Whether conscious or brainless, intended or instinctual, altruism was never truly “pure.”

But if science had painted a rather dour landscape of goodness, perhaps the spirit could transcend it after all. If ant workers helped their sisters only because it helped their genes; if a monkey helped another monkey only because he could cash in on the favor someday—perhaps man could do better. Perhaps
George
could do better. Inviting homeless strangers into his apartment was a beginning; in the vein of his constitutional extremism, giving them all he had and losing everything was the pushing of the envelope. If George’s own mathematics described a world where selflessness was always selfish, perhaps in his own actions he could prove that in humans this wasn’t necessarily so. If science could not provide the answer to the riddle of the origins of pure, universal goodness, if it could not even formulate the question necessary to fathom such mysterious depths, then perhaps George could find it elsewhere, in the fetid corners of Euston Station and the lonely benches of Soho Square. Perhaps pure selflessness resides in places science could never touch—in the unknown and unknowable recesses of the soaring human soul.

It was a courageous bid, a bold examination, and much was riding on it. But if this was indeed George’s goal, then its outcome may best explain his demise. For in the final analysis selflessness only led to further despair: None of the homeless people he tried to help ever left the bottle, none returned to their families, none changed their ways. He himself had wallowed in misery, too sick and too hungry to be of any use even if he’d wanted to be. His own equation could reveal when altruism would evolve by benefiting the community despite being disadvantageous to the individual. But in his own life George had failed to find the balance.

This was bad enough, and yet it could always be chalked up to circumstance; coincidences, after all, were what defined the fundamentally incontrollable human experience. In truth a much more sinister realization was what had gotten to him, something that could not be a mere coincidence. It was a discovery infinitely more devastating. For no matter how much he wanted to forget himself, in the end he couldn’t. How could he discern if his selflessness was not just a masquerade, the self fooling the self only to please the self and nothing more? How could he know, apart from the ant, the monkey, and all the other creatures that abound in nature, whether his goodness,
human
goodness, was really genuine and pure?
¹⁸

He had been blessed with an unusual intelligence. He had seen things that the greatest minds had failed to see before him. And yet all his rational powers stood useless before the conundrum: It was impossible to know. Trying to transcend science he had found that he couldn’t transcend biology: Despite the yearnings of his soul he was trapped in the prison of his brain. And, living in a squat with a broken window in the London winter, far away from his daughters, dejected, lonely, and weak, it may just have been a realization too difficult to bear. “Might go hay-wire but will never be humdrum,” his Harvard interviewers had presciently divined back in 1940 when he arrived as a young hopeful—and they were right. In utter despair and utter anguish, George had finally, insolvably, hit “Wittgenstein’s wall.”

In 1996, Bill Hamilton wrote Kathleen Price a letter remembering his old friend. George’s life, he explained, was like a novel, “kept exciting and unexpected right up to the last page.”
¹⁹
Hamilton, who was to die at the height of his powers three years later from malaria-induced internal hemorrhaging following an ill-advised trip to the Congo to discover the origins of the virus responsible for AIDS, thought that George’s life had been a “completed work of art.” He may have been right. For, in a deep sense, what makes great works of art complete is that they remain forever incomplete. Explanations for events are at once myriad and mysterious; putting down a book, or walking away from a painting or a sculpture, or finishing listening to a piece of music, one always leaves with lingering thoughts that are neither questions nor answers. And so, whether George killed himself because of illness, unrequited love, confusion, or philosophical despair, his life and death continue to provide invaluable instruction. By crashing into “Wittgenstein’s wall,” George teaches us, like a great work of art, where the limits of our reason confront the depths of our soul.

Nothing makes this clearer than a sheet of paper Hamilton found among the discarded effects in the squat. Written by Richard W. De Haan, “teacher of the Radio Bible Classic, worldwide ministry through radio, television, literature,” it was titled “Love is the Greatest!” and Hamilton paid little attention to it. But there was an important message there. “Men and women have always yearned for understanding, compassion, forgiveness, and deeds of loving-kindness from their fellowmen, but often they’ve been sadly disappointed,” it read.

George Price lies in an unmarked grave in the Saint Pancras Cemetery in North London, flanked by a proud sycamore and a young weeping willow. Too weak or too ill or too heartbroken to follow this path peacefully, perhaps it was his ultimate and enduring message to the world he left behind.