One of Three

I started listening to the most recent episode of EconTalk, in which Professor Roberts interviews one Hanno Sauer about the latter's new book: The Invention of Good and Evil. I have to admit that I gave up not too long into it, in part because of this statement from Mr. Sauer:

 And, now you get the opposite problem when you move to a naturalistic Darwinian framework. All of a sudden, the default assumption seems to be that it's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' It's dog-eat-dog, it's elbows out. Everyone is selfish. Everyone is essentially sociopathic. Right?

And, now you get the problem: Okay, evidently there is friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice. But, where do those come from? It seems to not make any sense.

It irked me, because the basic idea that, under "a naturalistic Darwinian framework" that "everyone is essentially sociopathic," doesn't actually come out of any of Mr. Darwin's work. As I noted in my (unfinished) blogging of my way through On the Origin of Species:

There are three distinct facets to the Struggle for Existence, as Darwin explains it - competition within a species, competition between species, and mitigating the hostile effects of one's environment.

Mr. Sauer's book, rather than seeking to correct the misconception that the "default assumption" should be that competition within species is the norm, leans into it. And I found myself asking why. Or, on the larger scale, why does the misconception persist so? I can't possibly be the only person who has read Charles Darwin, or recalled that person-to-person competition is only part of one of three primary conflicts that Mr. Darwin identifies. So why don't more people push back against it? Why accept the hostile framing that the idea that "the Darwinian view of Evolution requires one to be murderously pseudo-Machiavellian" and then try to argue that unselfishness can grow within it, when it strikes me as much easier to point out that "friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice" make the other two conflicts much easier, and start from there?

Speculation on other people's motives is often a one-way ticket to creating a strawman argument, so I won't indulge in it, other than to say that there must be incentives at play that I am either unaware of, or not fully crediting. Because while it may seem unreasonable to me, there are assuredly reasons for it that people feel are worthwhile.

Of course, it may simply be that the misconception is widely held enough that people don't always realize that it is, in fact, a misconception. It's like Fyodor Dostoevsky's bit of dialog in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan notes: "If God does not exist, anything is permissible." This is commonly taken to be absolutely true in much of the Western world, especially by Christians, despite the fact that there is nothing in the viewpoint of Moral/Ethical Realism that requires some sort of divinity to create the rules, just as there in nothing in Mathematics that demands some sort of divine order for 2 + 2 to equal 4. Perhaps it's just easier to set out to prove the argument incorrect than to point out that it doesn't actually seem to make any sense, given the world as we understand it.