The Price of Altruism (39 page)
Read The Price of Altruism Online
Authors: Oren Harman
Hamilton, though, had never gotten over it. This was tricky business, George wrote to John in October, since in the draft of “The Logic of Animal Conflict” that Maynard Smith had just sent him there was no reference to Hamilton on kin selection. Clearly this needed to be fixed before George would put his name on the paper.
But something else needed to be fixed as well. For, following his love conversion, George saw that the current drafts had to be revisited. “This requires choosing some words with more care,” he explained to John in February. “I think that I’ve found wordings that you won’t object to and that won’t shock Nature’s readers by making them suspect what I believe.”
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Maynard Smith replied that he was sorry about not citing Hamilton in the draft; oddly enough it was simply a glitch, and he’d fix it. He was sorry, too, about what had happened in 1964. In fact he’d quoted Hamilton’s short 1963 paper then but could have done better by citing the as-yet-unpublished paper that he had just reviewed. He felt terrible about it, and would try to find the next opportunity to “set the record straight” clearly, he wrote, “Bill certainly deserves any credit that is going.”
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As for the reworking of some of the language in their current joint paper, John would defer to George’s sensitivities. He had no problem that the word “Dove” from “Hawk v. Dove” be scrapped; instead they’d just call a nonviolent, nonretaliating actor by the less theologically laden “Mouse.”
“The Logic of Animal Conflict” made the cover of
Nature
in November 1973. “Game theory and computer analysis,” the authors concluded triumphantly, “show…that a ‘limited war’ strategy benefits individuals as well as the species.” With the newly introduced and formally defined concept of the ESS, it was a paper that would impact the study of the evolution of behavior dramatically.
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Down at Soho Square most days, searching for Aberdeen and Peg Leg Pete, George had other things on his mind.
“As I need hardly tell you,” Al wrote to him from Buffalo,
the moral and religious precepts of the Gospel reflect a profound understanding of human nature. I would think they are intended to identify goals toward which we should strive, given our frailties…to live up to them literally may be to attempt more than human nature can manage and, I suspect, more than we actually intended. Trying to live up completely by such principles might produce little in the way of peace of mind. And, it would seem to me, that where behavior based on religious precepts does not yield peace of mind, the eventual result will almost inevitably be the erosion of belief itself.
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But George was deep in the forest on the path he had set for himself. “I can’t remember whether I told you anything much about my way of life,” he wrote to his brother, Edison.
I have no home, so use my business address as a mail address…. Usually I wear brown Levis, sneakers, and a colorful shirt. Many times each month I find myself reduced to one penny, a half penny, or zero. Most of my possessions have been given away, including my watch and coat (but I’ll have to pick up a coat somewhere now with winter coming on). Everywhere I go I keep running into down-and-out alcoholics, to whom I give when I have anything, and with whom I sit and drink from their bottle if they offer me a drink. Increasingly I find myself on the opposite side from the police. Many of my friends have done time, and I’ve been in a house that was raided and had my things searched then, but I haven’t yet been busted…. I do a lot of smoking, and also smoke cigarettes, though I haven’t yet developed a fag habit. A substantial amount of my time is given to trying to help people in almost any way they ask me or seem to need help, whether it’s by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen, talking to a landlord, shopping for a housebound person, or trying to solve some mathematical problem for somebody here at work. A lot of this helping is of old people, especially women in their eighties. I live very cheaply and have been reducing my debts (which are large) fairly rapidly since I became homeless…. In spite of vast amounts of time missed from work, plus eccentric behavior such as sleeping here often and doing my laundry in the men’s room and trying to borrow money from everyone in the department, my professor and the department chairman are friendly to me. (In fact, most people are friendly to me except the police, who seem to instinctively dislike me nowadays). I haven’t gone to church for six or eight weeks, but I visit and try to help old people in connection with a church that I have often attended. I usually wear a cross of some aluminum-appearing or pewter-like metal around my neck, except that people keep asking me for it (especially old, sick people and down-and-out alcoholics) and I’ve given away seven of them and don’t have any now and won’t be able to buy another until pay-day). I generally try to say “Yes.”
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Then he ended, “And now what’s up with you?”
It was an amazing transformation from the prim, short-haired, gangling IBM worker he had been just a short seven years ago. Even Smoky was really starting to get worried about him, as was Paul Garvey, a homeless wreck serving time at Her Majesty’s Remand Centre in Richmond, Surrey.
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But George was happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever been. A kind of peaceful quiet had finally descended on his soul. Lately he’d met “a bloke named Keith who is a follower of the Guru Maharishi,” and the two enjoyed conversations on a park bench over chips and coffee.
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He was enclosing a picture of himself, he wrote to Kathleen, taken in his office by a photographer; the best faculty photo, people said, in all of the department. In it he is wearing a colorfully striped shirt and dark bow tie, sporting a wry smile above a scraggly red beard, counterbalanced by fine hair brushed back above a broad forehead. Only the eyes confuse an otherwise joyful portrait: Tucked behind dark-rimed glasses, one is small and kind, the other open wide and strangely empty.
He was feeling so good that he decided to send Kathleen a special surprise. His only likely source at the time was in Nottingham, where, he divulged to his daughter as if reading her a bedtime story, the sheriff who hunted Robin Hood had lived. But in the end he took out the quid’s worth of pot, pressed between the pages of a C. S. Lewis book stamped for California. He had just moved to a new squat, and ended up smoking it himself.
Life among the destitute, as the “Monthly Message” of the London Healing Mission newsletter admitted, was “certainly never dull.”
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There was an alcoholic woman beater whose partner George had hid from him and who was demanding to know where she was. Increasingly he would come around the Galton, insisting to see George, and, when refused entry by the guard, would yell from the pavement up to his office. George refused to divulge the woman’s whereabouts and soon was keeping his own whereabouts secret, too. “The reason for the secrecy,” he explained to Kathleen after half apologizing for smoking the reefer,
is mainly one very difficult man who has been coming around where I work to look for me and causing trouble. A week ago Monday he pissed publically on the front steps of the genetics building, smashed a bicycle lamp, scattered the contents of some student’s satchel around, and shouted his best obscenities.
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The people he was living among and helping weren’t always as friendly as he was, but, having been enveloped in a halo of serenity, George wouldn’t allow this to dampen his mood. “I expect that one cover-illustrated article in Nature compensates for one urination at the front entrance to the building,” he joked to Kathleen, his sense of humor still very much alive.
The administrators at the Galton weren’t happy about the down-and-outs who were showing up, still less for their urinations and assaults on students. Late in the fall, George had met a young IBM programmer from America at the Russell Square Underground Station who turned out to share his liking for Proust plus his total lack of sense of direction and great inability in pronouncing unfamiliar names. Excited, George took him back to his office and they spent the evening talking about Proust and computer programming. As it happened, the young American was wearing blue jeans, leather boots, a green poncho, and had about a three-day stubble. Wary of George’s exploits, the beadle immediately pegged him as an alcoholic and pressured Harry Harris into introducing a new rule against late-night and weekend working without special permission. CABS tried to help by sneaking George a key to the statistics library, but he was discovered. Soon he was no longer coming in to his office at UCL. Too quickly his colleagues at the department were losing contact with him. Most thought he had gone off the deep end. “He certainly flipped,” one of them recalled.
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Then, in mid-November, Al Somit arrived in London for a visit. The UCL photo may have made George look healthy and chipper, but that was only a head shot and after a rare shower to boot; the professional photographer hired by the Galton had obviously done some magic. In reality things were very different. Al hadn’t seen George for about eight years and was dismayed and appalled at what he now found: He’d first met him in the weight room at the University of Chicago, offbeat perhaps but handsome and muscular and hard; now George was as sinewy and gaunt as an old man, the spring in his step all but vanished. He was grungy and oily and shabbily dressed, his teeth were beginning to rot, his outgrown hair was as brittle as hay, his fingers yellow from smoking. They joked together like in the old times at the co-op before Al shifted, inevitably, to a more serious tone: “I’m not going to give you money for the new pair of shoes you obviously need unless you promise not to give it to these two leeches,” he said to him in a coffee shop, eyeballing two alcoholics who had been on George’s tail. George thanked him but said he couldn’t make such a promise, and that no amount of convincing would help. It was the same old George, he thought, always contrary, always at the extreme. Holding his hand out with a smile to say good-bye, Al walked away from his old friend with the pound notes still deep in his pocket.
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“It was nice to see you again though, in all honesty, I think I would have preferred finding you in somewhat other circumstances,” he wrote upon his return to Buffalo, suddenly feeling worried and regretful.
It occurred to me, as I reflected on our discussion, that you may be confusing the notion of
serving
your fellow man with
loving
your fellow man. If the former, surely there are more effective ways than the one which you have adopted.
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Then he added, with a candor far removed from their usual wisecracking: “The latter may, in fact, be quite beyond your capacity—or mine.”
When he left their meeting, George literally had nowhere to go. It was cold out. At Euston Station he met an alcoholic who told him about the headquarters of the Tolmers Village Association, just down the road. The address was 102 Drummond Street, and, the man said, it was one of the few places around with a hot bath.
The Tolmers Village Association had been born in the summer of 1973, the fruit of community action to help save the neighborhood from Stock Conversion, a property developing company, and its owner, Mr. Joe Levy. Levy had become rich in the sixties, having obtained planning permission to build offices on a one-acre site on the corner of Euston and Hampstead roads in Camden. Demolition began in 1963, and within a short few years the run-down shops and houses west of Hampstead Road had all been bulldozed and replaced by “millions of pounds worth of windswept glass, concrete and steel, full to the brim with office workers.” The first of the big property bonanzas, the Euston Centre whetted Levy’s appetite. And as the conscientious members of the Tolmers Square Tenants Association were busy fighting in the Camden Council for the tenants down the road who were being displaced by the new massive high-rise tower, Levy and Stock Conversion were buying up their houses, literally under their noses, to do to Tolmers Square what they had done with Euston Centre.
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Levy hadn’t gotten rich because he was lucky, and now the same acute developer’s nose had led him once again to a practically assured gold mine. Tolmers Square had originally been built in the nineteenth century for the middle class, an almost complete, oblong circle of dark brick four-tiered Victorian terraced houses surrounding a church. Soon, however, it was taken over by the working classes, and when the main-line terminals of St. Pancras and Euston displaced thousands of residents toward the end of the nineteenth century, overcrowding and prostitution turned the area into one of London’s worst residential slums. Heavy bombing during World War II, though, combined with rising health standards and—with the expansion of Euston Station—the encroachment of industry, commerce and offices, led to a population drop from an 1870s level of more than five thousand to just above one thousand in 1970. It was then that the Tory government attempted to stimulate the economy by letting the bank rate fall from 8 precent to less than 5 percent, resulting in a flood of capital into property. By the beginning of 1973 the market valuation of property companies in Britain was £3.6 billion, more than the entire gold and dollar reserves of the United Kingdom. With its run-down porticos and leaky pipes, Tolmers Square had little present value, but Levy’s nose didn’t fail him: Just half a mile to the north of Oxford Street, with Soho and the theater district just beyond, east of fashionable Primrose Hill, and only a few minutes walk from Regent’s Park, Tolmers Square and its North Gower, Drummond, and Euston Street environs would fetch at least three times the rent for office rather than residential space, and considerably higher than for office space in other parts of London. It was a speculator’s jackpot.
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