The most common source of unethical behavior in the modern world is self-interest. We, as individuals, tend to believe that our interests are worth more than those of others. This makes sense, given that our own needs and wants are evident to us, but the needs and wants of others are slightly harder to understand. What this has given us is a society whose main focus is the individual and the improvement of said individual. This is, in fact, a backwards way of living. Our priority must be the advancement of humanity; improvement of the individual will come as a result.
Now before we can assert that improving society is of the utmost priority, we must understand how the individual can help society. In this case one can perceive altruism as the basis of improving human culture. It is no wonder then that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are all necessary to the evolution of the human race. Humans, as it turns out, are “a species whose members are so pathetically helpless,” and as such require help from each other. We see evidence of this in humanity’s antiquity, when we congregated together and did what was best for the group. For our ancestors, altruism was not a choice but a necessity. Roko Belic states in his documentary “Happy” that happiness is an evolutionary reward for cooperation as evident by the fact that people who lead virtuous life have the highest overall well being. We see parallels to this idea in the ancient greek’s word eudaimonia. Usually translated as happiness, it is actually correctly translated as human flourishing. Both Belic and the greeks saw the affinity between our everyday lives and morality. How can we ignore the human trait that has allowed us to propagate into the most dominant species on Earth?
A simple look around will show you that the human race has changed. It is no longer a struggle to survive. Now the question here is how this change came about? How did we go from a heavily altruistic culture to a heavily materialistic culture? This change is likely due to population size. In primordial humans’ age, the group size was small; they could possible know everyone in your assembly. It is easy to assume you are more likely to help someone you know than someone you don’t. This is merely Richard Dawkins's idea of kin selection in action. Over time our population size grew while our kin size stayed the same and as a result overall altruism decreased. Now what did this change cause? The difference is how we judge our own lives. If you asked your ancestor how his life was going, “you are asking him to make a moral evaluation of his life” says Matthew Pianalto. In essence he would answer with how good he had been to his fellow man. Ask the same question to a present day individual and they will most likely answer with how well they are satisfying their wants (Pianalto 8). So we can now see that the only change in the human species is a change in thinking. Does this necessarily constitute a new way of acting? No, our goals and purposes in life are still the same yet now we insist on improving the individual. There is no good reason for this.
We see repercussions of this self-centered culture everywhere. Ask anyone what constitutes a good life and they will answer “happiness.” Because of our culture’s fascination with materialism, one can assert that society believes monetary worth is a quantitative measure of happiness. If self-improvement is in fact the right way to go about living, then we should see a direct correlation between monetary worth and happiness. It turns out, though, the opposite is true. The United States ranks #1 in wealth yet scored 12th in life satisfaction. Denmark, ranked 16th in wealth, scored 1st in life satisfaction. What this shows us is the amount of expendable income accumulated after basic needs are provided for correlates indirectly with happiness. Money, and to a greater extent materialism, is only a fraction of happiness. The rest of of your life should be focused on leading a virtuous life. If this is true then we must assume, as Pianalto says, that “ scores of people who are failing to live up to the standards of moral and intellectual excellence are not leading happy lives.” I believe this is true, unfortunately.
Ask anyone and they will answer that our culture appears to be backwards. As a species who survives on nature, began in nature, and is still a part of nature, we have strived long and hard to distance ourselves from it. Even what makes us human, our human nature, we have long sought to separate ourselves from. We have romanticised this past as if ancient humans knew something we didn’t. This assumption, though, is right. What our ancestors knew was that we needed to work together to survive, and while we need not try hard to survive, our goals must remain the same. It seems odd that we would not want to cooperate with each other; we are all the help we are ever going to get.
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