Selfishness Through Temper Desire

When talking about the good in the world, we refer to the evil. There is not good without the evil, we can agree with that. We refer to the opposite in order to emphasize on the meaning we are trying to cherish. When referring to The Selfish Gene, Dawkins is not quite referring to selfishness. Instead, he constantly refers to altruism, and the altruistic traits that recur in the process of evolution. He describes altruism at the individual level in nature: “The commonest and most conspicuous acts of animal altruism are done by parents, especially mothers, towards their children” (6). The bond between a mother and his child is not only the gene they share. It’s a whole structure where sacrifice becomes self evident. Nowadays it’s a common cliché to refer at the mother who did everything she could to save her child. We see it in the Exodus, where Jochebed hides Moses from the Pharaoh in order to avoid her son from being killed. Such things can’t be explained. Such things are “behavioral, not subjective”, therefore the motives of taking such decision are irrelevant.

Since the beginning of the world, either through Big Bang or the Creation, everything was simple enough to have the endeavor to become more complex. From an atom we create a molecule, from molecules we create cells, organs, tissues, bodies, men. Men. Man was created from simplicity, and that led to instant selfishness. The Fall of Man is a clear example of how we are condemned to egotism. Why would Adam disobey God’s orders concerning the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? As the Tao Te Ching explains: “It is more important /To see the simplicity/To realize one's true nature /To cast off selfishness/And temper desire” (Tao Te Ching 19). Here we confront with four different variables: simplicity, nature, selfishness, and desire. Adam was tempted to eat from the tree, it was not his “true nature” to do so. From temptation came desire, but it doesn’t refer to only desire: to temper desire. It refers to a desire that annoys, and indeed man’s desire led to God’s rage, which later led to humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. And man’s nature is determined from this episode. We are separated from the rest of the species due to the fact we know good and evil. We decided to cast off our selfishness instead of embracing simplicity, and that led to what we today know as our nature.

And for the same reason atoms create molecules and cells create tissues, we ought to derive from somewhere, don’t we? According to Darwin, Homo sapiens is the last stage of a constant process of evolution that started millions of years ago as a simple prokaryotic species. But if we look it the other way around, what is our other possible origin? It is quite obvious, according to Dawkins we are “all descended from the same ancestor” (17) , hence just as traits are transferred through the beautiful process of inheritance, we are also being gifted with Adam’s selfishness and temper desire. Since the moment we are born we are selfish, our mothers are not, though. In the Chronicles of Narnia, people from Narnia used to call human beings “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”. We are the sons of Adam, we inherited selfishness. Our mothers embrace altruism, which nowadays is quite helpful for the survival of young children in this world of self destructive selfishness.