The Origins of Virtue

By Matt Ridley

From the Introduction. This is a book about human nature, and in particular the surprisingly social nature of the human animal. We live in towns, work in teams, and our lives are spiders' webs of connections - linking us to relatives, colleagues, companions, friends, superiors, inferiors. We are, misanthropes not withstanding, unable to live without each other. Even on a practical level, it is probably a million years since any human being was entirely and convincingly self-sufficient: able to survive without trading his skills for those of his fellow humans.We are far more dependent on other members of our species than any other ape or monkey. We are more like ants or termites who live as slaves to their societies. We define virtue almost exclusively as pro-social behaviour, and vice as anti-social behaviour. Kropotkin was right to emphasize the huge role that mutual aid plays in our species, but wrong and anthropomorphic to assume that therefore it applied to other species as well. One of the things that marks humanity out from other species, and accounts for our ecological success, is our collection of hyper-social instincts.

London. Penguin,. 1996.294p. CONTAINS MARK-UP