While hiking in the mountains I sometimes have unexpected insights.  One time, while resting at a mountain peak, I was seized by the impulse to consult my heart, and ask:  "What's the right thing to do in a world with unintelligent and unmotivated people?"  And my heart answered:  "Be your brother's keeper.  For they were not as lucky as you to have received the will to work, and the intelligence and motivation that makes work effective."

I thought about that as I hiked down the mountain slope.  What superficial and silly advice the heart gave me!  And I promptly forgot about it.

A few years later I had an experience that reminded me of my heart's advice.  I was spending the day helping someone with a move to another city.  The person wasn't too bright, and had never been motivated to do the responsible thing.  But during this particular period the person was actually trying to do the right things, and as I watched the bank clerk patiently explain some simple things about opening a checking account I was seized by that same feeling that had occurred on the mountain.  I appealed to my heart again, for a translation of the feeling into a verbal message that I could understand.  And it said:  "See how earnestly the unlucky try to manage their own lives, and see how the more able can patiently help them?  Nothing is lost when the able person helps the helpless.  Be your brother's keeper, and see how rich the world can be."

That moment changed my life.  From then on I had new eyes for looking at the down-trodden, the homeless, the unintelligent and unmotivated.  They cannot be held responsible for receiving a bad assortment of genes that they are stuck with.  And by the same reasoning I cannot take credit for the better genes that I have, nor the better destiny that this good luck affords me.

With that moment of realization, I began to devote more of my efforts to helping the less fortunate.  I began tutoring at a local college, where the "learning disabled" needed help.  I served food to the homeless one Christmas morning.  And I did volunteer work at the various schools my daughter attended.

I wanted to do more, though.  I wanted to help a wider population.  With this motivation I began to study the problems of the "helpless," as I came to call them, from a larger perspective.  My reading provided occasional troubling thoughts, made by cynical people who, I concluded, didn't understand other people's problems empathically.

I went to a nearby University to study journal articles.  Some of them dealt with feeding the starving Ethiopians, or building housing for those poor people who are ignored by natural market forces.  Occasionally I would seek out professionals and question them about these matters.

One of the professors I spoke with was especially patient with me.  Perhaps this was because I was an adult amongst younger students, and I had some of the idealism that is supposed to be lost during the passage to adulthood.  I wondered if he thought I had been affected in an unusual way by the mid-life transition.  At any rate, he patiently answered my questions without probing my motivations.

One day, however, his growing curiosity overcame his reluctance to intrude.  He asked:  "Why are you devoting your free time to helping the helpless?"  "Because they are helpless, and the world is a nicer place when the stronger help the weaker," I answered.  That was all.  He accepted this answer.  But, in some vague way, I didn't!  I began to wonder what was causing me to waver.

I cannot say if it was the professor's gentle question, which he did not challenge, or whether some of my reading was bothering me.  I sensed a nagging doubt about what I was doing.  Perhaps the endeavor was futile, I vaguely wondered.

At about this time I encountered an article in Nature magazine by a Soviet geneticist, Alexey S. Kondrashov ("Deleterious Mutations and the Evolution of Sexual Reproduction," Nature, 336, 435, 1988 Dec 1).  It was difficult reading, but some ambivalent attraction kept my attention to the task.  About half way through the article I began to have a stomach ache.  It was while studying a graph describing "mutational load."  The graph showed a distribution of the number of newborns versus some arbitrary trait and a trace for the distribution of adults for the same trait, after selection pressures took their toll.  His conjecture was that mutations are constantly degrading the genetic heritage, and in the normal state of nature there was a steady-state recovery since the small fraction of survivors were those not affected by the deleterious mutations.  I recalled the fact, with a wincing feeling, that in the natural state women bear an average of 8 children, and on the average only 2 of these survive to adulthood.  The six that died, it suddenly occurred to me, may be Kondrashov's deleterious mutation carriers!

The consequences of this reasoning were inevitable.  The modern human condition has improved so much that women are having fewer children, and successfully raising all of them to adulthood.  "This is a good thing, isn't it?" I wondered.  "It's the type of progress we want all people of the world to share in, isn't it?"

Question followed question.  Answers didn't!  I went to the patient professor, and explained my dilemma.  And I was surprised by his reaction.

He said "So now you know!  You know one of the secrets that a handful of professionals have figured out!  This one is an aspect of the Human condition that cannot be published.  There is a code that every knowing person adheres to.  It is that the ugly truth shall not be told to anyone, and it shall not be discussed with anyone who has not come to it by their own thinking.  The ugly truth is like a taboo; it is kept within the profession, and you are one of the few to have uncovered this one in the only way that it is uncovered.  Welcome to the fellowship of caretakers of sacred forbidden knowledge!"

I felt numb!  As he was saying these things I felt a part of myself, a very important part that I did not want to lose, just slip away.  I did not want to hear what he was saying; I had wanted him to tell me that it wasn't true, that I had overlooked something.  I began to feel alone, inexplicably alone.

I began looking at the world through different eyes after this experience.  I ceased my studies, and told myself that I needed a "vacation" from the endeavor.  Later I would come back to the matters that disturbed me, and try to find a flaw in the argument that seemed to follow from the Kondrashov speculation.

I went hiking again, to the same mountain that years before led me to consult my heart, now half expecting to find a guiding path out of my dilemma.  When I reached the peak, I asked my heart to speak again.  And the heart spoke:  "There are other truths that are unspeakable!  Seek them out, and through them find a winning path."

Then I recalled that indeed the professor had said that "you know one of the secrets..."  I had overlooked that he implied there were others.  Perhaps another is an antidote to the first, and the professor could not tell me about it.

This hope revived my studies, and I enthusiastically resumed searching for the forbidden antidote to the "Kondrashov catastrophe."

I went back to the professor and told him what I was hoping for.  He said nothing, and just nodded his head in a noncommittal manner.  It occurred to me, while standing in front of the wise old man, that Schopenhauer's pessimism might in fact be right, and existence is nothing but disappointment, pain and disillusion; that humans "never get what they want, and can never love what they get."  That, just as for an individual person, for whom "life is an immense preparation for something that never happens," so it might be for civilizations.

"But professor," I protested, "doesn't the world deserve to know some possible consequences if the Kondrashov catastrophe is true?  If there's no antidote for it..." and I couldn't formulate the rest of the sentence.  He said "Some things are possible, and some aren't."  Then changed the subject.

This story has no end.  I am still searching.  It is a brave search, for I have learned that the truth is sometimes ugly.
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This site opened:  January 16, 1999.   Last Update: January 16, 1999