Posted on 22nd October, 2025 in Blog posts
WHY BE GOOD : The origins of altruism and why it matters
In December 2024 Matt Ridley, author of Origins of Virtue, introduced this topic at an Athenaeum Club salon. I then followed on with the words below, which expressed the ideas about the origins of altruism that had come to me as I wrote TO THE RIVER, the novel featured elsewhere on this website. WE both had relatives who had been fugitives during war in Italy, in 1943-4.
WHY BE GOOD : The origins of altruism and why it matters
To explain why I think this topic so important, I can do no better than quote the American sociologist Joseph Henrich . He writes:
‘For Saint Augustine, the source of social order lay in the teachings of Christ. For Hobbes it lay in the sovereign. For Lenin it lay in the party. They were all wrong. The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating, not a perfect harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present. We must build our institutions in such a way that they draw out those instincts.’
(Henrich, Joseph (2020) The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: p264)
Now I get on to the topic itself.
- During WW2, all over occupied Europe the German armies murdered people who helped those they sought to imprison or persecute.
- A very small number of people in each country can be identified as rescuers, because they risked death and the destruction of their families and communities when they harboured those sought by the Germans.
- Usually, the fugitives were Jews or political resisters. In Italy though, in 1943, the vast majority of those hiding from the Germans were allied escapees from prison camps. Both Matt Ridley and I had relatives who were escapees in Italy in 1943.
- TO THE RIVER tells the story of a young woman, Lucia Riva, who takes a dangerous decision to help former enemies – British prisoners – escape from their enemy. Her transformation from a clever but otherwise unremarkable provincial girl into a leading rescuer, starts with her coming across a lost Jewish refugee, the 5-year old Heinz.
- The story starts shortly before the Italian government surrendered to the Allies in September 1943. Following the allied invasion of Sicily and the fall of Mussolini, in July 1943, the Germans began to occupy northern and central Italy in order to hold off the allied armies under Montgomery, coming north.
- Wherever the Germans took control, the suppression of anti–fascists and the deportation of Jews were intensified and 80,000 allied prisoners of war were to be seized and sent to Poland.
- Returning to Lucia, heroine of TO THE RIVER, although her reason tells her to get shot of the little Jewish refugee Heinz, a kind of instinctive love, warmed into a passion by the encouragement of her mother and her classics teacher, makes her take responsibility for the child.
- Then, having crossed that Rubicon, she becomes one of the hunted herself, she turns from a grieving and self-absorbed young widow into a leader, not only in her own community but of hundreds of fugitives who become her dependents.
- She jettisons all her hopes for her own future when she mobilises her community to succour the escapees, British soldiers rather less charming and less grateful than Heinz. 600 prisoners break out of their camp in Umbria under the command of the Irish FitzGerald, but they are guided and supplied by Lucia and the country people she has mobilised.
- In my story, Lucia then accompanies the wounded Fitzgerald south, and over the Maiella mountains, to the battle lines where German armies under Rommel and Allied forces under Montgomery face each other. FitzGerald wants to return to the British with crucial intelligence but depends upon Lucia as guide and camouflage.
- The action takes place over 4 months as they slog down Italy, over the Maiella mountains to the River Sangro. Fitzgerald, the senior prisoner who eventually swims the Sangro, changes more slowly, from a self-righteous crusader to someone sensitive to virtues and values which he had probably earlier dismissed as
- All the main events in the novel did happen, they are woven into a story from the accounts of many different people. I explain this on my website hugodeburgh.com
- As a child in Italy in the 1960s, I heard tales of wartime from an Italian perspective. Much later, back in the UK, I met many of those who had escaped from prison camps in Italy, by that time mostly retired professional men. I always asked them the questions: why did the rescuers rescue and why did the bystanders not? What differentiates them?
- The risks to the rescuers were very great and the rewards none. To this day there are many villages in Italy that are unpopulated ruins, as they were exterminated by the Germans because they harboured fugitives.
- The answer given by the ex-fugitives to my question was that there was a culture of empathy in rural and small town Italian society, along with a dismissive attitude to authority, whether political or religious. They often also said that it was the women who were the virtuous, taking the lead.
- In particular, Stuart Hood, who had escaped when a subaltern, and after the war became an eminent writer and broadcaster, ruminated on this in his later years. As a young communist, he had assumed that the rural proletariat felt solidarity with the outlaws. Later, he mused to me that their altruism was unconnected with political belief or ‘class consciousness’.
- Nor did they look for reciprocity. Hood was categorical that the rescuers had no idea of getting any return, nor that they were inspired by moral teachings or religious beliefs.
- I might never have written the novel, had I not, in 1993 in a different connection, been sent by C4TV to California to interview a psychologist, Samuel Oliner, about his research into what led ordinary men and women risk their lives on behalf of others during the persecution of the Jews.
- Samuel Oliner studied rescuers in several European countries and found that
‘Moral behaviours for most people are the consequence of strong attachments to moral communities, communities that regard ethical obligations as universally binding.’
Oliner also wrote:
‘We found a clear correlation between empathy and altruistic behaviour—helpers simply could not stand by and see others suffer. We also found that altruists, unlike bystanders, had internalized an ethic of caring and social responsibility learned from their parents.’
- Put in more concrete terms, the common denominator was that rescuers’ mothers, in particular, had passed on a set of instinctive values, absorbed not through teaching, but by osmosis.
- So, was it Italian culture, in which mothers are supposedly so dominating and the Virgin Mary is held up as role model, that provided the virtue urge, or something else? Was it the teachings of the church? After all, many religious people did succour fugitives.
- Taking on the question of whether virtuosity derives from religious teachings, in my novel I have a German army chaplain, a deserter called Father Wolfgang, reject the presumption that the virtuous were virtuous because they had been catechised by the church.
- I’m going to quote an exchange after Lucia Riva, taking shelter in a monastery, goes into the great hall which is full of hundreds of refugees and is greeted by Father Wolfgang:
His voice was enthusiastic. ‘ Grüß Gott! Salve! You are Signora Riva? You are a brave woman. I know what you’ve been doing further north.’
‘Not alone, Father. There were many doing the work.’
‘Would there were more. Most people don’t help.’
Lucia recognised something in Father Wolfgang that propelled her to ask, ‘And those who do help, those few, why do they do it?’
A nearby woman with a baby took her eyes off it and intervened.
‘A Christian education.’
The priest turned to her. ‘I regret to have to say it, but Christ does not make men good. Almost all our German soldiers were brought up in the faith, yet which of those has for a moment hesitated to harm? I have given the sacraments to General Lanz. General Lanz, who has slaughtered thousands of unarmed people on the Greek islands.’
Lucia: ‘You, a priest, say that it is not Christ who makes people good?’
‘Oh, he may affect a few. But those are Christians because they are good, not good because they are Christians.’
- Notwithstanding Father Wolfgang, many of us from a monotheist background believe that our moral impulses come from religion and that, as is often attributed to G. K. Chesterton, ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they become capable of believing in anything.’
- It is instructive to compare with China because it is the most longstanding human civilisation and has managed for most of that time without a god, as we monotheists understand God.
- Before the CCP imposed Russian Communism, Chinese followed moral precepts that derived from their thinkers’ understanding of nature and the environment.
- While obeisance was made to heaven in official rituals, this heaven did not have moral authority like a god. Respect for heaven was simply an acknowledgment that we humans are an integral part of nature and must try to understand and obey its laws.
- In China, before the Chinese Enlightenment of c500BC, there may have been those who attributed everything to powerful forces outside human understanding, like Greek or Norse gods. During the Chinese Enlightenment, though, both Confucius and Laozi taught that it is by observing nature, and how we fit into it, that we learn how we should behave, so that we can understand and practice universal values.
- Confucius considered that man was born with those values wired in, but that he or she needed education and ritual to keep them operational, reinforce them. Xunzi thought man was born nasty but that he or she needed education and ritual to keep him or her conforming to (in the words of St Paul, 350 years later) ‘whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure’.
(Philippians 4:8)
- In this connection, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich (66) thinks that how we behave is the product of cumulative cultural evolution. He writes (179)
‘the human practice of passing on traditions, customs, knowledge and belief is by direct infection from one person to another’ so that our attitudes and behaviour evolve.
That seems to fit with the Chinese sages.
- For, to those Chinese sages, the very idea of a lawmaker external to nature was an illusion as ridiculous as an afterlife in which we end up in heaven or hell, possibly, if a martyr of a certain kind, with 72 virgins.
- Not that Chinese did not believe in afterlife. For them, immortality was achieved for your parents through you and through you for your children. And that was before they had heard of Richard Dawkins!
- Simple Chinese might have statues of saints – a great general here, a philanthropist there, a Buddha, Jesus or some folk God such as Guan Yin, Goddess of Mercy – but these were the equivalent of our statues of worthies, role models and friends, found in Trafalgar Square and all around our club here. They never made you good, nor did you apply to them for absolution.
- For the Chinese, therefore, virtue is an instinct, which can be enhanced or perverted by education or experience. The mechanism by which virtue is triggered, according to the sage Mencius, is the love or benevolence cultivated in the family so that it could be extended out to others, with whom we see ourselves as integrated:
老吾老以及人之老，幼吾幼以及人之幼《孟子·梁惠王上》
- Mencius’ idea seems to tie in nicely with Oliner’s. Henrich, on the other hand, believes this is wrong: he considers that close kinship is antithetical to universal values, the opposite of what appears to be the lesson from Italy, or from Samuel Oliner. I leave you to decide.
- I want to end by reading a vignette, the story of a greatcoat, which illustrates something of the world of the fugitives of 1943.
- Guided by a teenager, Nino, FitzGerald and Lucia, burdened with two small refugee children and exhausted, have climbed up the Maiella massif in November. It is nightfall when they spy a shepherds’ bothy.
Outside, against the front wall and sheltered by a little rampart about two feet high, jutting out at a right angle from the house, sat four or five men, warming themselves around the fire of a few logs on which a stew was cooking.
Nino sat down between two of the men. Lucia and FitzGerald stood nearby, waiting. Nino spoke without preliminaries, ‘Have the shepherds not left yet?’
A young man replied without looking up, ‘No, we leave at dawn.’
After a while, one of the men, his hooked nose giving him a face like an eagle, invited the two strangers to join them.
‘Come and sit down.’ He had an extraordinarily deep voice, like the echo of a fathomless cave.
Lucia was shivering. FitzGerald stamped his feet and, taking her free hand, went to sit beside the fire.
Eagle Face ladled out a canteen of stew and passed it to Lucia.
‘Chew it first until it is a mush, then give it to the baby,’ he suggested. He thrust hunks of meat into FitzGerald’s and Enrico’s hands: ‘Mangi! Mangi! Eat! Eat!’
As they ate, the man questioned them.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Through the lines.’
Eagle Face looked grave.
After a few minutes, in which he seemed to be trying to penetrate their minds, he spoke matter-of factly. ‘Avoid the road to Castel di Sangro because the Germans are defending Roccaraso, Rocca Pia, Castel di Sangro and Alfedena.’
‘Thank you,’ said FitzGerald. He wondered why Nino had not brought up how they were to pass the night. I must get space inside for Lucia and the baby at least, he thought. He waited for Lucia or Nino to take the lead.
When they had finished their meal, Eagle Face spoke as if he were their host, or the landlord. ‘You are cold, all of you. Go inside, you, your female and your little ones, find a spot to lie down.’
Lucia was dumb, perhaps cowed by tiredness. FitzGerald helped her up and together they went inside the mountain hut.
As Eagle Face held open the door, they perceived, dimly, bodies all over the floor. The walls were black and greasy, the smell of sweat was everywhere, punctuating the burning smell from a glowing brazier. Eventually they found a clear space and lay down together. Enrico held tight onto Lucia’s back; Vito was against her breasts. A few moments later, somebody stepped over them and shoved a folded greatcoat under their heads. It was Eagle Face from outside.
They heard that deep voice again. ‘Sleep now, I can see you are very tired.’ Then he went, closing the door and immersing them in darkness.
Lucia, without looking at FitzGerald, curled up into his body, the baby now between them.
…[…]…
After an hour or so, he woke. Lucia and the baby were sleeping deeply, having detached themselves from his coat and curled up into a ball. FitzGerald, rising carefully so as not to disturb them, stepped over other sleepers and went outside to join the shadows before the fire. He looked for Eagle Face, but he was not present.
To the shadows in general, he asked, ‘What has happened to the man with the hooked nose?’ In the light of the flames, FitzGerald saw, from his sheepskin jacket, breeches and leggings, that the man to whom he had addressed himself was a shepherd.
‘He’s gone, over the mountains somewhere.’
‘Did he have an overcoat?’
‘No, when he left he did not have his overcoat and I was surprised.’
PAUSE
- In conclusion: From birth, a kitten knows how to stand or suck a teat without a PSHE lesson. Perhaps, the origins of virtue, as expressed in the lives of the rescuers, lie in what they have understood about themselves and others at their mother’s breast.
- If so, a human who is not perverted from his other instincts by bad examples, by fear or by political interference, will cleave to his or her instinctively derived values.
- Why some people will never do so, but always be bystanders or actively evil, is another question, for another novel. Unless Matt Ridley can tell us.