Joy and the Selfish Gene

Guest Opinion

This differs from the essay I had set out to write. Initially, I was writing a piece titled, “What If He Wasn’t So Wretched.” After finishing the essay and washing my hands, I felt another idea creeping into my peripheral vision, this one about joy. I thought, “He was awful yesterday, he’s wretched today, and he’ll probably be miserable tomorrow. So, the essay will not go to waste!”

After watching the Democratic National Convention (DNC), I was struck by how different the Democratic convention was from the Republicans’.

At the Republican National Convention (RNC), the participants consistently appeared to be—there’s no other way to put it—pissed off and aggrieved. It was as if they had just learned that the world as they knew it had changed irrevocably, never to return to how things used to be. I suspect that is what they mean by making America great again and America first.

One felt a feeling spreading over the DNC crowd from the first to the last day. There’s only one word that captures the emotions of Chicago: joy, something that had been in short supply in the previous nine years, especially the last three and a half. Writers are fond of asserting that Trump sucks all the oxygen out of any room he enters. I disagree; I think that it is the joy that he sucks out of every room.

Joy! What a welcome contrast to the tomfoolery and mean-spiritedness of the Trump years and his never-ending fight to overcome America’s resistance to his brand of politics. He’s like that suitor who refuses to take no for an answer and tries desperately to win you over with the force of his will. The country is fortunate that he is elderly, because even if he lost the next election, he wouldn’t give up; he’d run again if he could still move. Not only is such bullheadedness nuts, but it’s also even worse and more corrosive: it’s selfishness.

The Selfish Gene, by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is the best book I’ve ever read about the sin of selfishness. Dawkins writes that a gene is “selfish” if it acts in a way that promotes its survival at the expense of other competing entities.

All genes are similar physically: they are all snippets of DNA. Where they differ is in the information they encode. Some genes are more selfish than others, while some are altruistic. The altruistic gene ensures survival together.

Mutually altruistic behaviors are often successful because they benefit an organism more than selfish behavior does. This is how a flourishing human society thrives and survives.

You can see where this metaphor is taking us. Trump personifies the selfish gene, one that believes that life is a zero-sum game. For him to win, he thinks you must lose, and because he is selfish at his core, he doesn’t care that you lose. Your loss is not his concern.

An ancient African proverb says, “The boy who is not loved will burn down the village just to feel its heat.” And isn’t that precisely what happened on Jan. 6, 2020, an attempt to burn down the People’s House? Because he was unloved, Trump sicced a pack of rabid followers on the Capitol. He inspired them to prepare a noose to hang his Vice President and refused to call them off even when urged to do so by his daughter.

The selfishness, vindictiveness, and venal sheer depravity are enough to take one’s breath away. It exists in such a magnitude of supply that it’s challenging to comprehend. And because it is palpable, it fills one with fear and dread.

But joy is an exquisite antidote to fear, because joy, fear, boredom, and sorrow cannot exist simultaneously. Psychologists caution us that one cannot find joy just by thinking about it or deciding to feel joy. Finding joy requires us to do something that brings joy.

That is why the DNC convention was hopeful and joyful. The whole week was an exercise in exorcizing the monster who almost devoured our democracy. For the first time in forever, we could see a path forward, a way out of the misery and malaise that accompanied the selfish gene’s ride down the golden escalator in what seems like two lifetimes ago.

As one minister said near the end of the DNC convention, quoting Psalm 30:5, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

Trust that there is even more joy ahead when, once and for all, the angry, malignant monster will be defeated at the ballot box. Then, once again, we may believe in what can be and be unburdened by what came before.

Isiah Smith, Jr. is a retired government attorney.

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