Harman Oren Solomon. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

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George Price in his University College, London, office, 1973

Reckonings

Toward the end of April 1973 the grant came through. Beginning May 1 George

would be reappointed associate research fellow at the Galton, with a salary of

£3,195 for a year of research on genetic polymorphism, “no fixed hours of

attendance” stipulated. It was exceptional for the Medical Research Council to

award one-year grants, not to mention for the Galton to demand so little; CABS’s

imploring had evidently done some swaying. But in truth genetic polymorphism

in nature was rather far from his mind now. In May he wrote to Julia that he was

planning to find a large derelict house once the lease ended on June 24, and to start

a “Jesus people” commune with twenty to twenty-five people. Clearly her lack of

response to his marriage proposal meant that she wasn’t very interested. But she

should still come along with the girls and Dom in the summer to stay with him

there. He had no doubt that she’d be fond of Bernardo and Chrissy in particular.

To Mr. Norman Ingram-Smith of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields he wrote in more

detail about his wish to help solve the “bag-storage-place-to-wash-and-

change-clothes problem” of London’s homeless. There were two explicitly

Christian communes in the city: the Children of God commune on Walterton

Road and the Jesus Family commune in South Norwood. Both were full-time

evangelizing outfits, and both prohibited drinking and smoking: “That’s fine for

those who want that, but there are many people in London who enjoy helping

others but who smoke and drink moderately and want to hold jobs. So there is a

need for communes or co-ops with more permissive rules.”

The idea was to start such a commune by renting out a derelict house (not

squatting; after all, the people living there would all have jobs, and it wouldn’t be

fair not to pay rent), and opening it up as a haven for homeless who needed help.

Each member would decide what part of his or her possessions and income were

turned over for common use to the commune. Particular effort would be made to

get some members with skills useful for rehabilitating old houses: plumb-ers,

electricians, and so on. It would be a happy and friendly place, “with a bit of style

and swing to it,” for advertising to help make communal life seem attractive.

Members would be encouraged to invite guests for meals and to stay overnight or

longer. But this would not be a one-off; it was part of a much bigger plan:

The hope would be that other communes would spring up that similarly had

permissive and flexible rules, with members holding jobs, some of which would

have more social service emphasis. One desirable feature would be to have young

people and old people living together. Some communes might include bedridden

or blind people. Others might make a special effort to help alcoholics. And so on.

It would depend upon what people were interested in doing. If the idea took hold

and many communes were founded, a lot of problems could be alleviated,

including the problem of giving homeless people in some cases homes, and in

other cases a place to leave a suitcase, wash up, and change clothes.

Back in Little Titchfield, he was learning lessons of love from his lodgers. In the

living room he had built an altar, covered by a tablecloth and with a wooden cross

standing atop it. It was rather simple, George thought, but he had plans for a more

splendid one, with a skirt of black velvet and a top cloth of white velvet,

surrounded on the sides and back by drapes of blue velvet. Then one day Bernardo

asked for some Vaseline for his hair, and, apparently not noticing that it was an

altar, wiped his greasy hands on its cloth, and—to George’s horror—hung his

underpants on the cross. Just as he was about to give him a piece of his mind,

George came to see that this was Jesus telling him—through Bernardo—that the

rich velvet altar cloths were the wrong way, the old way, the Old Testament way,

whereas giving good clothes that he himself wanted to needy strangers was the

right way, the way of Jesus the Lord.

As much as living with strange men was educating him, the lease came to an end

on June 24, and, feeling utterly unworthy yet to follow Jesus’ true path of

suffering, the least George could do was not to renew it. The peculiar American

had been a godsend to the homeless of Euston Station and Soho Square for the

past three months, but he had completely failed to plan ahead for his own sake.

Now George was going to be homeless himself.

The first few nights he slept in his office at the Galton, but clearly this was no kind

of solution. Ursula Mittwoch, a colleague at the department, offered that George

stay with her family and do some tutoring for their teenage daughter who was just

then preparing for an English exam. She remembered his stay with fondness. Her

daughter loved George’s clarity and marveled at how he seemed to know all the

poems she was supposed to learn. Everyone enjoyed his good humor at breakfast

and dinner, his utter considerateness, tidiness, and gentle manner. Even George

himself was making a good time of it. “Th us far I have enjoyed being homeless,”

he wrote to his old family friend Dr. Gilfillan back in the United States on July 3.

“It is a good way to get acquainted with people.”

But the Mittwochs’ was only a short-term solution, as were fleeting stays at other

friends’ houses from the Galton. He’d moved most of his books and papers to

Wolfson House, the abode of the Department of Human Genetics and Biometry at

4 Stephenson Way. But soon George was beginning to see that this wasn’t going

to be all that easy. Before he could create his “Jesus people” commune, he would

need to find a place to sleep.

Having to abandon George’s apartment, too, Smoky was now once again behind

bars. From Her Majesty’s Prison, Pentonville, on Caledonian Road, he wrote on

lined prison notepaper to thank George for the radio he had sent him, but also to

explain his own philosophy. George might think that Jesus intervenes in people’s

lives, but Smoky was less salutary. “Lets be fair,” he wrote, “if we do wrong we

have to take the consequences.” George’s noble generosity was admirable, but in

the end the price might be too steep:

Come to think of it, you are better off keeping away from the square, those people

there have no respect for you, all they want is money and cider off you, you have

to consider yourself now and again, do they worry about you, when you are broke

and hungry. I doubt it very much.…give them half the chance and they would

squeeze you dry.

Selfless friendship was difficult to come by.

Talking about friends, where are all the ones who are supposed to be friends of

mine (YOU EXCEPTED OF COURSE!) I haven’t had even as much as a postcard

off any of them. So I can assure you, I don’t miss any single one of them,

FRIENDS, people call them? They are or were only drinking acquaintances, I

miss my drink and the privilege of walking the streets admittedly who doesn’t in

this place. In fact what purpose have these people got in LIFE? They live from one

day to the next wondering where the next drink is coming from they hardly ever

eat, have a bath, they won’t work, honestly I think some of them would be better

off in here, for a while.

He was praying that George and Peg Leg Pete find a place to rest their heads

again. George was a rarity: a true and honest altruist. He needed to watch out for

himself. “It’s not very nice in the Bruce House,” Smoky warned him of the

Centrepoint homeless hostel on the aptly onomatopoeic Drury Lane. “Pleased

don’t sleep that low!” Then he added, “I would suggest that you post the cash to

me in your next letter, if you can manage say £10 to £15.”

Thinking little of his own problems, George had lately started to help old people

around Myddleton Square near Saint Mark’s Church, nursing them or running

errands during the day and sleeping over nights when family found it difficult to

stay. Muriel Challenger, a congregation member, acted as the go-between. There

was the frail octogenarian Mrs. Rose on Chadwell Street, who wasn’t doing all

that well, and Mrs. Abercrombie, likewise, on Goswell Road. After explaining

that he shouldn’t worry if the old ladies sometimes seemed “changeable,” Muriel

wrote to George:

Mr. Eastop, 345 St. John Street, could do with someone to walk beside him for a

very short walk. It would be good for him to go out and not sit all day but he has

lost confidence since a severe illness. His little wife is housebound too & is not

much of a companion as she finds her deafness difficult to cope with.

George had seen Julia briefly when she visited in the beginning of August. She’d

come over, she made clear, to buy some antique jewelry and small collectibles to

sell at weekend antique markets back in Michigan. It was a sad coda to the

hopeful days all those years ago, when World War II was ending and the future

lay ahead. If there had been some miniscule, wild glimmer of hope that they

should get back together despite all their history, it had to be put to rest now. With

George homeless and making radical selflessness his life’s philosophy, it was

clear to Julia that her relationship with that handsome man she had encountered at

the Met Lab, the promising scientist who had become the father of her daughters

twenty-five years before, was finally, irreversibly dead.

George was staying at Bruce House now. Some nights a violent drunk would fight

him over his cubicle, and always he would yield with a smile. During the day he’d

walk to Euston Station and Piccadilly Circus to meet winos and beggars and see

how he could help them. He was wearing a large aluminum cross against his

chest, and twice already, he thought, it had come in handy. When he’d chanced

upon two cases of police brutality to homeless men he confronted the coppers

demanding that they stop. Each time he was told gruffly that it was none of his

business, and each time he remarked that it was. Then, on both occasions, the

policemen took a look at his cross and, silently if not entirely respectfully,

retreated.

He had testified at Smoky’s trial, but the testimony failed to shorten the sentence.

Never mind, George wrote encouragingly, this would give Smoky time to make a

true promise to Christ. “You asked me for suggestions about what to do when you

get out,” he offered.

Well, Smoky, I may be totally wrong, but since you ask me for advice I’ll tell you

what I believe. Your ideas, from what you’ve written to me, are about getting a

good job, working regularly, going to church regularly, and abstaining from

drink. Well, I don’t think you can manage it.

Instead George thought that he should take one or two drinks soon after he got

out, that he should right away, even now in prison, stop attending church services,

and that he should abandon ideas of getting a proper job and try to help the

homeless instead. The reasons for all this (“by the way,” George wrote, “this is

very unconventional advice”) were first, that not drinking entirely would only

inevitably lead to a powerful urge for the bottle; second, that going to church was

much less important than serving Jesus by loving and helping others; and third,

that since he knew the streets better than anybody, helping homeless

down-and-outs like himself would be the job he could accomplish with greatest

skill.

If you try to manage a conventional, in-between life I think you’ll quickly drift

back to the way you were. So I think your only way out is to resolve that you’re

going to go to the other extreme and give most of your time and efforts to helping

others, especially alcoholics. It’s much the same way that some dangerous

animals will attack a man if he tries to run away from them, but will run away

from him if he goes directly toward them. So, in the same way, think of cider and

wine, Soho Square and Bruce House and that whole way of life as a dangerous

tiger that will hunt you down if you try to flee from it, but if you go directly toward

it, armed with the “rifle” of intending to help people, it will flee from you.

Sealing the letter and addressing it to Pentonville, George might really have

written the advice to himself.

Back in October when he’d expressed to Maynard Smith his joy over the outcome

of their joint paper on the logic of animal conflict, he had paused to relate an

embarrassing misgiving. “There is one matter that has to be brought up now and

on which I need to hear from you before trying any re-writing,” he wrote. “This is

a rather unhappy matter to mention. It involves Bill Hamilton.”

What George was referring to was something Hamilton had once told him

regarding the refereeing of his 1964 paper on the evolution of social behavior.

Usually gentle and pacific, Hamilton felt that he’d been terribly wronged, and

continued to harbor a burning grudge against Maynard Smith after all these years.

For Maynard Smith had been the referee of his paper, Hamilton had learned, the

one responsible for asking to split it into two separate papers—a request that

eventually held up publication for close to nine months. This wouldn’t have been

so terrible if Maynard Smith himself had not hurried in the interim to publish the

paper in Nature contra Wynne-Edwards, in which he coined the term “kin

selection” for the very first time. After all, “kin selection” was a pilfering of

Hamilton’s idea of inclusive fitness; like King David with Uriah and Bathsheba,

Maynard Smith had not only sent Hamilton away but absconded in the meantime

with his beloved!

When George found out that Maynard Smith had been the Nature referee who

read his own paper on antlers in 1968, he remembered Hamilton’s ire and jumped

to similar conclusions. Once again, it seemed, John had held up a new idea and in

the meantime somehow found himself interested in the very same topic. But then

George met Maynard Smith and saw what a kind and gentle person he was.

Hamilton’s anger, he now believed, had to be the result of some

misunderstanding. This was the reason why, when Maynard Smith wrote to him

in 1971 wanting to cite his antlers paper, George replied, “If one mentions an

‘unpublished manuscript’ then someone may wonder about whether it was used

with permission, but if you speak of ‘discussion’ then no such suspicion arises.”

Having seen for himself that John was a good man, he wanted to protect him from

a possible second accusation.

Hamilton, though, had never gotten over it. This was tricky business, George

wrote to John in October, since in the draft of “The Logic of Animal Conflict” that

Maynard Smith had just sent him there was no reference to Hamilton on kin

selection. Clearly this needed to be fixed before George would put his name on

the paper.

But something else needed to be fixed as well. For, following his love conversion,

George saw that the current drafts had to be revisited. “This requires choosing

some words with more care,” he explained to John in February. “I think that I’ve

found wordings that you won’t object to and that won’t shock Nature’s readers by

making them suspect what I believe.”

Maynard Smith replied that he was sorry about not citing Hamilton in the draft;

oddly enough it was simply a glitch, and he’d fix it. He was sorry, too, about what

had happened in 1964. In fact he’d quoted Hamilton’s short 1963 paper then but

could have done better by citing the as-yet-unpublished paper that he had just

reviewed. He felt terrible about it, and would try to find the next opportunity to

“set the record straight” clearly, he wrote, “Bill certainly deserves any credit that

is going.”

As for the reworking of some of the language in their current joint

paper, John would defer to George’s sensitivities. He had no problem that the

word “Dove” from “Hawk v. Dove” be scrapped; instead they’d just call a

nonviolent, nonretaliating actor by the less theologically laden “Mouse.”

“The Logic of Animal Conflict” made the cover of Nature in November 1973.

“Game theory and computer analysis,” the authors concluded triumphantly,

“show…that a ‘limited war’ strategy benefits individuals as well as the species.”

With the newly introduced and formally defined concept of the ESS, it was a

paper that would impact the study of the evolution of behavior dramatically.

Down at Soho Square most days, searching for Aberdeen and Peg Leg Pete,

George had other things on his mind.

“As I need hardly tell you,” Al wrote to him from Buffalo,

the moral and religious precepts of the Gospel reflect a profound understanding

of human nature. I would think they are intended to identify goals toward which

we should strive, given our frailties…to live up to them literally may be to attempt

more than human nature can manage and, I suspect, more than we actually

intended. Trying to live up completely by such principles might produce little in

the way of peace of mind. And, it would seem to me, that where behavior based on

religious precepts does not yield peace of mind, the eventual result will almost

inevitably be the erosion of belief itself.

But George was deep in the forest on the path he had set for himself. “I can’t

remember whether I told you anything much about my way of life,” he wrote to

his brother, Edison.

I have no home, so use my business address as a mail address…. Usually I wear

brown Levis, sneakers, and a colorful shirt. Many times each month I find myself

reduced to one penny, a half penny, or zero. Most of my possessions have been

given away, including my watch and coat (but I’ll have to pick up a coat

somewhere now with winter coming on). Everywhere I go I keep running into

down-and-out alcoholics, to whom I give when I have anything, and with whom I

sit and drink from their bottle if they offer me a drink. Increasingly I find myself

on the opposite side from the police. Many of my friends have done time, and I’ve

been in a house that was raided and had my things searched then, but I haven’t

yet been busted…. I do a lot of smoking, and also smoke cigarettes, though I

haven’t yet developed a fag habit. A substantial amount of my time is given to

trying to help people in almost any way they ask me or seem to need help, whether

it’s by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen, talking to a landlord,

shopping for a housebound person, or trying to solve some mathematical problem

for somebody here at work. A lot of this helping is of old people, especially women

in their eighties. I live very cheaply and have been reducing my debts (which are

large) fairly rapidly since I became homeless…. In spite of vast amounts of time

missed from work, plus eccentric behavior such as sleeping here often and doing

my laundry in the men’s room and trying to borrow money from everyone in the

department, my professor and the department chairman are friendly to me. (In

fact, most people are friendly to me except the police, who seem to instinctively

dislike me nowadays). I haven’t gone to church for six or eight weeks, but I visit

and try to help old people in connection with a church that I have often attended.

I usually wear a cross of some aluminum-appearing or pewter-like metal around

my neck, except that people keep asking me for it (especially old, sick people and

down-and-out alcoholics) and I’ve given away seven of them and don’t have any

now and won’t be able to buy another until pay-day). I generally try to say

“Yes.”

Then he ended, “And now what’s up with you?”

It was an amazing transformation from the prim, short-haired, gangling IBM

worker he had been just a short seven years ago. Even Smoky was really starting

to get worried about him, as was Paul Garvey, a homeless wreck serving time at

Her Majesty’s Remand Centre in Richmond, Surrey.

But George was happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever been. A kind of peaceful

quiet had finally descended on his soul. Lately he’d met “a bloke named Keith

who is a follower of the Guru Maharishi,” and the two enjoyed conversations on a

park bench over chips and coffee.

He was enclosing a picture of himself, he wrote to Kathleen, taken in his office by

a photographer; the best faculty photo, people said, in all of the department. In it

he is wearing a colorfully striped shirt and dark bow tie, sporting a wry smile

above a scraggly red beard, counterbalanced by fine hair brushed back above a

broad forehead. Only the eyes confuse an otherwise joyful portrait: Tucked

behind dark-rimed glasses, one is small and kind, the other open wide and

strangely empty.

He was feeling so good that he decided to send Kathleen a special surprise. His

only likely source at the time was in Nottingham, where, he divulged to his

daughter as if reading her a bedtime story, the sheriff who hunted Robin Hood had

lived. But in the end he took out the quid’s worth of pot, pressed between the

pages of a C. S. Lewis book stamped for California. He had just moved to a new

squat, and ended up smoking it himself.

Life among the destitute, as the “Monthly Message” of the London Healing

Mission newsletter admitted, was “certainly never dull.”

There was an alcoholic

woman beater whose partner George had hid from him and who was demanding

to know where she was. Increasingly he would come around the Galton, insisting

to see George, and, when refused entry by the guard, would yell from the

pavement up to his office. George refused to divulge the woman’s whereabouts

and soon was keeping his own whereabouts secret, too. “The reason for the

secrecy,” he explained to Kathleen after half apologizing for smoking the reefer,

is mainly one very difficult man who has been coming around where I work to

look for me and causing trouble. A week ago Monday he pissed publically on the

front steps of the genetics building, smashed a bicycle lamp, scattered the

contents of some student’s satchel around, and shouted his best obscenities.

The people he was living among and helping weren’t always as friendly as he

was, but, having been enveloped in a halo of serenity, George wouldn’t allow this

to dampen his mood. “I expect that one cover-illustrated article in Nature

compensates for one urination at the front entrance to the building,” he joked to

Kathleen, his sense of humor still very much alive.

The administrators at the Galton weren’t happy about the down-and-outs who

were showing up, still less for their urinations and assaults on students. Late in the

fall, George had met a young IBM programmer from America at the Russell

Square Underground Station who turned out to share his liking for Proust plus his

total lack of sense of direction and great inability in pronouncing unfamiliar

names. Excited, George took him back to his office and they spent the evening

talking about Proust and computer programming. As it happened, the young

American was wearing blue jeans, leather boots, a green poncho, and had about a

three-day stubble. Wary of George’s exploits, the beadle immediately pegged him

as an alcoholic and pressured Harry Harris into introducing a new rule against

late-night and weekend working without special permission. CABS tried to help

by sneaking George a key to the statistics library, but he was discovered. Soon he

was no longer coming in to his office at UCL. Too quickly his colleagues at the

department were losing contact with him. Most thought he had gone off the deep

end. “He certainly flipped,” one of them recalled.

Then, in mid-November, Al Somit arrived in London for a visit. The UCL photo

may have made George look healthy and chipper, but that was only a head shot

and after a rare shower to boot; the professional photographer hired by the Galton

had obviously done some magic. In reality things were very different. Al hadn’t

seen George for about eight years and was dismayed and appalled at what he now

found: He’d first met him in the weight room at the University of Chicago, offbeat

perhaps but handsome and muscular and hard; now George was as sinewy and

gaunt as an old man, the spring in his step all but vanished. He was grungy and

oily and shabbily dressed, his teeth were beginning to rot, his outgrown hair was

as brittle as hay, his fingers yellow from smoking. They joked together like in the

old times at the co-op before Al shifted, inevitably, to a more serious tone: “I’m

not going to give you money for the new pair of shoes you obviously need unless

you promise not to give it to these two leeches,” he said to him in a coffee shop,

eyeballing two alcoholics who had been on George’s tail. George thanked him but

said he couldn’t make such a promise, and that no amount of convincing would

help. It was the same old George, he thought, always contrary, always at the

extreme. Holding his hand out with a smile to say good-bye, Al walked away

from his old friend with the pound notes still deep in his pocket.

“It was nice to see you again though, in all honesty, I think I would have preferred

finding you in somewhat other circumstances,” he wrote upon his return to

Buffalo, suddenly feeling worried and regretful.

It occurred to me, as I reflected on our discussion, that you may be confusing the

notion of serving your fellow man with loving your fellow man. If the former,

surely there are more effective ways than the one which you have adopted.

Then he added, with a candor far removed from their usual wisecracking: “The

latter may, in fact, be quite beyond your capacity—or mine.”

When he left their meeting, George literally had nowhere to go. It was cold out. At

Euston Station he met an alcoholic who told him about the headquarters of the

Tolmers Village Association, just down the road. The address was 102

Drummond Street, and, the man said, it was one of the few places around with a

hot bath.

The Tolmers Village Association had been born in the summer of 1973, the fruit

of community action to help save the neighborhood from Stock Conversion, a

property developing company, and its owner, Mr. Joe Levy. Levy had become

rich in the sixties, having obtained planning permission to build offices on a

one-acre site on the corner of Euston and Hampstead roads in Camden.

Demolition began in 1963, and within a short few years the run-down shops and

houses west of Hampstead Road had all been bulldozed and replaced by “millions

of pounds worth of windswept glass, concrete and steel, full to the brim with