It seems to me that religion and
philosophy were fundamentally based in the mistaken notion that man
is egoistic, selfish, and a material object, and so therefore
compassion and altruism must be spiritual, abstract, and
non-material.
Neo-Darwinism eventually explained
compassion and altruism---even Darwin had problems understanding
them, as did philosophers of egoism like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
So compassion and altruism were relegated by these thinkers to
non-material, abstract, spiritual realms, where I suppose priests and
philosophers could better control them, or get rid of them in
Nietzsche's case.
As quoted the other day, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson showed that within groups
selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of
altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. So compassion and
altruism are very much materially-grounded, genetically-determined,
objects.
Compassion
and altruism don't need mistaken abstract notions to explain
themselves, they need kin and group-selection to explain and
perpetuate themselves. Human beings are kin-centered and
ethnocentric and over time that became a basic part of human nature
because it helped humans survive and reproduce successfully.
That
also explains why universal religions and ideologies don't work very
well pushing a universal compassion and altruism that is naturally
constrained to kin and ethnic groups and not much beyond that, other
than in rare emergency survival conditions.
Rather
than trying to hang on to compassion and altruism by inventing
abstract-spiritual-universal forms, human beings must soon be ready
to admit that what they need to do is organize themselves into an
ethnopluralism of ethnostates, where real
compassion and altruism have a chance of existing.
Religion
and philosophy can then rise to affirming the evolution of material
life toward supermaterial Godhood, beginning within thousands of ethnostates...
You want compassion and altruism, that is the way you get it.
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