Most fathers-in-law would be helping with the shed. I’m not that noble
What is love? An evolutionary biologist would tell you it is a mechanism to subvert the survival-of-the-fittest impulse so that your genes, selfish by nature, can ensure their own survival.
The love-struck are willing to forgo personal need and personal safety to assist the object of their adoration. The lover is willing to lay down their life for the beloved. The loving mother will sacrifice all for the children. The loving husband will sacrifice himself for his children’s mother (or prospective mother of the children) and for the children themselves. Self is risked so the genes can march safely on towards tomorrow surrounded by a guard of the enamoured.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
This is the unsentimental, scientific explanation of love. An ugly explanation, perhaps. But flowers that grow in ordure are, nevertheless, often beautiful.
And what of kindness? The impulse to reach out and do good for your brother, neighbour, or even a stranger?
We have a natural sense of empathy that puts us easily in another’s shoes. But this might be driven by an innate expectation of reciprocation. A realisation that, there but for the grace of God go I, and when I’m down and need a hand the woman I’m helping now will help me. Maybe your every good deed is done with a subconscious notion that fate keeps a ledger and the world owes you for your acts of kindness.
And fairness? What of fairness? A sense of fair play? Is it, too, merely your subconscious demanding justice for another person because you would have it for yourself when the time comes? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Is it merely an expectation of tit-for-tat?
Our better nature coalesces most densely when dealing with family. What wouldn’t we do for the kin, eh? Nothing’s too much. Family is the vortex of all these finer impulses, the place where they are most strongly felt and most predictably played out. Our virtue comes to the surface naturally and easily when dealing with family. The noble sentiments, whether evolved or culturally inherited, are the pillars and buttresses that hold up the edifice of the clan. When family calls, when the trumpet of filial need is heard, we rally round.
That said, I’m not going to help Tom fix his shed roof today. If, as the evolutionary biologists insist, (and who am I to contradict a Dawkins or a Darwin?) all these finer impulses are merely self-interest dressed as virtue, then it’d be nothing but an act of greed on my part to strap on the nail bag and pitch in.
He has finally become my son-in-law, but filled the office unofficially for years before that, during which time he fixed our toilet door, our toilet, our back gate, our laundry basin, a spat with the neighbours, the dog kennel, the clothesline, the bidet (unwisely refusing my safety goggles) the oat mill, the Mini Minor ... he’s handy. He knows of dovetail joints and cantilevers and shoots a pop-rivet gun with Bondish aplomb. He’s traded golf for my regard on Saturdays when a tailwind blew along every fairway. And has answered my calls for help on so many days when sloth was playing its lustrous tune that I now call it DIT (Do It Tom) rather than DIY.
But if he thinks I’m coming round to help him put a new roof on his shed today, then he has no idea what an exotic exception I am to the way families normally operate and a refutation of how things ought, rightly, be done. I am neither strapping on a tool belt nor climbing a ladder today. I’m going to Portsea to drink beer with gold-fanged matriarchs.
He has likely heard tales of my mastery aloft from his wife. (That liar! Trying to sell our family as competent, normal, balanced.) She’s doubtless painted a picture of me leaping from beam to beam like an Amish Nadia Comaneci with a smile full of roofing nails. But he’s too proud to beg me to help, and I’m too proud to help without being begged.
Anyway, if the aforementioned finer instincts involving family are merely a lolly scramble of disguised egocentrism, as Dawkins et al would have it, then it makes perfect moral sense that I mingle today with the clifftop doyennes of Portsea all uniformed in Versace to commit philanthropy at their luncheon to aid incarcerated urchins rather than pitch in at a working bee in Brunswick.