Metanexus: Views 2002.10.08 2856 words Today's columnist, James Barham, makes the following observation: "On the Tuesday following the attack on the World Trade Center, the Science Times ran an article on Darwinian speculation about the biological roots of morality, in which a prominent evolutionary theorist was quoted as saying, 'Moral behavior is often a within-group phenomenon. Altruism is practiced within your group, and often turned off toward members of other groups.'[5] But if human moral feeling is nothing more than 'altruism' in the Darwinian sense---the same thing motivating any soldier ant or worker bee---then what grounds do we have for criticizing the September 11 martyrs, who after all sacrificed themselves on behalf of their tribe?" Yes, that is precisely the problem. If what we dub "morality" is predominantly or exclusively a biological phenomenon, then can we speak of right or wrong at all? For no one would say that "catness", for example, was good, and "dogness" was somehow bad and then also proceed to consider the poor animals in question as somehow culpable when they were merely expressing their biological natures in, say, meowing (a most excellent thing!) and barking (a deplorable activity). That the criteria for goodness and badness lie somewhere beyond the biological is seen in the fact that we can, however, speak of "good" and "bad" cats, as when they fail to take care of the excretory needs in what we consider the proper fashion. And yet, morality must also be something more than human whim, for as Barham notes: "It is of course true that we are a gregarious species, and as such have inherited an abiding love for the families and tribes to which we belong, along with a willingness to sacrifice our lives for their sake. But we have no need of Darwin to tell us this much---it was already quite clear to Aristotle. The problem, rather, is to understand how our human nature is related to our animal instincts. The indisputably mammalian and primate foundations of human sociality no more explain the loftiness of higher human values, and our striving in their pursuit, than a foundation pit explains a skyscraper or a cathedral." But how to explain it, then? Well, read on to find out more about one possible explanation. Today's author, James Barham of Lancaster, PA, in speaking of himself, notes: "I was raised a Southern Baptist, was converted to scientific materialism in my teens, and lost my Darwinian faith in my late thirties. I have always been equally attracted to the sciences and the humanities (I am extravagantly fond of literature and music). As a result, I am seeking a viewpoint this is both consistent with modern science and capable of doing justice to the full range of human moral, aesthetic, and religious experience." --Stacey E. Ake =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Subject: Beyond Darwin and Nietzsche: On the Origin of Value in the Music of Cells, Part 2/3 From: James Barham Email: II None of this means that we must return to a premodern, mythological worldview. In the end, Darwin's theory does not have all that much to do with our view of ourselves as evolved beings. After all, we did not need Darwin to teach us about our kinship with the other animals. That is a matter of everyday observation. Like the other animals, we are born; we breathe; we eat, drink, and excrete; we breed; we bleed; and we sicken, grow old, and die. In short, we are flesh of their flesh. Indeed, the idea that the human race is an integral part of nature is as old as philosophical reflection itself. Here is how Lucretius put it in the first century B.C.: "haud, ut opinor, enim mortalia saecla superne aurea de caelo demisit funis in arva" (For I do not think that a golden chain on high lowered living creatures from heaven to earth) (De rerum natura, 2.1153--1154; my translation) It is the no-golden-chain idea that is crucial for our view of our relation to the rest of nature, not the theory of natural selection. There can be little doubt that the basic idea of evolution---the transformation of living forms into one another over time---is correct, since it is the best way of understanding the profound unity we see in all of life at the biochemical, the molecular, and the cellular levels. It is also strongly suggested by the slow and majestic unfolding of life over time that we observe in the fossil record. But if the transformist hypothesis is the best available explanation of these facts---or at least the best explanation that does not resort to a golden chain---let us not pretend that natural selection is a sufficient explanation of transformation. Richard Dawkins once claimed that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" (The Blind Watchmaker 6). Apparently, Professor Dawkins is one of those ascetic souls who are satisfied with little. Some of us have a larger appetite for understanding, one that the theory of natural selection does not assuage. Darwin's theory does not begin to explain even the teleological character of life, much less the ultimate ground of Being itself. As for the latter, everything depends on what we mean by the word "God." Certainly, we are not obliged to accept the conventional dichotomy: either a human-like personality transcending nature---the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob---or else the blind reign of Chance and Necessity, those implacable deities of the ancient Greek atomists and their modern epigones. There are other options. Above all, there is the possibility of a self-subsisting, creative power contained within nature itself, an idea that is familiar from a number of philosophical traditions, both east and west. In the West, it may be found in various guises in Aristotle, in the Old Stoics, in Plotinus, and in the Renaissance naturalists---what Ernst Bloch has termed the left-wing Aristotelian tradition.[3] In the East, it has occupied a more central position, being present in one form or another in most traditions, notably the Upanishads, Advaita Vedanta, Daoism, and neo-Confucianism. It has been expressed with particular elegance by the great Southern Song philosopher Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi), whose role in the history of Chinese thought has been likened to that of Aquinas in the West: "The blue sky is called heaven; it revolves continuously and spreads out in all directions. It is now sometimes said that there is up there a person who judges all evil actions; this assuredly is wrong. But to say that there is no ordering principle would be equally wrong."[4] However, if the intellectual foundation for the rehabilitation of value is to be a dynamical and emergentist form of neo-vitalism, then there is a serious danger that must be squarely faced. During the first half of the past century, an earlier "holistic" intellectual movement disgraced itself by following Nietzsche's exhortation to go "beyond good and evil," supplanting the higher human values of truth, goodness, and beauty with the lower values of vitality, power, and physical fitness (see Harrington, Reenchanted Science). Ironically, it is mainly the Darwinians who flirt with this poisonous idea today under the guise of "evolutionary psychology." But neo-vitalist critics of Darwinism should also take heed. The conflation of specifically human values with generic biological values seems to be a perennial temptation of any form of naturalism, whether mechanistic or vitalistic. We were recently treated to a particularly odious example of this way of thinking. On the Tuesday following the attack on the World Trade Center, the Science Times ran an article on Darwinian speculation about the biological roots of morality, in which a prominent evolutionary theorist was quoted as saying, "Moral behavior is often a within-group phenomenon. Altruism is practiced within your group, and often turned off toward members of other groups."[5] But if human moral feeling is nothing more than "altruism" in the Darwinian sense---the same thing motivating any soldier ant or worker bee---then what grounds do we have for criticizing the September 11 martyrs, who after all sacrificed themselves on behalf of their tribe? It is of course true that we are a gregarious species, and as such have inherited an abiding love for the families and tribes to which we belong, along with a willingness to sacrifice our lives for their sake. But we have no need of Darwin to tell us this much---it was already quite clear to Aristotle. The problem, rather, is to understand how our human nature is related to our animal instincts. The indisputably mammalian and primate foundations of human sociality no more explain the loftiness of higher human values, and our striving in their pursuit, than a foundation pit explains a skyscraper or a cathedral. The great French novelist Albert Cohen makes plain the way in which morality stands in stark contrast to our animal inclinations in this meditation on the Nazis from his masterpiece, Belle du Seigneur: ". . . when they sing of their ancient legends and of their ancestors with long blond hair and horned helmets oh yes horned for it is vital to look like an animal and it is doubtless a most pleasant thing to go forth in the guise of a bull what are they celebrating if not a cruel past to which they are nostalgically committed and attracted and when they fill their mouths with swaggering talk of their race and of the one blood by which they are joined what are they doing if not reverting to notions of animality which wolves understand well enough though even wolves do not devour their own kind and when they exalt strength or the exercise of body and flesh in the sunlight when like their Hitler or their Nietzsche they boast of being inexorable and implacable what are they boasting of if not their return to the great apedom of the primeval forest and in truth when they massacre and torture Jews they are punishing the people of the Holy Law and of the prophets the people who strove to establish the reign of the human on earth oh yes they know or sense that they are the people who live under the sway of nature and that Israel is the people who combat the laws of nature the bearer of a crazy hope which nature abhors and they instinctively abominate the people which opposes them and which upon Sinai's top did declare war upon nature and the animal in man . . ." (877--878; translation slightly modified). This rebellion of all that is highest in Homo sapiens against our own animal origins makes a mockery of Darwinian evolutionary psychology. Efforts to explain this "crazy hope"---this struggle against the natural ties of kinship (think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the children of the White Rose, or those Serbs who fell defending Sarajevo)---with notions like "kin selection" and "inclusive fitness" would be laughable if they were not obscene. Here is our dilemma. If there is such a thing as goodness that transcends the authority of particular revelations or cultural traditions, then it can only be grounded in a universal human nature. Yet Darwinism reduces human nature to selfish genes.[6] How, then, can we explain our capacity for moral feeling, which so clearly transcends genetic expediency, in a way that is valid for all human beings in all times and places? I believe that this problem of the origin of morality, and of the rest of our higher human nature, is parallel to the problem of the origin of life. As Cioran has remarked, "life is life only by infidelity to matter" (Anathemas and Admirations 5). In the same way, humanity is human only by infidelity to the animal in man. Just as life surpassed inanimate matter, while yet remaining material, in developing the will to live and the wit to adjust itself to circumstances, so too have human beings surpassed the rest of the living world, while yet remaining animal, in developing a moral conscience, a delight in beauty, and a love of truth. How was this possible? Almost certainly, it was primarily a cognitive achievement. Language instilled in us the faculty of imagination, which in turn freed us from the prison of our own perspective, allowing us to wander in our minds at will throughout time and space, and to participate sympathetically in the viewpoints of our fellows. Language and culture have created for us a new universe of values and meanings that transcends our animal origins. On the other hand, it is vital to emphasize that this transcendence is not absolute. It has been said that we human beings live and breathe in culture like fish swim in the sea. This is undoubtedly true, but the vast ocean of culture is a second sea that has emerged out of the far greater sea of life in which we continue to swim. Contrary to Nietzsche's many contemporary disciples, this means that there is a human essence---one that lifts us high above the other animals. Perhaps the best example of this is the creative passion inspired by the sexual instinct. The universality of the instinct itself is obvious enough; the question is, How should we view the creative drive that emerges from it? Though the latter is indeed strongly shaped by culture, manifesting itself in diverse ways in various times and places---think how different is the story of Ulysses and the Sirens from that of Lord Krishna and the Milkmaids---nevertheless, it remains one of the great constants of human nature. The entire artistic heritage of the world eloquently attests to this fact, from The Tale of Genji to Anna Karenina; from Romeo and Juliet to The Love Suicides at Sonezaki; from the ukiyo-e prints of Utamaro to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; and from Sappho's lyrics to the "St. Louis Blues." Surely any human being of any epoch, and of either sex, is capable of entering fully in their imagination into any of these works of art, however unfamiliar the social and cultural background may be. Would not Lady Murasaki have been moved by the fate of Tolstoy's heroine, just as we are moved by that of Murasaki, the author's namesake and Genji's great love? Is it conceivable that Chikamatsu would have failed to admire Shakespeare's art, or that the Bard would not have appreciated Bunraku? Who can doubt that Sappho, lying alone, watching the Pleiades set, would have understood Bessie Smith, seeing the evening sun go down? Erotic love is a universal human force that far outstrips our carnal desires, while yet remaining firmly grounded in them; it is the creature of culture, not of biology, but it is no less universal for that. Similarly, moral insight, aesthetic rapture, and rational thought all have roots in our animal nature, while at the same time constituting a higher human essence that transcends both those roots and all linguistic and cultural boundaries. In ancient Greece, Heraclitus---that great postmodern hero---wrote, "Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow."[7] This is commonly taken to mean that all is flux, that there are no stable essences to things, and hence no true descriptions of the world as it is in itself, apart from cultural conventions. But in medieval Japan, Kamo no Ch'mei wrote, "The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings."8 Thus, it seems that the very idea of impermanence has a universal appeal to the human mind that transcends history, language, and culture! I submit that the dynamical, emergentist perspective provides a better framework than either Nietzschean relativism or Darwinian reductionism for understanding such universal feelings and perceptions. Notes: 3 "Left-wing" in contrast to the "right-wing" Aristotelianism of Aquinas and the neo-Thomists---see Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke. Unfortunately, this important work has never been translated into English; for a more accessible, if very brief, discussion, see Bloch's The Principle of Hope (I, 205--210). See, also, Wayne Hudson's The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, especially Chap. 4. 4 Cited in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China ( 492). For a thorough and sober discussion of this point of view, see Michael P. Levine's Pantheism. See, also, my "Back to the Stoics." 5 Interview with David Sloan Wilson, cited in Natalie Angier's "Of Altruism, Heroism and Evolution's Gifts." 6 This foolish view of genetics is not valid even for the other animals, let alone for us. After all, bears can learn to ride bicycles. Are we to conclude that this is due to a latent gene for ursine cyclism? For a more balanced view of animal behavior, see Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka's Animal Traditions and Frans de Waal's The Ape and the Sushi Master. There is now a growing backlash against genetic reductionism even among geneticists themselves---see Evelyn Fox Keller's The Century of the Gene. 7 Cited in G.S. Kirk et al.'s The Presocratic Philosophers (195). =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This publication is hosted by Metanexus Online . The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors. To comment on this message, go to the browser-based forum at the bottom of all postings in the magazine section of our web site. Metanexus welcomes submissions between 1000 to 3000 words of essays and book reviews that seek to explore and interpret science and religion in original and insightful ways for a general educated audience. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. 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