Science, Evolution, Poetry

Science, Evolution, Faith, and Romance:

The New York Times today mocks Ms. O'Donnell for being inspired by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Let's talk about whether romantic and fantastic writings should be at the core of one's identity and thought. Along the way, we can address a debate we've been having here for a couple of weeks.

Evolutionary sciences are increasingly able to explain and predict human behavior. For that reason, as we discussed recently, fields like economics should take 'the evolution challenge' in examining their ideas about how people will behave. I suggested that philosophy should do the same thing -- to understand virtue as animal as well as rational, because it seems to me to be both. Looking at the effect of animals on humans, we find that there is reason to believe that much of our magic comes from working with them. We may best understand what Hegel was calling "magic" by thinking about training animals, and how much can be communicated across species and without words.

Against this basic thrust is a counterargument, which is that what passes for evolutionary science pertaining to humanity isn't very good. (H/t: Cassandra; but I recall T99 making this point not so long ago, in one of our discussions that I can't seem to find.)

Ladies, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It is time to stop arguing with evolutionary theorists when they use bonobo behavior to justify their own low standards.... simply write to let me know what behavior of yours you'd like to rationalize, and I am confident that working together as a scientific team, we can find a gorilla somewhere out there doing that very thing with a vengeance.

Let's face it -- the new "science" of infidelity is just not very scientific. It certainly provides a convenient "out" to deny personal responsibility, but anyone who buys this "science" is missing out on the best parts of being human: the freedom that comes from self-control and the intimacy that can only come with commitment.

To some degree, evolutionary science can 'prove' a lot of different things depending on what you want it to prove. The author points at writing that appears to show some evolutionary license for infidelity, and asks why we don't also see evolutionary license for other things that she would like? After all, she can observe the behavior in chimps.

Roger Scruton explores the problems of this neuroscience further in this article. Scruton raises many of the same points, and some others that are valuable. Wait, though: Let's make sure to consider his groundwork, before we look at the critique of the practice of these sciences:

Genuine science and true religion cannot conflict. Science discovers truths, religion reveals them. But no truth contradicts another, and all truths have a place in the scheme of things, bound each to each in a web of mutual implications. Pope John Paul II believed this, and made a point of emphasizing that the Church has neither the right nor the power to contradict the findings of science. Moreover, if science and religion conflict over some matter, then it is religion, not science that must give way. Of course the Church has not always obeyed that rule. But it is a rule dictated by the laws of thought.

Averroës and Aquinas wrote of faith and reason, rather than religion and science. But their concern was essentially the same: to reconcile human discovery and divine revelation. This concern has been central to Western civilization from its beginnings in the city-states of Greece. We are shocked by Plato, when he defends the “noble lie,” inviting us to propagate unbelievable myths for the sake of social order. We are shocked by Dostoevsky, when he writes that “if I must choose between Christ and Truth, it is Christ that I shall choose.” We are shocked by the person who protects his sacred texts from scientific examination, lest their status as “revelations” be put in doubt. We accept that there are falsehoods that it might be dangerous or impolitic to question. But we hope always for another and purer kind of religion, purged of superstition and pious fairy tales.

Since the Enlightenment, science has been capturing territory from religion, explaining the cosmos and our tiny corner of it in ways that make no mention of a supernatural plan. And for two centuries religion has been gradually giving way, accepting that now this feature of our world, now that one, could be accounted for without reference to God’s purpose.

I might argue that the only bad fairy tales are "pious" ones; in general I think there's a lot in that kind of folklore worth considering. In general, though, Scruton captures the post-Enlightenment position well: reason is on a throne, and animality is considered something to be striven beyond, improved or controlled by reason.

To what purpose, though? What can reason tell us about how we should direct ourselves?

Well, one way you could approach that problem is by looking at the shape of nature, and seeing if you can divine an arrow pointing in some direction. You can call this the "purpose" of nature, and set yourself to achieving that purpose.

Evolutionary science has some limits for you here, however: consider Kant's "first proposition" in his attempt to perform just this kind of a divination of the purpose of humanity.

All the natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end. This can be verified in all animals by external and internal or anatomical examination. An organ which is not meant for use or an arrangement which does not fulfill its purpose is a contradiction in the teleological theory of nature [i.e., the theory that nature has a purpose -Grim]. For if we abandon this basic principle, we are faced not with a law-governed nature, but with an aimless, random process, and the dismal reign of chaos replaces the guiding principle of reason.

Well, Darwinian science has some bad news for you. The importance of random mutation suggests that chaos has exactly the formative role Kant did not want to see there; and that the facts are that most of these random mutations do not function to guide a species (or even an organ or capacity) toward some destiny, but lead to extinction. Some small number of them prove beneficial, or harmless, and so may survive. The first proposition, though, seems to collapse.

Another way you can use reason to try to guide us in setting ends is to restrict your view, so that you are looking not at nature as such, but at human history. If you can divine a few points through which you can project a line, you can call that line the arrow of progress, and try to follow it.

Notable philosophers who tried to do this include Karl Marx. His idea about the dialectic was that it could show us how humanity was progressing, and we could then chart a course for further progress. Marx despised the capital-oriented middle classes, but he thought them better than the rural populations they had replaced. (Search on "idiocy of rural life.") The grinding of capitalism would, he was sure, produce internal contradictions that would have to be resolved through a new way. That way lay collapse and revolution, but -- since it was along the arrow of progress -- also a better world.

We don't need to belabor the matter of just how deeply wrong this was, or how deeply harmful. One might argue that Marx was merely wrong about the direction of the arrow, and try it again; but the experience suggests that we should be very humble about any theory that promises "progress" to humanity.

If reason cannot set the final ends for virtue, then, what can? Scruton:

Take the case of erotic love. The Bible succinctly explains the deep significance for each other of Adam and Eve. What it tells us is beautifully amplified by Milton in Paradise Lost. But the truths so finely discerned by Milton and by the author of Genesis are not captured by brain science. That science has made great progress in understanding the mechanism of pair-bonding, induced by the release of oxytocin into the cortex during intercourse. The theory shows what is common to people and laboratory rats. But it says nothing about what distinguishes them, which is the I-to-I relation of lovers, as revealed in the smile and the kiss.

This is the point that Cassandra and others are after: the higher nature that is achieved when animality is guided by reason. It is the poetry we get from Milton. What would evolutionary science say about this kind of poetry? That it was itself subordinate to the animality, I suspect: that romance and poetry are merely adaptive ways of achieving sexual access. Rational science finds that there is no rational nature separate from animal nature, for even the products of rationality are reduced at last to mere animality.

This is a problem for the Enlightenment! Enlightenment philosophy extends the ancient idea that reason (broadly read) should guide desire, to the idea that rational nature is the core of what it means to be human. It is what separates humans from the animals, and what places humans above the animals. If rational nature collapses into animality, the whole structure of the Enlightenment is in peril. All rationality turns out to be is a more effective animality. Rationality can hold its prominent position on the grounds of efficiency, but only for a while: for after the goods of animality are secured, we can no longer judge whether or not it is still more efficient. In order to judge, we need a rational standard: one of those arrows that Marx and Kant tried to build, which have proven so unreliable.

That is true if the Enlightenment is right about the core nature of humanity. That is to say, the Enlightenment understanding is wrong precisely if it is right: it fails on its own terms. If rational nature is the core of human nature, then animality is the core of human nature; science, and therefore reason, proves it.

If we take Scruton's groundwork seriously, we seem to be at the end of the debate. If religion must make way for what reason shows, then it will not do to have faith in a human nature above or separate from animal nature. All we have is an efficient adaptation: but efficient for what? It cannot guide us in any reliable way past the achievement of animal needs and desires.

That seems to be correct, if the Enlightenment understanding is where we make our stand. There remains a competitor.

The competitor holds that the core, essential nature of mankind is not rationality but romance. If there is a thing that makes us different from the animals it is the telling of tales. Into these stories about our lives we find friends and lovers to be not mere means to our animal or rational ends, but indispensable sources of romance.

The worth of others to us comes not from how they can help us achieve some end of our own, but in how their own ends and their own stories entwine with and enrich our tales. If they were only pieces of our story, they would be of small matter: but we find that their stories transform ours, and ours theirs, so that we are forced to regard them as equals of a sort. We may love them as enemies -- for what kind of a story has no villain? We may kill them, as it chances: but we are fools if we think that writes them out of our story. It only deepens the ways in which they alter the tale.

If it is the romance that matters -- not the animal desire, not the reason, but the poetry -- then we have a way of accounting for the power of Milton. We find that poetry and romance are not the byproducts of an animal search for reproduction, but the core feature of what and why we are. They are the point.

What that means is a topic for another day.