The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (49 page)

Indeed, the commonsense way of thinking about the relation between our thoughts and feelings, on the one hand, and our pursuit of goals, on the other, is not just wrong, but backward. We tend to think of ourselves as making judgments and then behaving accord ingly: "we" decide who is nice and then befriend them; "we" decide who is upstanding and applaud them; "we" figure out who is wrong and oppose them; "we" figure out what is true and abide by it. To this picture Freud would add that often we have goals we aren't aware of, goals that may get pursued in oblique, even counterproductive, ways — and that our perception of the world may get warped in the process.

But if evolutionary psychology is on track, the whole picture needs to be turned inside out. We believe the things — about morality personal worth, even objective truth — that lead to behaviors that get
 {324} 
our genes into the next generation. (Or at least we believe the kinds of things that, in the environment of our evolution, would have been likely to get our genes into the next generation.) It is the behavioral goals — status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, and so on — that remain steadfast while our view of reality adjusts to accommoderate this constancy. What is in our genes' interests is what seems "right" — morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of Tightness is in order. In short: if Freud stressed people's difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves, the new Darwinians stress the difficulty of seeing, truth, period. Indeed, Darwinism comes close to calling into question the very meaning of the word truth. For the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth — moral discourse, political discourse, even, sometimes, academic discourse — are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there's often no reason to expect that winner to be truth. A cynicism deeper than Freudian cynicism may have once seemed hard to imagine, but here it is.

This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn't exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already, various avant-garde academics — "deconstructionist" literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of "critical legal studies" — are viewing human communication as "discourses of power." Already many people believe what the new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously. Ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day. Cutting-edge talk shows are massively self-referential, with jokes about cue cards written on cue cards, camera shots of cameras, and a general tendency for the format to undermine itself. Architecture is now about architecture, as architects playfully and, sometimes, patronizingly meld motifs of different ages into structures that invite us to laugh along with them. What is to be avoided at all costs in the postmodern age is earnestness, which betrays an embarrassing naivete. Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals
 {325} 
seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

It is conceivable that the postmodern attitude has already drawn some strength from the new Darwinian paradigm.
Sociobiology
, however astringent its reception in academia, began seeping into pop ular culture two decades ago. In any event, the future progress of Darwinism may strengthen the postmodern mood. Surely, within academia, deconstructionists and critical legal scholars can find much to like in the new paradigm. And surely, outside of academia, one reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

Thus the difficult question of whether the human animal can be a moral animal — the question that modern cynicism tends to greet with despair — may seem increasingly quaint. The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.
 {326} 

In 1871, twelve years after
The Origin of Species
appeared, Darwin published
The Descent of Man
, in which he set out his theory of the "moral sentiments." He didn't trumpet the theory's unsettling implications; he didn't stress that the very sense of right and wrong, which feels as if heaven-sent, and draws its power from that feeling, is an arbitrary product of our peculiar evolutionary past. But the book did feature, in places, an air of moral relativism. If human society were patterned after bee society, Darwin wrote, "there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering."

Some people got the picture. The
Edinburgh Review
observed that, if Darwin's theory turned out to be right, "most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have
 {327} 
attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct. ... If these views be true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the conscience and the religious sense."
³

However breathless this prediction may sound, it wasn't entirely off base. The religious sense has indeed waned, especially among the intelligentsia, the kinds of people who read today's equivalents of the
Edinburgh Review
. And the conscience doesn't seem to carry quite the weight it carried for the Victorians. Among ethical philosophers, there is nothing approaching agreement on where we might turn for basic moral values — except, perhaps, nowhere. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the prevailing moral philosophy within many philosophy departments is nihilism. A hefty, though unknown, amount of all this can be attributed to the one-two punch Darwin delivered: the
Origin
's assault on the biblical account of creation, followed by the
Descent
's doubts about the status of the moral sense.

If plain old-fashioned Darwinism has indeed sapped the moral strength of Western civilization, what will happen when the new version fully sinks in? Darwin's sometimes diffuse speculations about the "social instincts" have given way to theories firmly grounded in logic and fact, the theories of reciprocal altruism and kin selection. And they don't leave our moral sentiments feeling as celestial as they used to. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment — all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet.

What's more, we can't take solace, as Darwin did, in the mistaken belief that these things evolved for the greater good — the "good of the group." Our ethereal intuitions about what's right and what's wrong are weapons designed for daily, hand-to-hand combat among individuals.

It isn't only moral
feelings
that now fall under suspicion, but all of moral discourse. By the lights of the new Darwinian paradigm, a moral code is a political compromise. It is molded by competing interest groups, each bringing all its clout to bear. This is the only discernible sense in which moral values are sent down from on high —
 {328} 
they are shaped disproportionately by the various parts of society where power resides.

So where does this leave us? Alone in a cold universe, without a moral gyroscope, without any chance of finding one, profoundly devoid of hope? Can morality have no meaning for the thinking person in a post-Darwinian world? This is a deep and murky question that (readers may be relieved to hear) will not be rigorously addressed in this book. But we might at least take the trouble to see how Darwin handled the question of moral meaning. Though he didn't have access to the new paradigm, with its several peculiarly dispiriting elements, he definitely caught, as surely as the
Edinburgh Review
did, the morally disorienting drift of Darwinism. Yet he continued to use the words good and bad, right and wrong, with extreme gravity. How did he keep taking morality seriously?

As Darwinism was catching on, and the
Edinburgh Review
's fears were sinking in, a number of thinkers scrambled to avert a collapse of all moral foundation. Many of them skirted evolutionism's threat to religious and moral tradition with a simple maneuver: they redirected their religious awe toward evolution itself, turning it into a touchstone for right and wrong. To see moral absolutes, they said, we need only look to the process that created us; the "right" way to behave is in keeping with evolution's basic direction: we should all go with its flow.

What exactly was its flow? Opinions differed. One school, later called social Darwinism, dwelt on natural selection's pitiless but ultimately creative disposal of the unfit. The moral of the story seemed to be that suffering is the handmaiden of progress, in human as in evolutionary history. The Bartlett's Familiar Quotations version of social Darwinism comes from Herbert Spencer, generally regarded as its father: "The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many 'in shallows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence."

Actually, Spencer wrote that in 1851, eight years before the
Origin
 {329} 
appeared. And, for that matter, various people had long had the feeling that gain through pain was nature's way. This was part of the free-market faith that had brought England such rapid material progress. But the theory of natural selection, in the eyes of many capitalists, gave this view an added measure of cosmic affirmation. John D. Rockefeller said that the withering of weak companies in a laissez-faire economy was "the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God."

Darwin found crude moral imputations to his theory laughable. He wrote to Lyell, "I have noted in a Manchester newspaper a rather good squib, showing that I have proved 'might is right' and therefore Napoleon is right and every cheating tradesman is also right." For that matter, Spencer himself would have disavowed that squib. He wasn't as heartless as his more severe utterances imply, nor as heartless as he is now remembered. He put lots of emphasis on the goodness of altruism and sympathy, and he was a pacifist.

How Spencer arrived at these kinder, gentler values illustrates a second approach to figuring out evolution's "flow." The idea was to view evolution's direction, not just its dynamics, as a source of guidance; to know how humans should behave, we must first ask toward what end evolution is heading.

There are various ways to answer this question. Today, among biologists, one common answer is that evolution has no discernible end. Spencer, at any rate, believed evolution had tended to move species toward longer and more comfortable lives and the more secure rearing of offspring. Our mission, then, was to nourish these values. And the way to do so was to cooperate with one another, to be nice — to live in "permanently peaceful societies."
⁶

All of this now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history. In 1903, the philosopher G. E. Moore decisively assaulted the idea of drawing values from evolution or, for that matter, from any aspect of observed nature. He labeled this error the "naturalistic fallacy." Ever since, philosophers have worked hard not to commit it.

Moore wasn't the first to question the inference of "ought" from "is." John Stuart Mill had done it a few decades earlier. Mill's dismissal of the naturalistic fallacy, much less technical and academic than Moore's, was more simply compelling. Its key was to articulate
 {330} 
clearly the usually unspoken assumption that typically underlies attempts to use nature as a guide to right conduct: namely, that nature was created by God and thus must embody his values. And, Mill added, not just any God. If, for example, God is not benevolent, then why honor his values? And if he is benevolent, but isn't omnipotent, why suppose that he has managed to precisely embed his values in nature? So the question of whether nature deserves slavish emulation boils down to the question of whether nature appears to be the handiwork of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Mill's answer was: Are you kidding? In an essay called "Nature," he wrote that nature "impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve." And she does all this "with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst... ."Mill observed, "If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals." Anyone, "whatever kind of religious phrases he may use," must concede "that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man." Nor, believed Mill, should we look for guidance to our moral intuition, a device "for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices."