Darwin's Dangerous Idea (88 page)

installed in a sex cell, ready to try its fate in the great mating lottery. But How they further this
summum bonum
is also designed right into them, which "daughters" of your original zygote are destined for meiosis and which for mitosis? This, too, is a lottery. Thanks to this mindless mechanism, and in this regard they differ fundamentally from the other cells that are "in paternal and maternal genes (in you) could not ordinarily "know their fate" in the same boat": my symbiont visitors. The benign mutualists, the neutral advance. The question of whether they are going to have germ-line progeny commensals, and the deleterious parasites that share the vehicle they all that might have a flood of descendants flowing on into the future or be together compose—namely, me—each have their own
summum bonum
relegated to the sterile backwaters of somatic-line slavery for the good of the designed into them, and it is to further their own respective lineages. For-body politic or corporation (think of the etymology ) is unknown and tunately, there are conditions under which an
entente cordiale
can be unknowable, so there is nothing to be gained by selfish competition among maintained, for, after all, they are all in the same boat, and the conditions their "fellow" genes.

under which they can do better by not cooperating are limited.
But they do
That, at any rate, is the usual arrangement. There are special occasions,
have the "choice."
It is an issue for them in a way it is not for the host cells however, on which the Darwinian Veil of Ignorance is briefly lifted. We have Why? What enables—or requires—the host cells to be so committed, but already noted them; they are the cases of "meiotic drive" or "genomic gives the visitor cells a free rein to rebel when the opportunity arises?

imprinting" (Haig and Grafen 1991, Haig 1992) we considered in chapter 460 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories
461

9, in which circumstances
do
permit a "selfish" competition between genes 2. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE'S JUST SO STORIES

to arise—and arise it does, leading to escalating arms races. But under most circumstances, the "time to be selfish," for genes, is strictly limited, and once the die—or the ballot—is cast, those genes are just along for the ride until The
first impulse to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the
the next election.2

origin of morality was given me by a clear, tidy, and shrewd
—
also
Skyrms shows that when the individual elements of a group—whether of
orecocious
—
little book in which I encountered distinctly for the first
whole organisms or their parts—are closely related ( clones or near-clones)
time an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis,
the genuinely
English
type, that attracted me
—
with that power of
or are otherwise able to engage in mutual recognition and assortative "mat-attraction which everything contrary, everything antipodal possesses.

ing," the simple game-theory model of the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the strategy of defection always dominates, does not correctly model the cir-

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 1887, preface

cumstances. That is why our somatic cells don't defect; they are clones. This is
one
of the conditions under which groups—such as the group of my "host"

It is in perfect accordance with the scheme of nature, as worked out by
cells—can have the "harmony and coordination" required to behave, quite
natural selection, that matter excreted to free the system from super-stably, as an "organism" or "individual." But before we give three cheers and
fluous or injurious substances should be utilised for [other] highly
take this to be our model for how to make a just society, we should pause to
useful purposes.

notice that there is another way of looking at these model citizens, the

—CHARLES DARWIN 1862, p. 266

somatic-line cells and organs: their particular brand of selflessness is the unquestioning obedience of zealots or zombies, exhibiting a fiercely Friedrich Nietzsche published his
Genealogy of Morals
in 1887. He was xenophobic group loyalty that is hardly an ideal for human emulation.

the second great sociobiologist, and, unlike Hobbes, he was inspired (or We, unlike the cells that compose us, are not on ballistic trajectories; we provoked) by Darwinism. As I noted in chapter 7, Nietzsche probably never are
guided
missiles, capable of altering course at any point, abandoning read Darwin. His contempt for the "English type" of genealogy was directed goals, switching allegiances, forming cabals and then betraying them, and so against the Social Darwinists: Herbert Spencer in particular, and Darwin's forth. For us, it is always decision time, and because we live in a world of fans on the continent. One fan was Nietzsche's friend Paul Ree, whose "tidy"

memes, no consideration is alien to us, or a foregone conclusion. For this book,
Origin of the Moral Sensations
(1877), provoked Nietzsche's untidy reason, we are constantly faced with social opportunities and dilemmas of masterpiece.3 The Social Darwinists were sociobiologists, but certainly not the sort for which game theory provides the playing field and the rules of great ones. In fact, their efforts almost did in the memes of their hero, by engagement but not the solutions. Any theory of the birth of ethics is going popularizing second-rate (per)versions of them.

to have to integrate culture with biology. As I have said before, life, for The "survival of the fittest," Spencer proclaimed, is not just Mother Na-people in society, is more complicated.

ture's way, but
ought
to be
our
way. According to the Social Darwinists, it is

"natural" for the strong to vanquish the weak, and for the rich to exploit the poor. This is simply bad thinking, and Hobbes has already shown us why. It is equally "natural" to die young and illiterate, without benefit of eyeglasses for myopia, or medicine for illness—for that is how it was in the state of 2. The parallel was perhaps first noted by E. G. Leigh: "It is as if we had to do with a nature—but surely this counts for nothing when we ask: Ought it, then, be parliament of genes: each acts in its own self-interest, but if its acts hurt the others, they that way now? Alternatively, since it was (in an extended sense ) entirely will combine together to suppress it. The transmission rules of meiosis evolve as increas-natural—it wasn't supernatural—for us to step out of the state of nature and ingly inviolable rules of fair play, a constitution designed to protect the parliament against the harmful acts of one or a few. However, at loci so closely linked to a distorter that the adopt a host of societal practices for our mutual benefit, we may simply deny benefits of 'riding its coattails' outweigh the damage of its disease, selection tends to that there is anything universally natural about the strong dominating enhance the distortion effect. Thus a species must have many chromosomes if, when a distorter arises, selection at most loci is to favor its suppression. Just as too small a parliament may be perverted by the cabals of a few, a species with only one, tightly linked chromosome is an easy prey to distorters" (Leigh 1971, p. 249). See also Buss 1987, pP-3. Ree was Nietzsche's dearest friend, close enough to be entrusted with the task of 180ff., for a discussion of germ-line sequestration as basically a political innovation that conveying Nietzsche's proposal of marriage to Lou Salome in 1882, but she refused, and t permitted multicellular life.

Ree fell in love with her. Life is complicated.

462 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories
463

the weak, and the rest of the Social Darwinist nonsense. It is amusing to note struck Nietzsche was that this capacity does not come for free. This was the that the fundamental (bad) argument of the Social Darwinists is identical to a topic of the Second Essay of the three that make up the
Genealogy-.
"To (bad) argument used by many religious fundamentalists. Whereas the breed an animal
with the right to make promises
—is not this the paradoxical fundamentalists sometimes begin their arguments by saying, "If God had task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem intended Man to ... [fly, wear clothes, drink alcohol,...]," the Social Dar-regarding man?" (Second Essay, sec. 1, p. 57). This "long story of how winists begin theirs by saying, in effect, "If Mother Nature had intended Man
responsibility
originated" is a story of how early human beings learned to to...," and even though Mother Nature (natural selection) can be viewed as torture each other—literally—into developing a special kind of memory, the having intentions, in the limited sense of having retrospectively endorsed memory needed to keep track of debts and credits. "Buying and selling, features for one reason or another, these earlier endorsements may count for together with their psychological appurtenances, are older even than the nothing now, since circumstances have changed.

beginnings of any kind of social forms of organization and alliances" (Sec-Among the Social Darwinists' ideas was a political agenda: efforts by do-ond Essay, sec. 8, p. 70). The capacity to detect cheating, to remember the gooders to provide nurture for the least fortunate members of society are promise broken and punish the cheater, had to be drilled into our ancestors'

counterproductive; such efforts permit those to replicate whom nature would brains, Nietzsche surmised: "Its beginnings were, like the beginnings of wisely cull. These are abominable ideas, but they were not the primary target everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time"

of Nietzsche's criticism. His primary target was the historical naivete of the (Second Essay, sec. 6, p. 65 ). What is Nietzsche's evidence for all this? An Social Darwinists (Hoy 1986), their Panglossian optimism about the ready imaginative—not to say unbridled—reading of what we might call the fossil adaptability of human reason (or Prudence) to Morality. Nietzsche saw their record of human culture, in the form of ancient myths, surviving religious complacency as part of their heritage as "English psychologists"—

practices, archeological clues, and so forth. Leaving the gory details aside, intellectual descendants of Hume. He noted their desire to avoid skyhooks: fascinating though they are, Nietzsche's suggestion is that eventually—perhaps via an instance of the Baldwin Effect!—our ancestors "bred" an animal with an innate capacity to keep a promise, and a concomitant talent for These English psychologists—what do they really want? One always dis-detecting and punishing a promise-breaker.

covers them ... seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which This permitted the formation of early societies, according to Nietzsche, but has been decisive in its evolution, in just that place where the intellectual there was still no morality—not in the sense that we recognize and honor pride of man would least
desire
to find it (in the
vis inertiae
of habit, for today. The second transition occurred in historical times, he claimed, and can example, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and chance mechanistic hooking-be traced via etymological reconstruction and a proper reading of the texts of together of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, the last two millennia—an adaptation by Nietzsche of the philological molecular, and thoroughly stupid)—what is it really that always drives methods that he had been trained to use. To read these clues in a new way, these psychologists in just
this
direction? Is it a secret, malicious, vulgar, you need a theory, of course, and Nietzsche had one, developed in opposition perhaps self-deceiving instinct for belittling man? [Nietzsche 1887, First to the tacit theory he discerned in the Social Darwinists. The proto-citizens of Essay, sec. 1, p. 24.]

Nietzsche's second Just So Story (told in the First Essay) live in societies of sorts, not Hobbes' state of nature, but the life he describes in them is about Nietzsche's antidote to the banalities of the "English psychologists" was a equally nasty and brutish. Might made right—or, rather, might ruled. The very "continental" romanticism. They thought the passage from the state of people had concepts of good and
bad,
but not good and
evil,
right and wrong.

nature to morality was easy, or at least quite presentable, but that was Like Hobbes, Nietzsche tried to tell the tale of how these latter memes arose.

because they just made up their stories and didn't bother looking at the clues One of the most daring (and ultimately least persuasive ) of his speculations of history, which told a darker tale.

is that the memes for ( moral) good and evil Were not just minor Nietzsche began, as Hobbes had done, by imagining a premoral world of permutations of their amoral predecessors; the memes
traded places.
What human life, but he divided his story of transition into two phases (and told had been
good
( old-style ) became
evil
( new-style ), and what had been
bad
his tales in reverse order, starting in the middle, something that confuses (old-style) became (morally)
good
(new-style). This "transvaluation of many readers). Hobbes had noted (1651, pt. I, ch. 14) that the very existence values" was, for Nietzsche, the key event in the birth of ethics, and he of any practice of forming contracts or compacts depends on the capacity of explicitly opposed it to Herbert Spencer's bland supposition that human beings to make promises about the future, and what 464 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories
465

the concept "good" is essentially identical with the concept "useful," "prac-

(Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is tical," so that in the judgments "good" and "bad" mankind has summed up antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it and sanctioned precisely its
unforgotten
and
unforgettable
experiences eumemics
,
since it is, like the extreme eugenics of the Social Darwinists, an regarding what is useful-practical and what is harmful-impractical. Accord-attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on ing to this theory, that which has always proved itself useful is good; the
bounty of nature. Few today—but there are a few—would brand
all
therefore it may claim to be "valuable in the highest degree," "valuable in genetic
counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of itself." This road to an explanation is, as aforesaid, also a wrong one, but at eugenics. We should reserve diat term of criticism for the greedy and least die explanation is in itself reasonable and psychologically tenable.