Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

Observations of human behavior can only be meaningful if they are made in real-world conditions, with an understanding of all factors at play in every instance, and on a scale great enough to allow for every sort of deviation of individuals and groups, and their circumstances, from what might be appropriately described as a norm. To do this would be impossible, of course. But surely science cannot extrapolate with authority from evidence which is only what happens to be available, especially when its appropriateness as evidence is very doubtful. Cats and dogs are quite closely related, but a lifetime of studying dogs would not qualify anyone to speak with authority on the ways of cats. So with the whole earthly bestiary which has been recruited to the purposes of the proper study of mankind.

I fell to pondering Darwinism while reading an essay by Robert Wright in Time, in an issue of the magazine that featured Bill Moyers’s televised discussions of the Book of Genesis. Wright’s essay, titled “Science and Original Sin,” delivers the “verdict of science” on human nature, while generously allowing that the biblical view is not entirely misguided. I would never wish to suggest that Wright speaks for science, a word he uses synonymously with Darwinism. His essay is mired in logical problems virtually sentence by sentence. But its appearance in a major mass publication, offered as an antidote, apparently, lest we be misled by the respectful attention paid to Genesis into forgetting that Science had displaced its fables with Fact and Truth, indicates the persisting importance of the theory, and the form in which it has its life among the general literate public.

The essay is full of Darwinian eccentricities. Wright says, “Such impulses as compassion, empathy, generosity, gratitude and remorse are genetically based. Strange as it may sound, these impulses, with their checks on raw selfishness, helped our ancestors survive and pass their genes to future generations.” To whom on earth would this sound strange except to other Darwinists? Most human beings live collaboratively and have done so for millennia. But Darwinists insist that “selfishness” is uniquely the trait rewarded by genetic survival. So while Wright does concede a biological basis to the traits we call humane and civilized, he puts them in a different category from the more primary traits (in his view) of selfishness and competition. It is not at all clear to me how some biologically based survival mechanisms have priority over others. Wright goes on to say, as Darwinists do, that we are kind to our kin, those custodians of our genetic immortality. “This finickiness gives our ‘moral’ sentiments a naturally seamy underside. Beneath familial love, for example, is malice toward our relatives’ rivals.” So our beguiling attributes can be reduced to the little meanness that governs all. It seems inevitable that, over time, doctrines and worldviews would recruit those to whom they make sense, who would therefore, generation after generation, and given the tendency of creatures to herd with their kind, become less and less capable of assuming a posture of critical distance. I cannot report from my own experience and observation that the malice he describes underlies family love. There is a tendency to consider, as he does in this case, pathological behavior as the laying bare of impulses that are in fact universal, so that any quantity of data can be refuted by a single example of behavior that would seem to illustrate his point. This kind of thinking makes all experience that contradicts its assumptions into the product of illusion or self-deception. A splendid way to win every argument.

The idea of illusion is very important to Darwinian thinking, and I am at a loss to understand how it can function legitimately in a Darwinist context. It is often used to reinterpret behavior to make it consistent with the assumptions of the observer. Wright says that when we send money to help victims of a famine on another continent, our “equipment of reciprocal altruism … is being ‘fooled’ by electronic technology into (unconsciously) thinking that the victims of famine are right next door and might someday reciprocate.” Well, perhaps. This may be truer of Wright’s equipment than of mine. The elaboration of this nonsensical machinery, whose function, I would suggest, is not the behavioral one of converting selfishness into generosity but the rhetorical one of converting generosity into selfishness, looks to me like anything but science. If behavior is genetically based, then the only insight one can have into the content of the genes that govern behavior is in manifest behavior, which, like it or not, includes generosity.

Wright does make one very valuable point. He says, “There remains one basic, unbridgeable divergence between religious doctrine and Darwinism: according to Genesis, nature is in essence benign … Only when man fell to temptation did the natural world receive a coating of evil. But according to Darwinism, the evil in nature lies at its very roots, instilled by its creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection is chronic competition untrammeled by moral rules. Heedless selfishness and wanton predation are traits likely to endure. If these things are sins, then the roots of sin lie at the origin — not just of humankind but of life.” In the degree that we have persuaded ourselves of the truth of this peculiar “science,” we have lost a demiparadise, in which there was a knowledge of good as well as of evil. I do not intend this as a defense of religion. I do not share the common assumption that religion is always in need of defending. What is needed here is a defense of Darwinism.

Why generosity and morality, whose ordinary, commonplace utility need hardly be defended, should be given secondary and probationary status is a question I think is best answered in terms of the history of Darwinism, or of the kind of thinking of which it is one manifestation. Utility, after all, should be a synonym for benefit, from the point of view of promoting survival. And behaviors should be looked at indifferently for their survival value, not screened to assure that they satisfy the narrowest definition of self-seeking before they can be regarded as natural and real. The rejection of religion by Darwinism is in essence a rejection of Christian ethicalism, which is declared to be “false” in terms of a rhetoric that pointedly precludes or disallows it. This is manifestly illogical.

Daniel Dennett quotes Friedrich Nietzsche frequently and with admiration as a writer with a profound understanding of Darwinist thinking and its implications. He deals with the problem of the historical consequences of Nietzsche’s work by remarking that he “indulged in prose so overheated that it no doubt serves him right that his legion of devotees has included a disreputable gaggle of unspeakable and uncomprehending Nazis.” Elsewhere he says, combining optimism with understatement, “fortunately few find [Nietzsche’s idea of a will to power] attractive today.” The following is a passage from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo:

Let us look a century ahead, let us suppose that my attentat on two millennia of anti-nature and the violation of man succeeds. That party of life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements, will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life out of which the dionysian condition must again proceed. I promise a tragic age: the supreme art in the affirmation of life, tragedy, will be reborn when mankind has behind it the consciousness of the harshest but most necessary wars without suffering from it —

Nietzsche’s many defenders always scold as naive the suggestion that he should be taken to mean what he says, that he is not just being “overheated.” What is most striking to me is the profound similarity between this language and Darwin’s in The Descent of Man. Not that Nietzsche had to know Darwin’s work directly. I do not wish to blame Darwin for Nietzsche, and there is no need to. This passage is entirely conventional except for the detail of heroizing the unpoetic business of breeding and, especially, culling.