While making plans for my more serious reading over the next month or two, I happened to read the opening pages of a book I’ll be perusing before long — Sociobiology, The Abridged Edition by Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor who learned a lot about social insects and found that he could apply some of his general knowledge and perhaps more of his techniques of analysis to social mammals as well, even to human beings. The opening words for the first paragraph are:
Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths. [page 3]
So far, so good, but we have to realize the tendency of empirical thinkers, of several respectable schools of thought, to see how we understand from the ground up but to fail to understand, or at least to fully accept (William James is an example), that there is a point where the richness and complexity of what we know begins to cohere in such a way as to imply the existence of two different and equally important realms of being:
- The greater entity of which we are part, the universe which is one aspect of a story and a collection of stories in which events are morally ordered, and
- Abstract realms of being from which the concrete realms are shaped.
Wilson certainly seems to realize there is something to be “pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers” but I suspect I’ll disagree with Wilson, certainly with some evolutionary biologists, about our proper ways of going about this business of pursuing a deeper and greater understanding by starting from that immediate understanding of evolutionary processes. I’ll speak to that issue shortly, but I’ll first note that Camus deserves some credit for seeing the need for an essential decision in human moral life, at least in the modern context where there has been a fundamental denial of the proposition that our duty, our only real option, is to accept reality and to understand it well enough to respond properly to it. It’s sheer moral insanity to think we can plausibly deny reality, to kill ourselves and leave that reality behind or to somehow make of reality something else. A full acceptance of reality doesn’t lead to passivity. It leads us to strong responses to and in the context of reality. In terms of Thomistic teachings, we should `naively’ accept what is and accept that our perceptions and properly developed thoughts deal with a reality given to us and not something we can judge or push aside in favor of a set of abstractions or dreams we prefer.
For example, we should start our understanding of our moral duty not to murder by first accepting the human reluctance, strong but far from absolute, not to kill any creature which presents to us a human appearance; I believe it’s mostly the face that does it. In any case, it’s probably mediated through that hypothalamus and limbic system. In Biblical terms, we can hear God’s Fifth Commandment, can understand it, and can have a good chance of obeying it even in tough circumstances just because of that human hypothalamus and limbic system. In philosophical terms, and those of a novelist or poet, we have to make peace with a jerry-built moral nature and try to see if we can make of it something more complete and less defective, even if perfection is little more than a dream. A natural-law theorist should be less concerned with constructing ideal systems and more concerned with the strange fact that, regarding a reluctance to kill other members of the same species, wolves seem to be our moral superiors.
A human being is a moral creature defined in many ways by his biological and social nature but capable of looking for meanings which transcend the flux of this mortal world as it immediately presents itself. Those realms of being which are part of Creation but transcendent to the most concrete realm of being demand from us responses just as do the more immediate environmental demands related to survival and reproduction. We respond to those demands from abstract realms of being when we posit moral views making sense of both Aristotle and Darwin. If we can begin to make better sense of it all by considering the theories of Boltzmann and Einstein and the esthetic responses of T.S. Eliot and the history-based wisdom of Lord Acton, then we are really getting somewhere.
Mostly, we are driven, as were Virgil and Homer and many before them, to draw a story out of what we are and what we have learned about our immediate environments and all that we believe to lie beyond this concrete realm. This isn’t men imposing order upon an alien universe but rather men responding to a universe which shows narrative characteristics, certainly in the events studied by evolutionary biologists. From concrete realms, men have ascended to ever greater understandings of more abstract realms of being, often by way of mathematicians and theoretical physicists studying surprisingly abstract relationships between concrete bits of matter. Matter isn’t what we naively think it to be and neither is space or time or number for that matter. We look for moral order as we try to draw those stories from the histories of life, from the histories of galaxies, from the more particular and even nastier histories of men. This is not an anthropomorphic response but rather a response to a universe which made us men by demanding proper responses from our ancestors.
Men are inclined to look for a more general meaning, if only a mythical cosmogony. If meaning isn’t found, that takes a bit of wind out of our sails. Entire civilizations can be demoralized and their moral structures begin to decay along with the moral order in the souls of individual human beings. More positively, a civilization can form if an Augustine finds order even if he himself is in a state of despair because of the problems of the moment, problems brought about as an older civilization is collapsing.
Even when meaning is fading, as it was by at least the late 1800s in the West, some men, such as Thomas Huxley, will struggle to find a new meaning and, failing, move on and to live a meaningful life to all appearances. A couple generations later, Jean-Paul Sartre, fell into a frenetic, amoral despair. Sartre, who as a philosopher could be seen a greater Camus, did see the importance of existence and — in Wilsonian terms — rebelled very consciously against the sanity enforced by his “hypothalamus and limbic system.” Sartre could have helped the men of his age find a newer and richer meaning in a world suddenly richer than it had been, but also seemingly chaotic if only because of its newness. He chose to rebel against what he was, what he felt himself to have been without any choice on his own part. That rebellion was as good as a rebellion against our universe, indeed against all of Creation.
Yes, the man who is Camus is the human animal described by Wilson, and so it is that the biologist can continue his critique of that starting point of philosophy when the wonder of what-is is turned to a rejection of what-is. Professor Wilson tells us:
Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. They hypothalamus-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness, “knowing” that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. [page 3 of Sociobiology]
The basic point which Wilson makes is a good one even though he weakens his overall position with a claim that life is genocentric. Genes are part of an entire organism, and it is the entire organism in the full range of its developed body, organs and behaviors as well as genetic systems, which is selected. The organism, genes and soma, are a reflection, an encapsulation of sorts, of at least adequate responses to environmental problems and opportunities. Wilson is right that the organism is part of a family line but it’s simplistic to reduce evolution to a process centered upon genes. To the extent genes define us, and there is a great deal of truth in that claim, they do so as reflections of the responses of many creatures over the eons to their environments. However imperfect and incomplete, we and our fellow-creatures are encapsulations of what lies around us by way of responses to opportunities and problems over those eons. If we wish to make a better, if still reductionistic, summary of our situation: we aren’t our genes so much as we are the heirs to our ancestors’ responses to their environments. Genes play an important part in this narrative, but only a part.
There are two immediate claims I’m making. One is that Wilson is right in his most central claim and perhaps I’d go beyond him. To try to judge the goodness of our own existence is an act of biological insanity and all that which is human and which we judge to be greater than `mere’ biology, morality and cognition and other human traits and skills, comes from the responses of a human animal to what his environments offer him and from the responses his ancestors made to their environments, including those offers which seem very threatening. We even have some evidence from spectacular cases of child abuse and neglect that a human child raised in a non-demanding and non-stimulating environment won’t even develop some of the most human of traits — kept from proper socializing to the age of 10 or even a little less, a rescued child can’t even learn to use language in a human way no matter how much effort is made by the most knowledgeable and most compassionate of experts in the human brain and its development.
The second claim is that meaning lies outside of us though we make it our own by our responses to those environments. We know that our moral instinct against murder is strongly related to the rat’s embodied reluctance to kill other community members who smell right and exhibit the correct behaviors. A weaker reluctance covers human beings we don’t recognize as community members and a still weaker reluctance covers the likes of creatures with eyes similar to those of human beings. It’s our duty not to recover some lost state of grace but rather to build upon a promising but incomplete and defective moral nature, to make it stronger and to help us to live in communities have grown, in complexity as much as size, well beyond families and tribes and even nations. But that situation came about because we live in a universe which, sometimes by sheer nastiness, elicits such moral responses at least from some evolving lines of creatures.
Meaning doesn’t come to us when we sit on our couches, it leaks out of neither our innermost consciousness nor out of our genes, though both of those play a role; we aren’t guaranteed to find meaning even by actively seeking it but we are guaranteed not to find it if we don’t seek it. The ways of seeking are many and, at the basic biological level, consist of those responses, artistic as well as practical, to problems such as occasional famines or to opportunities such as the newly discovered stuff which leaks out of very hot rocks and then cools into a hard and shiny form.
The language of `emergence’ used by Wilson in his first chapter is less apt than the Thomistic language of `intention’ in the sense of growth. Individuals developing during their lifetime can intend proper or improper paths through those lifetimes, though mostly we move one step at a time with only vague awareness of the path much beyond our front-most toe. Family lines can also intend, since it doesn’t require consciousness, only a power to respond to the world by growing, developing, maturing, in external behavior and in internal characteristics as well.
Our particular human natures are odd in that our complex brains can `make’ minds which allow us to partially transcend our biological natures while we necessarily remain within the context of our environments. Yet, it’s part of our human nature to live in a such a state of awareness that we also live in greater realms of Creation, some of which are described to us by mathematicians and theoretical physicists and some by philosophers and still others by poets and priests and musicians. Our sanity must be of a higher type, to consider not only our immediate or near-term biological needs even when supplemented by a conscious awareness of our role in the evolution of our genetic lines, but also to consider the greater possibilities, some are clearly good and some bad and some could be either, which lie outside the boundaries of any events or even any open possibilities in the history of life on earth to this time.
I’ve proposed that we have been given a very rough understanding of a greater story and of a greater set of possibilities from which we can choose while participating in that story, the story of the development of the greatest possible human community, the Body of Christ. This is seemingly a strange turn in a discussion of evolutionary biology from the sociobiological perspective and, like any other meaningful future we could imagine, we can’t fully understand it but we can understand it well enough to test its narrative rationality and perhaps its desirability. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past 25 years, writing novels and philosophical narratives which seek meaning in Creation as understood by this Christian. I’ve said before that I do philosophy and theology in the way of a novelist and I’ll strongly claim this to be the best way during an age when we need to make sense of a world which modern empirical knowledge shows to be richer and more complex than we can yet handle.
Unfortunately, one of the problems we’ve inherited in our biological nature is a tendency to remain within our comfort zone and so it is that most human beings, even those aware of our fundamental problems and opportunities — going far beyond even our specific political and economic problems and opportunities — will continue to follow old ruts and hope our problems will be solved by some sort of magic. Or maybe they’re morally paralyzed by pessimism and fatalism and can do no better than to carry on as if our problems were merely results of cycles which will soon bring us to better times. See my essay from a few years back, Individuals and Herds for a short commentary on a discovery of anthropologists of similar behavior on the part of Mayans who were aware of their destruction of their local environments and continued behaving the same old ways until they finished destroying their own civilization.