Most modern Americans don’t truly believe in biological evolution because it conflicts with a once plausible idea which remained strong in ghetto-Christianity after the separation of Christian understandings of Creation from mainstream science and philosophy; the idea is “human beings came into being once and for all and nothing can undo that”. Most Westerners, including most Christians, have accepted the factual claims and core theories of evolutionary biology, “sort of” and “kind of” and “in some ways”. Believers in so-called `Creation Science’ and others who accept a literalistic understanding of the creation stories in the book of Genesis are not so large a group and not so much a problem. The true problem comes from those “sort of” believers in evolutionary biology, some Christians but many mainstream secularists of a radical sort. And many others. The strength of this idea even in open enemies of Christianity points to the partial-truth in claims of this sort: “Marxism (or another secular faith of the modern world) is a desacralized Christianity.”
I suspect there to be a plurality, and maybe an outright and strong majority, of educated Westerners who accept that man evolved up to some point maybe 100,000 years ago. They probably know, at least approximately, that Human ancestors had already separated from our chimpanzee cousins something like 5,000,000 years ago but believe them to have evolved in stages, shedding their `ape-like’ characteristics. At some magical point, something like that 100,000 years ago, some generation became true human beings and selection on our race came to an end, except for traits considered superficial such as skin color or hair color. In fact, these `superficial’ traits in particular are probably related to issues of reproductive success which is as important as natural selection in the sense of survival—the `point’ is to survive to reproduce.
The fact that modern liberals, as one example, would define human beings as possessing a certain chattering sort of intelligence and a variety of rights, while Christians might define human beings as having some special relationship with God is immaterial. In fact, I would guess most Christians would—if honest—admit to defining human being in a way more similar to what is implied by the American Declaration of Independence or Locke than by what is assumed by St Paul.
It would seem that most modern Westerners think all human beings were made for the same general sorts of lives, political and economic and cultural. By sheer coincidence, these are lives approved by the various ideologies of modern liberalism, ideologies which reflect the preferences of a vocal and strong-willed minority of those descended from the peoples of Northwestern Europe over the previous five to ten centuries. This is the region which was studied by two famous and important residents: Adam Smith and Karl Marx as well as by Hobbes and Lock, Quesnay and Rousseau, Mill and Say, von Mises and Hayek. Yes, by sheer coincidence, all these thinkers in a small school of students indistinguishable from each other in the eyes of an anthropologist from Mars and hard to distinguish in the eyes of an anthropologist from China, decided that the traits of Northwestern European man (and North American man before long) were the signs of the realization of true, complete and perfect, human being. This true human being was seen as a radical individualist who formed communities by contract or, in more general terms, by way of a marketplace conglomeration of wills. It’s hardly surprising, given the feverish devotion of most—liberal and conservative—to individualism that even the family has now been redefined as a small community of individuals who choose to love each other and—maybe—live together.
This glorification of the individual along with the denigration of community isn’t a break with the traditions of Western Civilization, no longer Christian Civilization, but rather a continuation along the path we’ve traveled for several centuries, a path first seen and advocated by at least the Renaissance and perhaps implicit in the Nominalism of Medieval Christian thinkers. (I personally read signs of radical individualism out of Dante as well as—more expected—Milton.) You could claim that it is a break with the deeper and more ancient trends of the West, but that is largely meaningless in light of the dynamism of both communal and individual human being. (See The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending for a start on recently discovered facts about the speedup of human evolution about 12,000 years ago—the time of the Neolithic Revolution; this speedup in human evolution has run a race of sorts with cultural evolution.)
Individualistic assumptions drive our politics and distort our political relations. If you take seriously international neo-liberalism, if you take seriously the glorification of individual involvement in politics at all levels, if you take seriously the glorification of career over family and other traditional communities, or—mostly certainly—if you take seriously the claims that each of us becomes some sort of entity only accidentally tied to a particular body, Zulu or Chinese, Kung or Igbo, Arab or Germanic, male or female, biological or `techno-enhanced’, then you are a thoroughly modern Milt or Millie.
(Warning: It would seem that elites in the West have often preached “Radical individualism and liberty for me and serfdom for thee.”)
When these individualistic assumptions show too much sign of stress, many modern thinkers retreat not, choosing instead to stand upon a bedrock of a basic dualism, an assumption that there is a `me’ inside of my body but independent of it and nothing, not brain structure nor skeletal muscle mass nor sex organs, can change that. This is not to deny the reality of a variety of experiences of being out of synch with one’s body—many of us will have those sorts of experiences, perhaps in dreams or perhaps as a result of stress and exhaustion during combat. Heck, part of the initiation rituals of peoples with Shamanistic religions involve the deliberate creation of such states so that a warrior can discover if he be an eagle or a war-stallion. Shamans themselves are said to sometimes nurture experiences of being feminine, perhaps to be closer to the maternal gods than men could ordinarily get.
So it is that I ask: What is this true `me’? Modern man doesn’t worry the issue too much, so long as he can sustain the illusion that this `me’ is linked inextricably with his desires, at least his desires of today, if they be no more than a respectable middle-class life with some good football on television or if they be an effort for a man to become a woman or a woman to become a man. This implies, at least to an honest and faith-filled sacramental Christian, that this true `me’ inside must be free of capture by mundane reality, by matter and its relationships including for sure those which are revealed in the disturbing processes of evolutionary biology. In other words, this modern attitude which is held by nearly all including nearly all who call themselves `Christians’ is the ultimate rebellion against God as Creator. (This is a rebellion already seen by Herman Melville in the 1850s or so and explored in some of his writings and, most of all, through the character of Captain Ahab who seems to have been intended as a courageous version of Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
What is this true `me’? To a Christian, it might be a soul. To many sorts of tougher modernists, it might be a will. To softer modernists, it’s a so-called will which is actually desires untrained to higher purposes, individual or communal or idealistic. To those in the sexual revolutionary armies, it might be a `me’ that is female and stuck in a male body. To elaborate a little on the last, there is little doubt that male sexual development (to-date, more deeply researched than the female sexual development which as assumed to be, and might prove to be, simpler and more straightforward) is complex and things can go wrong that result in partially masculinized bones and muscles; it can even happen that the body is properly masculinized but not the brain so that sexual desires might be directed at members of the same sex. (Such desires might come for other reasons, but that’s of little interest to me in this essay.)
Developmental problems in a biological creature are far different from the problems of a female `person’ stuck in a male body or vice versa or the strange variations found in the thoughts of those attempting to justify even the most dangerous and exploitive sort of sexual behavior. Restating our sexual problems in terms of our biology doesn’t lead to easy answers but it allows us to move on. By this I mean we can move on from the local problem of a human being’s sexuality to a more global context, the entirety of a human being in his individuality and communality.
The very way in which even the most important of sexual moral issues are discussed in individualistic terms by those who claim to be traditionalists lets us see how much the liberals, that is the heirs of Hobbes and Locke, have won the war to control public language and concepts. It hardly matters whether those liberals call themselves libertarians or (free-market) conservatives or (collectivist) liberals. A sidenote of sorts: `collectivist’ liberals are the heirs of Hobbes and not some sort of special creation of the Late Modern Age; collectivism is that of Leviathan who protects the radical individual by crushing families and religious communities and ethnic communities and so on. The very fact that these institutions have been so badly damaged with the individuals moving on to malls and political conventions is evidence that communities have real existences somewhat separate from those of individuals, that is, they can’t just be reconstituted according to the desires of even the most devout of Christians. The very fact that psychologists have begun to speak of large percentages of badly damaged individuals in the younger generations lets us know of the wounds from even partial separation from communities of various types and at various levels (that is, human communal being is federal and there are communities of communities). Much of the damage of radical individualism shows in the form of neurotic disorders such as narcissism but our problems with certain types of `non-profit’ and exhibitionistic crimes at least hints of more serious damage to some and perhaps the likelihood that those `merely’ neurotic disorders might fester and turn into still more serious conditions.
If only Christians could be true to their alleged faith in the all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving Creator of this world. If only Christians could truly accept the facts of this world, including those sometimes nasty facts in evolutionary biology. But a similar comment could be made about that large group of secularists who were happy enough to use science to pound upon Christian teachings but are oblivious to the growing body of evidence that we humans are not a homogeneous species, one species but not homogeneous and not capable of simply moving into each others neighborhoods without badly damaging what is good in those neighborhoods.
Too many Christians believe in biological evolution so long as it doesn’t interfere with a traditional understanding of the story of Adam and Eve. Our hearts and livers may be the product of evolution but we have souls which were the result of a once and for all special creation of human being. From that point, we have all been more or less fallen versions of Adam and Eve and have all been capable of full moral awareness and of being self-governing.
Too many intellectually inclined conservatives believe in biological evolution so long as it doesn’t cast doubts upon traditional schemes of morality in terms of the categories of virtues and vices—all Chinese and Nigerians must have the same moral character as did those butchers and pin-makers studied by Adam Smith in Glasgow and London, the same mix of potential for specific sorts of nobility or degeneracy. Once the apeman evolved into Aristotle, the highest and final state of human being was reached.
Too many libertarians and collectivist liberals believe in biological evolution so long as it doesn’t cast doubts upon the claim that all human beings are alike even if they evolved in dramatically different environments in the 50,000 years or so since a surprisingly small group of modern human beings were gathered in the northeastern part of Africa, some to go onto the Eurasian continent and some to turn back into Africa.