The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (55 page)

Progress in evolutionary psychology will plainly affect — legitimately affect — moral and political discourse for decades to come. But no simple ideological label will summarize the effects. Once everyone understands this, there will be no horde of critics on the left, or on the right, for Darwinians to fend off. Enlightenment can then proceed
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When the HMS Beagle left England, Darwin was an orthodox and earnest Christian. He would later recall "being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality." But he was beginning to harbor quiet doubts. He was troubled by the Old Testament's "manifestly false history of the world" and its depiction of God as "a revengeful tyrant." He wondered about the New Testament too; though he found the moral teachings of Jesus beautiful, he saw that their "perfection depends in part on the inter-pretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories."

Darwin longed to regain certainty. He daydreamed about the unearthing of ancient manuscripts that would corroborate the Gospels. It didn't help. "Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate."
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Having lost his Christian faith, Darwin held for many years to a vague theism. He believed in a "First Cause," a divine intelligence that had set natural selection in motion with some end in mind. But then he began to wonder: "[C]an the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" Darwin finally settled into a more or less stable agnosticism, He might in upbeat moments entertain theistic scenarios; but for long periods of his life, upbeat moments weren't common.

In one sense, however, Darwin always remained a Christian. Like others of his time and place, he was steeped in the moral austerity of Evangelicism. He lived by the tenets that echoed in English churches and found secular expression in Samuel Smiles's
Self-Help
: that a man, by exercising his "powers of action and self-denial" could stay "armed against the temptation of low indulgences." This, as we've seen, was for Darwin the "highest stage in moral culture" — recognizing "that we ought to control our thoughts, and 'not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us.' "

But if Darwin was in this sense an Evangelical Christian, he could, with almost equal accuracy, be called a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim. The theme of strict self-governance, the control of animal appetites, appears again and again in the world's great religions. Also wide-spread, if a bit less so, is the doctrine of brotherly love that Darwin found so beautiful. Six centuries before Jesus, Lao-tzu had said, "It is the way of the Tao ... to recompense injury with kindness."
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Buddhist scriptures call for "an all embracing love for all the universe ... unmarred by hate within, not rousing enmity. "
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Hinduism has the doctrine of "ahimsa," the absence of all harmful intent.

What does a Darwinian make of this striking recurrence of themes? That various men at various times have been privy to the divine revelation of several universal truths? Not exactly.

The Darwinian line on spiritual discourse is much like the Darwinian line on moral discourse. People tend to say and believe things that are in their evolutionary ingrained interests. This doesn't mean that harboring these ideas always gets their genes spread. Some religious doctrines — celibacy, for example — may dramatically fail to
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do that. The expectation, rather, is simply that the doctrines people latch on to will have a kind of harmony with the mental organs natural selection has designed. "Harmony," admittedly, is a pretty broad term. These doctrines may, on the one hand, slake some deep psy chological thirst (belief in an afterlife gratifies the will to survive); or they may, on the other hand, suppress some thirst so unslakable as to be a burden (lust, for example). But in one sense or another, the beliefs people subscribe to should be explicable in terms of the evolved human mind. Thus when diverse sages manage to sell the same themes, the themes may say something about the contours of that mind, about human nature.

Does this mean common religious teachings have some sort of timeless value as rules to live by Donald T. Campbell, one of the first psychologists to get enthusiastic about modern Darwinism, has suggested as much. In an address to the American Psychological Association, he spoke of "the possible sources of validity in recipes for living that have been evolved, tested, and winnowed through hundreds of generations of human social history. On purely scientific grounds, these recipes for living might be regarded as better tested than the best of psychology's and psychiatry's speculations on how lives should be lived."
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Campbell said this in 1975, just after the publication of Wilson's
Sociobiology
and before Darwinian cynicism had fully crystallized. Today many Darwinians would be less sanguine. Some have noted that, while ideas must by definition have a kind of harmony with the brains they settle into, that doesn't mean they're good for those brains in the long run. Some ideas, indeed, seem to parasitize brains — they are "viruses," as Richard Dawkins puts it.
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The idea that injecting heroin is fun keeps infecting people by appealing to myopic cravings, rarely to the ultimate advantage of those people.

Besides, even if an idea does spread by serving people's long-term interests, the interests may be those of its sellers, not its buyers. Religious leaders tend to have high status, and it is not beyond the pale to see their preachings as a form of exploitation, a subtle bending of the listener's will to the speaker's goals. Certainly Jesus' teachings, and the Buddha's teachings, and Lao-tzu's teachings had the effect
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of amplifying the power of Jesus and Buddha and Lao-tzu, raising their stature within a growing group of people.

Still, it's not as though religious doctrines were always forced on people. Granted, the Ten Commandments had a certain totalitarian authority, conveyed by the political leadership and carrying God's own signature. Jesus too, though lacking political office, regularly invoked God's endorsement. But the Buddha, for one, didn't stress supernatural authority. And, though born to a noble station, he is said to have abandoned the trappings of status to roam the world and teach; his movement started, apparently, from scratch.

The fact is that many people at various times have bought various religious doctrines under no great external coercion. Presumably, there was some psychological payoff. The great religions are at some level ideologies of self-help. It would indeed be wasteful, as Campbell suggests, to throw out eons of religious tradition without inspecting it first. The sages may have been self-serving, like the rest of us, but that doesn't mean they weren't sages.

One great theme of the great religions is demonic temptation. Time and again we see an evil being that tries, in the guise of innocence, to entice people into seemingly minor but ultimately momentous wrongdoing. In the Bible and the Koran there is Satan. In Buddhist scripture there is the arch-tempter Mara, who insidiously deploys his daughters, Rati (Desire) and Raga (Pleasure).

Demonic temptation may not sound like an especially scientific doctrine, but it captures nicely the dynamics by which habits are acquired: slowly but surely. For example, natural selection "wants" men to have sex with an endless series of women. And it realizes this goal with a subtle series of lures that can begin, say, with the mere contemplation of extramarital sex and then grow steadily more powerful and ultimately inexorable. Donald Symons has observed, "Jesus said, 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart' because he understood that the function of the mind is to cause behavior."
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It is no coincidence that demons and drug dealers often use the same opening line ("Just try a little; it will feel good"), or that religious people often see demons in drugs. For habituation to any goal — sex or power, say — is literally an addictive process, a growing dependence on the biological chemicals that make these things gratifying. The more power you have, the more you need. And any slippage will make you feel bad, even if it leaves you at a level that once brought ecstasy. (One habit that natural selection never "meant" to encourage was drug addiction itself. This miracle of technology is an unanticipated biochemical intervention, a subversion of the reward system. We were meant to get our thrills the old-fashioned way, from a hard day's work: eating, copulating, undermining rivals, and so on.)

Demonic temptation connects almost seamlessly with the more basic notion of evil. Both ideas — a malign being, and a malign force-lend emotional power to spiritual counsel. When the Buddha tells us to "dig up the root of thirst" so that "Mara, the tempter, may not crush you again and again," we are supposed to steel ourselves for the battle to come; those are fightin' words.
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Warnings that drugs or sex or a belligerent dictator are "evil" bring much the same effect.

The concept of "evil," though less metaphysically primitive than, say, "demons," doesn't fit easily into a modern scientific worldview. Still, people seem to find it useful, and the reason is that it is meta phorically apt. There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests bin do not bring long-term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there's no reason not to.

When the Buddha urges digging up the "root of thirst," he isn't necessarily counseling abstinence. Certainly there is talk in many religions of abstinence from various things, and certainly abstinence is one way to short-circuit the addictiveness of vice. But the Buddha put his emphasis not so much on a laundry list of proscriptions as on a generally austere attitude, a cultivated indifference to material
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rewards and sensory pleasure: "Cut down the whole forest of desires, not .1 tree only!"
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This fundamental defiance of human nature is encouraged in some measure by other religions. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth"; and "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on."
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The Hindu scriptures, like the Buddhist, dwell at more length, and more explicitly, on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who "abandons desires," who "has lost desire for joys," who "withdraws, as a tortoise his limbs from all sides, his senses from the objects of sense."
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Hence the ideal man as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism. this was the image that inspired Gandhi to persevere without "hope of success or fear of failure."

That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a severe maxim — life is sillering — and placing it at the very center of his philosophy. If you accept the inherent misery of life, and follow the teachings of the liuddha, then you can, oddly enough, find happiness.

In all these assaults on the senses there is a great wisdom — not only about the addictiveness of pleasures but about their ephemerality. The essence of addiction, after all, is that pleasure tends to desperate and leave the mind agitated, hungry for more. The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature — a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has a malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying "Just kidding." As the Bible puts it, "All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled."
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Remarkably, we go our whole lives without over really catching on.
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The advice of the sages — that we refuse to play this game — is nothing less than an incitement to mutiny, to rebel against our creator Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us to keep us in the thrall of its warped values system. To cultivate some indifference to them is one plausible route to liberation. While few of us can claim to have traveled far on this route, the proliferation of this scriptural advice suggests it has been followed some distance with some success.

There is also a more cynical explanation for that proliferation One way to reconcile poor people to their plight is to convince them that material pleasures aren't fun anyway. Exhortations to forswear indulgence could be simply an instrument of social control, of oppression. So too with Jesus' assurance that in the afterlife the "first shall be last and the last shall be first"
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— it sounds a bit like a way of recruiting low-status people to his growing army, a recruitment that may come at their own expense, as they cease to struggle for worldly success. Religion, in this view, has always been the opiate of the masses.