On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
CHAPTER 1 - DILEMMA
These are the central questions that the great philosopher David Hume
said are of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond
that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these
two considerations together, what is man's ultimate nature?
We keep returning to the subject with a sense of hesitancy and even
dread. For
if the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve
cells and the mind can somehow be explained
as the summed activity of a finite number of
chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries
limit the human prospect - we are biological
and our souls cannot fly free.
If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural
selection, genetic chance and environmental
necessity, not God, made the species.
Deity can still be sought in the origin of the ultimate units of
matter, in quarks and electron shells (Hans Kung was right to ask
atheists why there is something instead of nothing) but nor in the
origin of species. However much we embellish that stark conclusion
with metaphor and imagery, it remains the philosophical legacy of the
last century of scientific research.
No way appears around this admittedly unappealing proposition. It is
the essential first hypothesis for any serious consideration of the
human condition. Without it the humanities and social sciences are the
limited descriptors of surface phenomena, like astronomy without
physics, biology without chemistry, and mathematics without algebra.
With it, human nature can be laid open as an object of fully empirical
research, biology can be put to the service of liberal education, and
our self-conception can be enormously and truthfully enriched.
But to the extent that the new naturalism is true,
its pursuit seems certain to generate two
great spiritual dilemmas.
The first is that no species, ours included,
possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives
created by its genetic history.
Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but
they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their
immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their
molecular architecture automatically steers them. I believe that the
human mind is constructed in a way that locks it inside this
fundamental constraint and forces it to make choices with a purely
biological instrument. If the brain evolved by natural selection, even
the capacities to select particular esthetic judgments and religious
beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanistic process. They are
either direct adaptations to past environments in which the ancestral
human populations evolved or at most constructions thrown up
secondarily by deeper, less visible activities that were once adaptive
in this stricter, biological sense.
The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it
promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its
assembly. The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction,
and reason is just one of its various techniques. Steven Weinberg has
pointed out that physical reality remains so mysterious even to
physicists because of the extreme improbability that it was
constructed to be understood by the human mind. We can reverse that
insight to note with still greater force that the intellect was not
constructed to understand atoms or even to understand itself but to
promote the survival of human genes. The reflective person knows that
his life is in some incomprehensible manner guided through a
biological ontogeny, a more or less fixed order of life stages. He
senses that with all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope, and
anxiety that characterize the species he will in the end be sure only
of helping to perpetuate the same cycle. Poets have defined this truth
as tragedy. Yeats called it the coming of wisdom:
"Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth."
The first dilemma, in a word, is that we have no particular place to
go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature.
It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the
needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and materials
crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at
least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But
what then? Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond
material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual
potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be
realized? Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much
by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing
awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival.
Religions, like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the
persistence and influence of their practitioners. Marxism and other
secular religions offer little more than promises of material welfare
and a legislated escape from the consequences of human nature. They,
too, are energized by the goal of collective self-aggrandizement. The
French political observer Alain Peyrefitte once said admiringly of Mao
Tse-tung that "the Chinese knew the narcissistic joy of loving
themselves in him. It is only natural that he should have loved
himself through them." Thus does ideology bow to its hidden masters
the genes, and the highest impulses seem upon closer examination to be
metamorphosed into biological activity.
The more somber social interpreters of our time, such as Robert
Heilbroner, Robert Nisbet, and L. S. Stavrianos, perceive Western
civilization and ultimately mankind as a whole to be in immediate
danger of decline. Their reasoning leads easily to a vision of
postideological societies whose members will regress steadily toward
self-indulgence. "The will to power will not have vanished entirely,"
Gunther Stent writes in The Coming of the Golden Age,
"but the distribution of its intensity will have been drastically
altered. At one end of this distribution will be the minority of the
people whose work will keep intact the technology that sustains the
multitude at a high standard of living. In the middle of the
distribution will be found a type, largely unemployed, for whom the
distinction between the real and the illusory will still be
meaningful . . . He will retain interest in the world and seek
satisfaction from sensual pleasures. At the other end of the spectrum
will be a type largely unemployable, for whom the boundary of the real
and the imagined will have been largely dissolved, at least to the
extent compatible with his physical survival."
Thus the danger implicit in the first dilemma is the rapid dissolution
of transcendental goals toward which societies can organize their
energies. Those goals, the true moral equivalents of war, have faded;
they went one by one, like mirages, as we drew closer. In order to
search for a new morality based upon a more truthful definition of
man, it is necessary to look inward, to dissect the machinery of the
mind and to retrace its evolutionary history. But that effort, I
predict, will uncover the second dilemma, which is the choice that
must be made among the ethical premises inherent in man's biological
nature.
At this point let me state in briefest terms the basis of the second
dilemma, while I defer its supporting argument to the next chapter:
innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and
unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality
evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon
be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human
values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political
practice flow.
On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
