To what extent can the insights of modern biology throw light on matters of morality, and hence on politics and economics?
In a nutshell, I want to argue that humanity has been led astray these past few thousand years, and particularly over the last two centuries, by the intellectuals and prophets of the western world who have shaped the modern Zeitgeist and hence brought the whole world, human and non-human, to the brink of disaster.
The shattering of the vessels
In particular, albeit largely inadvertently, theologians, clerics and philosophers, abetted in recent centuries by scientists, economists and politicians, have expressly argued or at least implied that human beings deep down are a bad lot, self-seeking and venal.
Apparently, the roots of our venality run deep. Thus in Genesis 3:23-24 we are told that God kicked our first ancestors out of the Garden of Eden because they would not or could not obey one simple rule – not to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. In the light of this, in the 5th century, St Augustine of Hippo, who did much to set the tone of the Christianity that followed him – both Catholic and Protestant – emphasised that we are forever tainted with “original sin”. The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer of 1549 invites us to confess “our manifold sins and wickedness” and declares that “there is no health in us”. Thus stricken, we can but ask God to
“– have mercy upon us, miserable offenders”.
In the 17th century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued in his book Leviathan that in the state of nature, without what our last prime minister but three, Theresa May, was wont to call “strong and stable government” to keep us in line:
“The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
This view of life is reinforced by the notion that Nature itself is in a state of perpetual strife. So it is that Sir David Attenborough, the world’s best-known and generally excellent informant on the natural world, is typically at pains to tell us that beneath the beautiful and tranquil surface of whatever tropical idyll he happens to have landed in, all is turmoil. A big bug eats a little bug and then is immediately engulfed by some killjoy chameleon. As Tennyson put the matter in In Memoriam, circa 1850, it’s –
“Nature red in tooth and claw”.
New language, same interpretation
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace brought science to bear. They pointed out in the 1850s (a) that all life evolves; (b) that the principal driver of evolution is what Darwin called “natural selection”; and (c) that natural selection is driven by the need to compete for limited resources. It all implies that life, inescapably, is one long struggle. Indeed, the full and little-remembered title of Darwin’s world-changing book on evolution of 1859 is:
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
Then in the 1860s the largely self-taught but in his day highly influential philosopher Herbert Spencer summarised natural selection as
“The survival of the fittest”.
He surely intended ‘fittest’ to mean ‘most appropriate’, or ‘best adapted’, as in the modern ‘fit for purpose’. But ‘fittest’ has often been construed in the other modern sense, of ‘strongest’ or ‘most athletic’. I suggest that Tennyson’s, Darwin’s and Spencer’s most resonant phrases – “red in tooth and claw”, “struggle for life” (or “struggle for existence”), and “survival of the fittest” – summarise what most people, including quite a few biologists, think “evolution by means of natural selection” actually is.
This in turn has been taken as an explanation or an excuse for humanity’s presumed venality. Life is innately and inescapably competitive and if we don’t fight our own corner with all our might we must fall by the wayside. We might not like it, but that’s the way life is. You can’t blame people for doing what is necessary. This thought is used to justify the prevailing offshoot of capitalism known as ‘neoliberalism’: an all-out, no-holds-barred competition in the global market for material gain. Or as Rabbi Michael Lerner puts the matter in Revolutionary Love (2019), the prevailing mindset has it that
“To be rational is to maximize self-interest, regardless of how that impacts others.” [and that] “Looking out for number one becomes the guiding principle and appears for many to be the only rational way to live.”
And of course in this post-Enlightenment age we are exhorted above all to be ‘rational’; and ‘rational’ in practice has become a matter of calculation – ‘efficiency’, cost-effectiveness, all measured in material terms. But love, friendship, beauty, and indeed all human values that we really care about, are not matters of calculation. So these things – the things that really matter to us – are written off: ‘sentimental’, ‘romantic’, ‘woolly-minded’, ‘hippie’. We cannot allow ourselves to indulge in fairy tales. Life is harsh, and we must face up to the facts. As the stiff-necked, poker-up-the-bum schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind says in Dickens’ Hard Times (1854):
“Now, what I want is, Facts… Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else… Stick to Facts, sir!”
The ultra-competitive market may indeed seem cruel at times but it is at least ‘realistic’. Life is serious and to survive we must make ‘tough decisions’ (which invariably are tough on other people or on the natural world, but we’ll let that pass). It is irresponsible to do otherwise. The neoliberal market imitates nature and so by definition is ‘natural’, and what is natural is good, or at least can’t be bad.
But this, I suggest, is bad moral philosophy – we cannot legitimately argue that what is natural is necessarily good. Various philosophers have made this point, including David Hume in the 18th century and G E Moore in the 20th. The same idea was very neatly summarised in the 1951 movie of C S Forester’s The African Queen, in which Humphrey Bogart, as the dissolute Charlie Allnut, says it is only human nature to get drunk; to which Katharine Hepburn, as the strait-laced Rose Sayer, replies:
“Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we were put into this world to rise above.”
Hepburn was surely right. Biology and morality march to different drums. What exactly is the drum to which morality marches, and who or what is beating it, is one of the fundamental questions of metaphysics and of all religions. Which doesn’t mean that science cannot contribute to the discussion.
So where do we go from here?
Clearly, all of the above needs teasing out. Hugely pretentiously no doubt (but why not?), I want to attempt the teasing over the next few months or as long as it takes, or until the grim reaper comes a-tapping, whichever is the sooner. The idea is to root out what it means to be good and to do the right thing, and how we can best supply an answer. No other question is more important, I suggest.
The first piece in the series simply points out that the conventional interpretation of ‘Darwinism’ is simply wrong; and the politics and the economic system that claim to be informed by it are seriously misguided and should be replaced forthwith. For nature is not competitive through-and-through, as Darwin is commonly (but mistakenly) taken to have meant. Indeed, I suggest – as many others have suggested, at least in principle, that –
“Although competition is a fact of life, the essence of life is cooperativeness.”
If it were not so, there could be no life at all.
And this is the idea that needs to be fed into the Zeitgeist – for what would and could the world be like if we rooted the economy in the idea of cooperation, rather than in the perceived need to be ruthlessly competitive? Of course, many have addressed this, but the modern emphasis on a crude, materialist interpretation of what it means to be ‘rational’, has pushed the question aside. But it needs addressing afresh.
Then, though, or at least as soon as possible, I want to try to justify my title, The Biology of Compassion. Why compassion? Human beings are ultimately protean creatures, at least among the life-forms that we know about. We can in principle do anything we choose within the laws of physics and adopt any mood or moral stance. So why single out compassion? What’s so special about it? More broadly, what is, or can be, the relationship between cooperativeness and compassion? More broadly still, what is the relationship between biology and morality?
Even more broadly I want to address what in some ways is the biggest question of all, at least for the western world and hence (since the west is so influential) for the world as a whole: What price rationality? In particular we might reasonably – rationally – argue that the biggest practical questions of all are moral: not what can we do (to which the answer seems to be “more or less anything we choose”) but what should we do? What is it right to do? And why? And as David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, morality in the end is a matter of feelings. We can and should apply our rational minds to questions of morality but rationality alone – calculation – cannot provide complete and satisfying answers. As Dostoyevsky observed in Crime and Punishment (1866):
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
I suggest that ‘intelligence’ in this context can reasonably be equated with ‘rationality’. So is it sensible – is it rational – to put all our faith in a way of thinking that clearly cannot answer life’s most important questions? What is Dostoyevsky’s “more”? Thomas Gradgrind was a caricature, to be sure, but he was an accurate caricature. Many people in all walks of life, including science and economics and government (and indeed in education) think like him. They think themselves to be ‘no-nonsense’ and ‘clear-headed’. They aspire, in fact, to be intellectuals. But – alas! – intellectuals get carried away on their own trains of thought. Political, economic, scientific, and, paradoxically, religious fundamentalism are the brainchildren of intellectuals. As George Orwell said in his Notes on Nationalism in 1945, it was the intellectuals of the West, not people at large, who for a time embraced Stalinism. Despite its obvious cruelty and oppressiveness, they saw it as the world’s salvation. But then, said Orwell:
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
The same comment might be applied to neoliberalism – or indeed, more broadly, to materialism, at least as materialism is generally understood. So, to come back to Dostoyevsky, if rationality fails us, the no-nonsense musing of the left brain, where else can we look for guidance? This takes us willy-nilly into the heady (though perhaps that’s the wrong word) regions of metaphysics, and ideas of transcendence and spirituality and indeed of religion (but religion seen as a quest, not as a fait accompli).
To go back to where we came in: it seems to me that all the many threads converge on the concept of compassion. As the Dalai Lama commented in 2017 in a talk to students at the University of California in San Diego:
“Many remarkable individuals have called for different kinds of revolution: technological, educational, ethical, spiritual. All are motivated by the urgent need to create a better world. But for me, the Revolution of Compassion is in the heart, the bedrock, the original source of inspiration for all the others.”
Truly there’s a rich seam here to be explored. Read more in my blog, The Great Re-Think on colintudge.com.
Colin Tudge’s latest book, The Great Re-Think (Pari Publishing, 2021), is available here.
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