The End
Darwinism Again: Knowledge
I do not want to end all discussion of religion. Anything but. Here, in line with the sentiment expressed in my preface, I am more interested in stressing the positive than pushing the negative. Rather than spending time about why religion is wrong, I want to open the possibility of a life without religion, without God. Can one then have purpose, or is life all an empty charade? In the words of Ivan Karamazov: “Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything.” And if everything is permitted, then nothing has any special value, and as we have seen, value is at the center of purpose. Life is without purpose.
Many people think of Darwinism as an alternative religion. Julian Huxley actually wrote a book called Religion without Revelation. Edward O. Wilson is of the same mind-set. Anyone who knows their scriptures has to be forcibly reminded of the Old Testament prophets on reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Others, like myself, prefer not to go down this path. Having given up our childhood faith, we do not want to take it up again even in a secular fashion. We shudder at celebrating Darwin’s birthday and calling it “Darwin Day.” The next thing is they will be putting him in a manger. That does not mean that evolution, Darwinism, cannot help with finding alternatives, and indeed, if you think (in the words of Thomas Henry Huxley) that we are modified monkeys rather than modified dirt, it is nigh compelling to turn to Darwinism for help. We are giving up one story of origins, so it is natural to turn to the alternative story of origins. In this sense, evolutionary thinking is privileged over (let us say) organic chemistry. And to the naysayers like Thomas Nagel, I can but quote John Stuart Mill: “And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”1
So how do we set about the task? We use our minds to think, to reason. What are we thinking or reasoning about? Let us agree (with qualifications to come) that ultimately we are thinking and reasoning about things that will help us successfully to survive and reproduce. But what as animals—particularly what as humans—do we need or do to survive and reproduce? Kant is helpful: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”2 In other words, knowing about the world around us and having a moral sense that guides us in our relationships with others, especially other human beings. Let us explore these two points.
If you stand in the Judeo-Christian tradition, you know—or at least you can know—truly about the physical world (including the living world) in which you live. You are made in the image of God, and while you may be tainted by original sin, there are going to be methods to get at the truth. Descartes, remember, suggested that we can discern clear and distinct ideas and that they tell us truthfully about what is guaranteed by God. If you are a Darwinian evolutionist, then things get a little more complicated. A fairly standard view (to which I subscribe) of Darwinian evolution at work on problems of knowledge—what has been given the rather ugly name of “evolutionary epistemology”—sees knowledge structured by innate dispositions about reasoning and mathematics and so forth, what Kant locates at work in the synthetic a priori, but with these dispositions having been put in place by natural selection for their utility.3 They are not, as Kant thought, necessary conditions for all and any rationality. The dispositions are then filled in, as it were, by experience and culture. Darwin, for instance, in the Origin, made use of a consilience, which is a method of argumentation that because of its utility was put in place by selection, but the details were filled in by experience (as on the Galapagos) and culture (as in using metaphors like a division of labor).
Is this enough? The sometime English prime minister Arthur J. Balfour (1848–1930) argued strenuously that natural selection is a poor reed on which to put one’s faith for truly discerning the nature of reality:
We are to suppose that powers which were evolved in primitive man and his animal progenitors in order that they might kill with success and marry in security, are on that account fitted to explore the secrets of the universe. We are to suppose that the fundamental beliefs on which these powers of reasoning are to be exercised reflect with sufficient precision aspects of reality, though they were produced in the main by physiological processes which date from a stage of development when the only curiosities which had to be satisfied were those of fear and those of hunger. The instruments of research constructed solely for uses like these cannot be expected to supply us with a metaphysic or a theology, is to say far too little. They cannot be expected to give us any general view even of the phenomenal world, or to do more than guide us in comparative safety from the satisfaction of one useful appetite to the satisfaction of another.4
Actually, a version of this argument was raised by the atomist Democritus. He was an empiricist, wanting to explain only in terms of the sensed. But as an atomist, he realized that his senses must be deceiving him, for the world he sensed was solid and colored and so forth, not buzzing little balls. So since his empiricism was not reliable, how then could one infer anything? In the words of Galen (129–ca. 200), the Greek physician, Democritus has his senses say to his intellect, “Wretched mind, do you take your evidence from us and then try to overthrow us? Our overthrow is your downfall.”5 In recent years, Alvin Plantinga has followed a similar line of reasoning, arguing that we cannot rely on processes that evolved solely for the purposes of survival and reproduction. Natural selection could mislead us for our own biological good and we could be living in a state of total deception. Somewhat cutely referring to what he calls “Darwin’s Doubt,” because it was a worry expressed by Darwin himself (“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”6), Plantinga inventively pretends to be present at a posh dinner in an Oxford College, where Richard Dawkins is arguing for atheism before the philosopher A. J. Ayer—a classic case of coals to Newcastle, one would have thought. Perhaps biologist and philosopher are living in a dreamworld. Their beliefs “might be like a sort of decoration that isn’t involved in the causal chain leading to action. Their waking beliefs might be no more causally efficacious, with respect to their behaviour, than our dream beliefs are with respect to ours. This could go by way of pleiotropy: genes that code for traits important to survival also code for consciousness and belief; but the latter don’t figure into the ethology of action. It could be that one of these creatures believes that he is at that elegant, bibulous Oxford dinner, when in fact he is slogging his way through some primeval swamp, desperately fighting off hungry crocodiles.”7 Natural selection could be making a sham of everything we believe about the world of reality.
Obviously, a lot of what these critics are saying is true. We could be living in a fool’s fantasyland. And if what people like Hume tell us is true, we do project a lot into the real world and think then that we have read it off. Causal necessity for a start. Perhaps religion for a second. But notice that selection does not leave us totally helpless. We can often have a pretty good idea of when nature is deceiving us. The burned child fears the fire. Beings that see a fire and associate with it burning and pain and the like are adaptively ahead of those who say, “Fire burns us? Just a theory, not a fact.” I made mention earlier of W.V.O. Quine, who knew the score: “If people’s innate spacing of qualities is a gene-linked trait, then the spacing that has made for the most successful inductions will have tended to predominate through natural selection. Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.”8 The fact is that if you are fighting crocodiles, then what you need are skill and cunning and energy. Boozing it up with Freddie Ayer is not the key to success of that sort.
Balfour is right. It is remarkable that our adaptations do so much. But if they started off by telling us about the world, then I am not sure why they should not go on telling us about the world. No one is saying, for instance, that selection gave us a gene for understanding quantum mechanics straight off. However, if it did give us genes for straightforward observation and reasoning, that is basically all one can or need ask for. The critics do point to the fact that ultimately for the Darwinian, it is a matter of getting it all to hang together. If the Humean analysis of causation fits, then plug it in. I worry in major part about Christianity because I cannot reconcile Athens and Jerusalem. Plantinga objects that this means we still in principle could be overall mistaken, just like the man in the factory who (unknown to himself is wearing red-colored glasses) sees everything as red and thinks this is so even if it is not. He has no means to judge outside the system. This is probably true and points ultimately to the fact that truth for the Darwinian is coherence rather than correspondence—it can be correspondence within the system but not overall. This, one would say, is the human existential position. Is the Christian any better off? Descartes and Plantinga (following Calvin) think that God guarantees truth. Perhaps, alas, Descartes’s evil demon who corrodes everything, once let out of the bottle, can never be recaptured. Can one ever be absolutely certain that one is not being deceived, especially given that others, equally certain, believe other things?
As we prepare to move on now to morality, note that in major respects our purpose-driven lives (if we may borrow a phrase from the title of a book by an evangelical who would agree with absolutely nothing in this book) come from the fact that we can tell something about reality. Because I am hungry and I can see animals out on the plain, it makes sense to plan and devise ways in which I can catch them and eat them. Because Emily had seen lawyers at work and down the road visited public defenders’ offices, it made sense for her to strive to join such an office herself. Note, however, that there is nothing to say that everything we do purposefully has to be tied directly to survival and reproduction. This is the thing about culture, the product of our minds and our reasoning and our efforts based on these: On the one hand, it is an incredibly powerful new way of transmitting information for our own ends. There are reasons why a naked ape from Africa lives all over the world in ever-increasing numbers. Someone has a breakthrough in agriculture and you don’t have to wait for the right genes to keep appearing and for selection to distribute them. The ideas can be passed on quickly from grown-up to grown-up. On the other hand, there is somewhat of a decoupling from survival and reproduction. One can well imagine that a fondness for games and physical play has biological adaptive virtues, but it is hard to imagine that American college football has any such virtues. The very opposite, in fact, what with the damage done to the bodies of young men and the drinking that goes on among spectators on football weekends in the fall. And I don’t even want to get into the moral corruption of a supposed institution of higher education that pays its football coach one hundred times what it pays an assistant professor. At a more refined level, it is a commonplace that the most esoteric flights of pure mathematics have a way of finding practical applications, but there is certainly not a priori reason why finding the Euler identity should do anything to improve anyone’s survival and reproductive chances. Something in culture must be adaptive, or we wouldn’t be here, certainly not in such numbers. There is no reason for everything to be adaptive, especially if it is not positively counteradaptive. The Shakers are now known for their furniture, not their megachurches.
Darwinism Again: Morality
What about morality? Go at it backward. It is absolutely and completely teleological. It is a major reason why there is purpose in our lives. I am sitting around the living room on a Saturday afternoon watching college football. I ought to be out on the green playing soccer with my sons and my daughter. I am staying up for three nights and drinking nonstop so I will be rejected at my medical, but I ought to be signing up to fight Hitler. I live in Florida and fly to Europe at least six times a year. I am adding considerably to factors causing global warming. I should quit my job, move to North Dakota, join a commune, and live in a yurt, eat only raw vegetables, go everywhere on foot or on a bicycle, and only have sex with my handkerchief lest I add to the population explosion. We are always thinking in terms of ends, of purposes, and of what we should be doing now and what we should not be doing now. As always, it is a matter of value. It is better to play with my kids than to vegetate on a couch in front of the television. It is better to fight Hitler than cowardly to avoid the responsibility. It is better to munch carrots in the wilderness by the Canadian border than to sit in a café on the left bank of the Seine with a glass of red wine and a smidgen of brie, arguing about Michel Foucault with Parisian pseuds like myself.
We can skip over solutions like that of Moore that lie in the Platonic tradition and equally over solutions that lie in the Aristotelian tradition, although as noted earlier, Aristotle-inspired ethics, so-called virtue ethics, finds many supporters today. What of the Darwinian case? We must tread carefully here, for since the Origin, far better known has been the position on ethics of Darwin’s fellow British evolutionist Herbert Spencer. And as one starts to dig into Spencer’s thinking, one starts to think that perhaps the British philosophers had a very good point. Stay away from this kind of stuff! At the normative or descriptive level—what should I do—the early Spencer can sound positively brutal about letting widows and children go to the wall.9 At the level of justification, metaethics—Why should I do what I ought to do?—one’s sympathies are with G. E. Moore. A truck is driven through the “is/ought” distinction. “Ethics has for its subject-matter, that form which universal conduct assumes during the last stages of its evolution.”10 Then: “And there has followed the corollary that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities, becoming less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such as do not necessitate mutual injury or hindrance, but consist with, and are furthered by, co-operation and mutual aid.”
If you think this is bad enough, let me ruin your day entirely by telling you from Spencer to the present, there have been those (usually biologists rather than philosophers) who have happily and proudly followed in the tradition. Above all, it is to be found today in the writings of Edward O. Wilson, for which enthusiasm he has long been the object of condescending scorn from members of the philosophical community, including, I confess, myself.
While many substantial gains have been made in our understanding of the nature of moral thought and action, insufficient use has been made of knowledge of the brain and its evolution. Beliefs in extrasomatic moral truths and in an absolute is/ought barrier are wrong. Moral premises relate only to our physical nature and are the result of an idiosyncratic genetic history—a history which is nevertheless powerful and general enough within the human species to form working codes. The time has come to turn moral philosophy into an applied science because, as the geneticist Hermann J. Muller urged in 1959, 100 years without Darwin are enough.11
For Wilson, humans have evolved in symbiotic relationship with the rest of the living world, and if we destroy that world, we destroy ourselves. This is why, in the name of evolution, he has become an ardent spokesperson for “biophilia,” arguing that unless we save such entities as the Brazilian rain forests, we are doomed.12
Now I am certainly not about to launch a full-blown defense of Spencer, although it is worth noting that at the normative level, his kind of thinking does not necessarily commit one to a laissez-faire morality that would do credit to Margaret Thatcher—a name, incidentally, not chosen at random, for she came from the same British Midlands, lower-middle-class, nonconformist background as did Spencer, and she, like Spencer, was less interested in having widows and orphans starve than in breaking down the powers of the traditionally ensconced rich and powerful. Wilson shows us that there are more acceptable normative claims that one can embrace, and Spencer himself was a major voice for free trade between nations and the hope thereby of ongoing peace. At the metaethical level, there is no question that Spencer and his followers do smash through the is/ought distinction. The question though is what precisely this means and entails. What if you deny the validity of the is/ought distinction and argue in some sense that physical things, including organisms, have some kind of absolute value in themselves? If this is so, then seeing ever greater value emerge is almost to be expected.13 We have already seen people who think this way—Plato and Aristotle with their organic analogies, for a start. Remember that Spencer himself, although he was always loath to admit intellectual debts, owed much (via the writings of Coleridge) to Friedrich Schelling, the Romantics’ Romantic. He in turn owed much to his predecessors—Spinoza, Aristotle, and even more to the side of Plato, on which we are now focusing. Mention has already been made of that juvenile, sixty-page essay on the Timaeus.
I am not unaware of the paradox of saying that there are Platonic elements in Spencer’s thinking, having earlier said that his greatest critic, Moore, is also a Platonist. As Whitehead said, all philosophy is footnotes to Plato. There are different sides to Plato and that is what is at issue here. This does not now mean that I am endorsing Spencer; rather, pleading for a more sympathetic understanding. The most beautiful place in the world is the Stellenbosch wine-growing area in South Africa. If some mining company moved in, intending to tear off the tops of the mountains, I would be ahead even of the ecofeminists in crying “rape”—and if that is not a value cry, one made for the sake of the mountain and not for me, I don’t know what is. Returning to Spencer, more importantly for us here, I am saying he is not really in the Darwinian tradition but more in that of the Greeks. Although I suspect that if your Darwinism pushes you toward monism, especially toward some form of panpsychism, seeing mind as all-pervasive, then a spirited case might be for saying that a Darwinian could and should go a long way down this path. As goes mind, so follows value—although the counter might be that while this is true for full-blooded panpsychism, it does not necessarily follow for a weaker form. Transferring information instantaneously across huge distances may make you inclined to think that mind is all-pervasive. Whether this transfer is something of value is another matter.
Leaving this, what about (what we might call) a more direct Darwinian approach to morality? One that preserves its purpose-laden nature? True confession time. I was the coauthor of the just-quoted, neo-Spencerian passage by Wilson! However, where he read the passage as saying that we can push through the is/ought barrier and use nature to justify morality, somewhat disingenuously, I meant that we could do an end run around the barrier and use evolution to explain away the metaethical justification of normative ethics. Endorsing what has become known as the “debunking” argument, I argue that once you have given a Darwinian explanation of moral beliefs, you see that there is no foundation. Morality is a set of subjective beliefs, not a reflection of objective, human-independent reality.14 To quote our heavy-booted coauthors again: “Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators.”15
I will skip quickly over the science that shows that morality is something that emerges from the workings of natural selection. Although there is still much controversy about how exactly natural selection does this, it seems generally agreed that cooperation—altruism—is something of value to the group and via this to the individual.16 The words of Darwin still stand today: “It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.”17 He continues: “There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”18 Hence: “At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.”19
Even though this may explain why we think morally, why does evolution show that there really are no foundations? If evolutionarily evolved adaptations can tell us truly about the physical world, why can they not do the same about the moral world? The reason is that, if a speeding train is bearing down on you, you had better get out of its way. It doesn’t really matter how you get to know it. If insect-like chemical sensors or bat-like echolocation did the job better than sight and sound, we would surely have evolved in a different way. But to the same end. Morality is similar and yet more radical. Yes, there is the “same end,” but whereas in epistemology it is about something, the train, really “out there,” in ethics it is about human relations and getting on. There is not the physical “out thereness” of the train, and it is here that the nondirectionality of evolution really kicks in—something about which most philosophers are nigh deliberately obtuse. If you could reproduce more by being Attila the Hun incarnate, natural selection would push you that way. By and large, however, that is not a genuine option for most people, and so we have been shoved toward some form of cooperation. There is no Seal of Good Housekeeping on which way. This lays open the possibility that, as opposed to what we do have, one could have a completely different yet functioning moral code—or a substitute for a moral code. If the aim of morality is getting along with each other, Kant allows that we might have no morality at all and just work through self-interest. “What concern of mine is it? Let each one be as happy as heaven wills, or as he can make himself; I won’t take anything from him or even envy him; but I have no desire to contribute to his welfare or help him in time of need.”20
Kant does agree that in real life this wouldn’t go too far because it takes out the human need of sympathy and feeling. But—even if we agree with what does seem implicit in Kant that we must obey some formal rules of reciprocation—we can imagine fairly humanlike creatures with emotions and a different moral system. Suppose that, rather like John Foster Dulles (President Eisenhower’s secretary of state), in the 1950s dealing with the Russians, instead of thinking that one should love one’s enemies, one thought one should hate one’s enemies—moral obligation. However, one knew they felt the same about you and so you got on—as did Dulles and the Russians. So now you have two functioning moral codes. It just so happens you have developed one rather than the other. You could have developed the other. Which is the true one? Who can say? And before you say that at least there was one true code, notice that its truth seems inessential to your belief system, and that is surely antithetical to what we understand by objective moral standards. It is certainly antithetical to what Moore understood.
By pointing out the consequences, if we had evolved in a different way, Darwin was even more radical: “If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.” Continuing: “The one course ought to have been followed, and the other ought not; the one would have been right and the other wrong.”21 Supposing the nonworking brothers to have devoted their time to intellectual study, on a regular basis one would have had female drudges killing off male Aristotelian philosophers, all in the name of morality. Hmm.
Here is not the place for detailed defense of the Darwinian position just sketched. Let me simply make two points. The first is that, if the argument is well taken, it does not mean that substantive morality now vanishes or collapses. It is very much a position in the tradition of Hume and the other eighteenth-century empiricists on down to the logical positivists of the twentieth century and the “emotivism” that emerged from this. The attack is on foundations—be these God’s will, or Platonic forms, or Moore’s nonnatural properties, or, indeed, the natural properties of Spencer and Wilson. Although it is less distant from Kant, whose making ethical norms part of the synthetic a priori meant that they come from us rather than found “out there,” as with epistemology there is a subjectivity that is denied by the Kantian necessary conditions for any rational being to think and act. As Darwin pointed out, there is a kind of evolutionary relativity—different moral codes for different kinds of being—yet since Homo sapiens is all one species, for us there is not that much moral relativity, and such as there is probably more cultural than biological. Aristotle thought it morally acceptable to have slaves; we do not. The change is one of culture and not of genes.
All of this means that purpose talk is proper and meaningful. My wife and I gave Emily money every month so she could work pro bono at the public defender’s office, with the aim of her eventually getting taken on as a paid employee. Because she was our daughter, we had a special moral obligation to her, to see that she had a good start in life and that she herself could grow up into a well-rounded person, able to make a proper contribution to society. We paid out then, with the purpose of achieving in the future something we thought morally important. The belief that we had such an obligation to our children is part of our moral code or system. These are our values. This deliberately chosen example does emphasize that an evolutionarily based—not justified—morality will have a distinctive form. It would see an obligation to all in need, but would argue that we have special obligations to some—our children and other relatives particularly. Although Peter Singer might dispute this,22 Saint Paul would not. “I seek not yours but you: for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children” (2 Cor. 12:14). Nor would Hume: “A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where everything else is equal. Hence arise our common measures of duty, in preferring the one to the other. Our sense of duty always follows the common and natural course of our passions.”23
The second point is that, with morality, we have a paradigmatic case of evolution deceiving us for our own good. “Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the intermediative action which, while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away, and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out its own aims.”24 I don’t suppose I was alone who, being introduced to moral philosophy more than fifty years ago, found the then-popular ethical philosophy of emotivism dissatisfying to the point of immorality. It said that claims like “Rape is wrong” translate out as “I don’t like rape. Boo hoo! Don’t you like it either?” (Refinements like “prescriptivism” added things like “Don’t rape.”) This could not be so. “Rape is wrong” means rape is wrong—it is morally prohibited—even if the whole world thinks it is okay. It was wrong to be prejudiced against Jews even though 80 percent of Germans under the Third Reich thought it acceptable. What was missing in the analysis, as people like John Mackie pointed out, was the sense of absoluteness. The meaning of moral statements includes objectivity.25 “Rape is wrong” means it is objectively wrong to rape. And it doesn’t take much to see why evolution added this element to the pie. If we thought it was all feeling, then the temptation to cheat would be overwhelming and substantive ethics would break down almost immediately. Because we think morality is binding on us, we do not cheat—at least, if we do cheat, we know that it is wrong. Before we have finished, we will be picking up again on some of these issues, but as we move on, let us collect what we have. A Darwinian evolutionist can and does have moral purposes. Generally, these will be the same purposes as everyone else—“don’t sexually abuse small children”—but although we don’t have extreme relativity, they will be geared to our underlying biology. One could never think (all other things being equal) that strangers are more important than family. Ultimately, moral purposes are part of the human condition, not existing outside us. I would speak of this, in the terms of this book, as more in the Kantian tradition, except it is not really Kant’s own position. You know what I mean, so let us leave it at that. There are values. There can be purposes.
How then are we to tackle the Dostoevsky problem without God? If God does not exist, can life have any purpose, any meaning? Take first the historical dimension. I suspect I am not alone when it comes to thinking about the secular notion of purpose through history, the idea of social or cultural progress—something with a goal toward which history is directed. Clearly we can make a case for progress if we think of things brought about thanks to science and technology—for instance, the Internet and how in the lifetimes of most of us it has transformed the way we think and work. Medicine too. Think of how smallpox has been wiped out and how polio is on the brink of extinction. Yet balancing this are horrendous conflicts—two world wars in the twentieth century for a start—as well as other massive acts of cruelty: Stalin and the kulaks in the 1920s and 1930s and Hitler and the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Steven Pinker argues that, despite these and other acts of violence, the world nevertheless is becoming a friendlier place.26 Perhaps, although I suspect many of us think a utilitarian head count is not adequate or appropriate, and that each and all of these horrors makes talk of progress not just otiose but somewhat obscene. Inexcusably naive too, faced as we are now with the spread of nuclear weapons to such unstable regimes as North Korea and the seemingly inevitable global warming. It would take a foolish and dangerous optimist to speak confidently of ongoing comprehensive cultural progress. Science and technology seem as much the problem as the cure.
This said, one can see progress in limited areas, and not just in science and technology. Think, for instance, of women’s education, at least in the West, in the past hundred years. When I was born, nice girls headed to secretarial school. No longer. And so it surely makes sense to think in terms of purpose, at some kind of collective, historical level. About fifty years ago, the country in which I have lived most of my life, Canada, introduced government-sponsored, universal health care. This did not come about by chance, nor is it universally popular by chance. People set out to start it and others to continue it, because they thought and still think it a most worthwhile end. One can have purpose and one can achieve these ends. One does not have to be quite the disillusioned cynic that Candide becomes at the end of Voltaire’s novel, that the best we can do is stay home and tend our garden. That said, grandiose Enlightenment schemes, modeled as they were on Christian promises of eternal bliss, seem farfetched and far away. It is interesting and instructive how much of the global warming debate on both sides is carried on in apocalyptic terms. Arguably, one of the deadliest legacies of Christianity is to incline us to think of history purpose-driven to a desired end.
Personal Meaning
At the individual, personal level, what of purpose for the nonbeliever? When I lost my faith around the age of twenty, I was not at all sure that such purpose was possible. And in a sense, of course, I was right. I had given up the idea of purpose offered by Christianity, namely, striving in this world for rewards in the next. Of course, with reason you might respond that it is as well that I gave up this idea of purpose, because it certainly isn’t that of Christianity. Jesus knew full well the joys as well as the sorrows of this life. Think of his friendship with the disciples and with Mary and Martha. This said, there is more than a flavor of this end-direction about Christianity and religion in general. The problem of evil is explained this way. Cancer in the child is made understandable by God’s plans for the hereafter. Kant made that point about truth telling. Never telling lies can lead to horrendous problems; fortunately, God will make it all right in the long-term, and we must always keep this in mind. Returning to nonbelievers like me, nothing denies that one can have a lifelong purpose aimed at a goal before this life ends, for instance, making a billion dollars. Or, perhaps more elevated, for Zionists seeing the creation of the state of Israel. But I suspect that most of us, having given up the idea of a lifelong purpose aimed at the next world, are inclined to draw back somewhat and cut down on lifelong purposes generally. After all, if everything you do and think is fixed on your next decades, then are you not missing out on the decade you are in? For the nonbeliever, these are all you are going to get. My existence, the value to my life, was not going to be predicated on the hope of feeling satisfied as life draws to an end—although as it happens, I do feel satisfied—but rather on doing those things of value along the way that will lead to such satisfaction. This all starts to sound very Aristotelian, and I think it is, so long as one doesn’t try to read too much overall meaning into things. In other words, as long as one is first and foremost a Darwinian! This said, as virtue ethicists stress, one pulls back from grandiose plans and one cultivates the things that are important to you as a human being. When I say “cultivate,” there is obviously some real intention and thought here, but a lot of it is actually doing and trying to bring meaning and value—and purpose—into one’s life.
My fellow philosophers have written intelligently and sensitively on these matters and help me to see things in perspective. I have always found inspirational Jean Paul Sartre’s little essay Existentialism Is a Humanism, based on a lecture given in 1945. He tells us that existence precedes essence and that, in a world without God, we must do the creating ourselves. “There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.”27 Continuing: “What we mean to say is that man first exists; that is that man primarily exists—that man is, before all else, something that projects itself into a future, and is conscious of doing so. Man is indeed a project that has a subjective existence, rather unlike that of a patch of moss, a spreading fungus or a cauliflower. Prior to that projection of the self, nothing exists, not even in divine intelligence, and man shall attain existence only when he is what he projects himself to be—not what he would like to be.”28
I think there is a human nature—our knowledge and our morality—one that I have been sketching earlier in this chapter, one that was shaped by Darwinian factors. That is the beginning of freedom, not its end. Trying to cash out how one now moves forward, how one sets about creating oneself, turn to the insights of American ethicist Susan Wolf, who sees meaning in fulfillment—“one finds one’s passion and goes for it”—and in going beyond self, “a life is meaningful insofar as it contributes to something larger than itself,” with the proviso that this circles back to self: one has “an expectation about the subjective feelings and attitudes that contributing to something larger will engender.”29 She writes also that “our susceptibility to these sorts of reasons is connected to the possibility that we lead meaningful lives, understanding meaningfulness as an attribute lives can have that is not reducible to or subsumable under either happiness, as it is ordinarily understood, or morality.”30 I am not sure about this. If you understand “happiness” in the extended sense of John Stuart Mill—better Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied—then I would argue that meaning and happiness do go together. One of the commentators on Wolf raises the case of Claus von Stauffenberg who led the plot against Hitler. He was hardly cheery when the plot failed, when he was discovered and was about to be put to death. But his life was surely meaningful, and even at that time—especially at that time—he had a sense of self-worth, which is the mark of the truly happy person. With respect to morality, as a Darwinian I want to get away from the Christian notion that you are either in or out on the issue. Prison visiting is of moral worth; composing operas is not. Apart from endorsing the Kantian notion of duties to oneself—Mozart had the duty to use his phenomenal gifts—I see value more on a spectrum, which of course is what you might expect from an evolutionist. I am not sure you could have a totally meaningful life if one were totally selfish—Richard Wagner around your wife, for instance—but value slips easily from one end of the spectrum to the other. Mozart and Wagner have brought great happiness to their fellow human beings, and that is surely a morally good thing to have done—quite apart from the worth for themselves of composing. Wolf insists on morality in some sense being objective, but “objective” is a very mild term for her; she stresses explicitly that she is not demanding nonnatural, Platonic-like qualities of the kind supposed by G. E. Moore, and if we mean by “objective” going beyond the purely relative—if it feels okay, then it is okay—as we have seen, the Darwinian insists on this. Although, it is comparative value that is at stake, when dealing with organisms, the human realm alters this. There might be some discussion about the absolute value of using an automobile rather than a bicycle—this is part of the discussion about whether culture shows real progress—for all that there are deniers, it is surely legitimate to say (as I have said) that vaccination against smallpox or polio is an absolute for the Darwinian as much as for anyone.
At the risk of being even more egocentric than usual, using the excuse that this is all personal and there are no outside supports, let me talk of three things that have given purpose to my life—made my life meaningful in a sense that I think would be appreciated by Wolf and others. First, family. After a not-very-happy first marriage, and several years as a single parent, I met my present wife, Lizzie, who, fortunately, for all that she shares her birthday with Beethoven, is not named “Ludwig.” We have had more than thirty years together raising children, not always finding it easy but fortunately having enough shared sense of humor to get through to the next day. Now with the kids launched—more or less, some days rather less than more—we find we really like each other and go traveling and those sorts of things. She regrets the books that keep piling up. I am seriously thinking of joining Amazon Anonymous—“Hi, I’m Michael, and I haven’t bought a book in five days.” I regret the dogs she keeps bringing home—“Hi, I’m Lizzie, and I haven’t been to the Bainbridge Animal Shelter in five days.” But we compromise. I buy books instead from AbeBooks.com. Lizzie stays in-state for her dogs. Nutmeg is a whippet from a Florida breeder. Our shared understanding and mutual tolerance, and the results that follow, are certainly things of value—things that give purpose to life. As Plato says in The Republic, they are the best kind of good—a good here and now and a good for the future. As are the children. The fun of the children at the time—am I the only person in the world who really loved having teenagers around the house?—and the joy that, like Emily, they have found ways to meaningful lives.
To family, in a very Greek way I would add friends. I am a compulsive worker, and as a break, I love to cook. What is good about this is that first, it is intense and you have to focus on what you are doing and not on other things. For a time, my mind is not racing on about the latest philosophical puzzle. It does not preclude listening to the radio. No account of my life would be complete without a tribute to the Metropolitan Opera and its Saturday afternoon broadcasts—now, and this starts to make even me think there might be a Good God, supplemented by cinema showings of matinees. Send out for pizza on those days! The second thing about cooking, or rather its results, is that it is social—blurring the distinction between value for oneself and value for others. Food is for sharing and conversation and more. At least, now that the second batch of children is in their twenties, we no longer have to buy loaves by the dozen and potatoes by the hundredweight. Although, be warned. Our youngest, Edward, is in Britain doing graduate work in philosophy. “Friday the Thirteenth. Just when You Thought the Worst Was Over! Fifty More Years of Philosophical Ruses.”
The second source of great satisfaction and purpose is being of service to others. That Quaker childhood struck deep! Sartre also: “When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.”31 I am absolutely not a do-gooder. The thought of going to Central America to build houses for the poor terrifies and appalls me. And I am not into late-night soup kitchens. But I have been a teacher—a college prof—now for fifty years and I find it deeply satisfying. I cannot say that I have always done brilliantly—my teaching ratings are pretty good, but I am not sure at all that I trust those—but I have striven to speak to every student, and (Quakerism again!) to see, in an entirely secular sense, that of God in every person, the “Inner Light.” I should say that being a philosopher has been important here because philosophy is the highest calling. Plato was absolutely right about this. To be able to share this with young people has been a joy and a privilege. My undergraduate teaching has been very heavily geared toward first-year students. I had a hugely difficult time making the transition from the close atmosphere of a Quaker boarding school—my American friends do a double take when I tell them that I am the product of a Christian high school—to the rather alienating experience of university. I want to help young people know that they are not alone, and that although life can be challenging, it can also be exciting and rewarding. For better or for worse, I am sure my writing style is a function of all of this—never presuming, always trying to keep the audience’s attention.
At the graduate level, most of my interaction has been in the second half of my career. In part, this was because in the early years I was establishing myself and wasn’t really ready. I set myself a huge agenda as I moved from philosophy to biology and then on to the history of science. The social psychologist Donald Campbell once said that to be interdisciplinary, you have to be willing to be inadequate in many fields at the same time, and I know what he meant. As I steered into waters unknown, understandably, few students wanted to follow me. Apart from anything else, it was one thing for me, a tenured full professor to do this, another for a soon-to-be job applicant. I, too, worried, as I still do, about their job prospects. It isn’t good enough to mentor and cherish someone rather vulnerable for five or more years and then turn around and say that you are not an employment agency. But I did want to contribute, and for this reason I started the journal Biology and Philosophy. Also, I have done a lot of book editing, in two series for Cambridge University Press. In that way, I was able to help others, particularly those at a junior level. It wasn’t just a matter of doing good in a Mother Teresa fashion. As I think Susan Wolf would appreciate and I hope approve, it has been great fun, not the least because in the journal I ran a column called “Booknotes,” where I had license to say what I wanted about a lot of self-regarding people. More recently, I have taken on graduate students, and I feel great pride in their development and successful job hunting, if not in academia, then in rewarding work elsewhere. As the students grow, particularly the graduate students, they turn from being one’s children into being one’s friends, and relationships forged are ongoing beyond college days—meaning in the sense of being fulfilling and meaning in the sense of being larger than oneself. I never, ever thought I would become a notary public and perform weddings, but I have and I did. I should say that all of the ethnic grandparents were greatly relieved when I used the service from the Book of Common Prayer. That I omitted all references to the deity mattered far less than the avoidance of a flower-children event, where the lines are made up—even worse, where people read from The Prophet—and we are all expected to sing Bob Dylan songs and embrace each other and the breakfast is gluten free.
Third, and this moves right on from the last point, the life of the mind, of the intellect. I always knew I was going to be a writer and I have been. The teacher in my infants’ class read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” and I was hooked. I cannot remember when I could not read, and from the age of five or six I had my nose in a book, always. The dreaded observation that the weather is nice—fortunately we lived in England—was always a wrench as I was pulled away from The Children of the New Forest or The Secret Garden or The Family from One End Street or (although my sister’s, one of my all-time favorites) Ballet Shoes. Thank you, Andrew Carnegie! As I have grown up, my tastes have changed, although the love of reading stays. Happiness is an old favorite by Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope. I confess a weakness for the “shockers” of John Buchan, especially the tales of Dickson McCunn, the Glasgow grocer. Apart from his phenomenal storytelling powers—Mrs. Gaskell and Neville Shute also come to mind—I should say that what makes these tales particularly gratifying is that, under the cover of a fast-moving thriller, Buchan works to expound and understand the Calvinist theology he imbibed as a child. It is for much the same reason that I enjoy and admire the trilogy—Gilead, Home, and Lila—of the contemporary novelist Marilynne Robinson. Lest I sound too much of a prig, not all of my reading has had to have deep meaning—nor would Wolf and others insist that it must. (Between the lines, I sense for Wolf a fondness for Sudoku solving. I am more of a crossword man, myself.) In the realm of books, linking childhood and adulthood is Sherlock Holmes. There has never been a better short story than “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” except perhaps “The Red-Headed League” or “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Going back to meaning, as my introduction to literature was thanks to Rudyard Kipling, so I hope the last thing I ever read will be by him. If you have not done so, I beg you to read “The Gardener.”
I always wanted to contribute, to be a player. As a child, in Quaker meeting when a “weighty Friend” would start pontificating, I would shut off and start planning a book. I now do the same in department meetings. From the start, I knew that I did not have the imagination of the novelist. Writing nonfiction is just as creative. Read this book! For me the play of ideas has always been vitally important and all-consuming. Fifteen minutes into my first philosophy class—it was on Descartes’s Meditations and how we know if we are awake or asleep—I knew that that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. What I did not then know was that I was going to be able to combine it with my love of history, particularly history of the Victorians. I always thought—I still think—that history on its own is great fun but not really a full-time subject for grown-ups. One needs more, and that means philosophy. I moved to philosophy of science as my special area of interest, at least in part because ethics (a natural for someone with a Quaker background) was so boring and irrelevant (no Darwinian infusion!). I had never in my life taken a course in biology—in my day, biology, like Spanish and geography, was for those known euphemistically as “late developers”—but, for the very good reason that there was not much written about it at the time, and that which was written wasn’t very good, focused on it in my doctoral work. If you think of Aristotle and Kant, that surely shows that not all change is progress!
Then came Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its message that, if you want to understand science, you must understand the history of science. This took me straight to Darwin and the Origin, and here we are a half century later. Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers into two kinds, hedgehogs like Plato who saw everything through one idea, and foxes like Aristotle, who range over many ideas.32 I am very obviously a hedgehog, but it doesn’t mean that the course of one’s thinking is straight down a narrow road—every turn taken, every hill ascended, shows new vistas and places to stop and try to understand. At the practical level, showing again why I am uncomfortable separating moral value from other values, my journey took me into the federal courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was the historian and philosopher of science who spoke up for the American Civil Liberties Union, in the already-mentioned (successful) suit it brought against a law that mandated the teaching of so-called creation science (biblical literalism) along with evolutionary theorizing in biology classes in the state’s public schools.33 At the more theoretical level, Darwinism has been my lifelong passion and interest, and I am glad that I have had the chance to study such a momentous aspect of human cultural history. It has given me opportunity and inclination to always think outside the box, as it were. Wearing my hat more as a historian of science—my earlier put-down was jokingly self-referential—I have always been interested in the sociological and ideological side of things. This has led most recently to an analysis of the Darwinian revolution through my personal passion for literature, looking at the reasons why, in major respects, as I expressed above, Darwinism has always functioned as a secular religion.34 I might regret Darwin Day, but I am not surprised by it. Wearing my hat more as a philosopher of science, it has led to thoughts about epistemology and ethics, expressed earlier in this chapter. Thoughts that, in my youth, would have made me deeply ashamed and of which—given that I am now being criticized in journals that would never accept anything by me—many today think I should still be deeply ashamed. As it happens, I have never been deeply ashamed of anything I have written—well, hardly ever!
I am finding teaching and scholarship more exciting now than ever before. I never thought I would teach a graduate course on Kant or another on American philosophy. I never thought that my love of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Dickinson would tell me so much about the shock of Darwinism on the Victorian mind. I never thought that, after years of making rude comments about Sewall Wright, I would now be sympathetic to a panpsychic perspective. I should add, to my surprise, I find that this move is today positively trendy in some very respectable circles. Perhaps there is some change, finally. In Canadian philosopher William Seager’s excellent overview of philosophies of mind, Theories of Consciousness, although he finds no place in his index for either Darwin or evolution, in a discussion of the new popularity of panpsychism, he manages somewhat sheepishly to tuck in a quotation from Clifford, adding: “The addition of the theory of evolution which gives a palpable mechanism by which the simple is differentially compounded into the complex adds impetus to the slide towards a true panpsychism.”35
Darwinism, but always with philosophy there in the end. Writing books like this, that have some interesting history but with an overall point. With a purpose, as one might say! A non-believer like me lives life day by day, finding value as one goes along. But at the end of fifty years, one can look back, as I do, with great satisfaction. Some may fault me for being elitist, stressing being a professor and so forth. To each his or her own. I certainly do not imply that what was of worth for me was of worth for all. In Dickens’s great novel David Copperfield, the companion of David’s aunt Betsy is Mr. Dick, who is feebleminded, or however one would describe him in our politically correct society. When we first meet him, he is writing a memorial, constantly interrupted by a haunting need to refer to the lopped-off head of King Charles the First. Then Aunt Betsy loses her money and Mr. Dick, who has beautiful handwriting, turns to copying legal documents and the like, making a little money and thus supplementing their income. This is incredibly meaningful for him, even though it would not be for David, who like his creator becomes a successful writer. The story does point to, what is for me, an important part of the meaningful life, namely, striving to do better than one thought one could. All my life I have been spurred by the sense that this I must do, for I am living a life for my mother—who died suddenly at the age of thirty-three—as well as myself.
In all of this, there is a huge element of what Bernard Williams—and, to be fair, Thomas Nagel—called “moral luck.”36 In my earliest years I had very loving parents; I was raised a Quaker, and although I no longer accept the Christian God, I am so aware every day that the devotion and moral worth of the Friends of my childhood infuse every part of my being; I have been healthy; I have lived in safe times in safe places; I came to university teaching when there were still many good jobs available; I lived in Canada where the Scottish influence on higher education made for great integrity; I met Lizzie; and much more. All one can say is that I have had the chances, unlike my mother, and I have tried to use them to the full. That is a very Christian sentiment—the parable of the talents has always been binding on me—but in a way my life has been better, more purposeful, than that of the Christian or other religious believer. To mention Bernard Williams, yet again, somewhat to my surprise, eternity strikes me as a bit tedious. I have been able to find purpose in what I am doing without hope or fear of what it is worth in some ultimate sense. You cannot have a more value-impregnated—a more purpose-filled—life than that.
There is nothing more to be said. Although a closing poem is not a bad idea.