The myth of Sisyphus is surely the easiest of all ancient parables to relate to. Every human life consists, in a sense, in waging an unwinnable war against gravity. From apocalyptic seismic upheavals to surgically unalterable sagging tits, the weakest of the universe's fundamental forces has her way with us all in the end. Still, it comes as a surprise - call me naive - to find oneself suddenly at the bottom of the anthill one has spent so many years laboriously climbing. I think in this situation it would be better to be an ant. I suspect that individual ants are fairly resigned to their lot in life, whereas I am not.
Mao Zedong's ascent to total power was enabled by the manner in which he turned a long series of defeats, retreats and retrenchments to his advantage. History has not, of course, been kind to Mao but he surely lived the dream in his own lifetime. It's not that I think I'm Mao or anything but they're not feeding me lithium yet, so I am still capable of fantasising that somehow I will yet snatch victory, or at least continence, from the jaws of defeat. Do I have the stomach, or the arsehole, for another assault on the anthill? I don't know.
Thank all the gods in whom I do not believe for giving me a hobby. When I was a child my profoundest wish was to be old and rich enough to be able to add a specimen of Conus gloriamaris to my shell collection. When I was old and rich enough, I found that I no longer wanted one. This constant failure of one's means to satisfy one's aspirations is another of life's bitter lessons. I have found however - and this may be my salvation - that the urge to collect, cultivate and share as many as possible of the world's plants has become a consuming passion that I hope will burn as ferociously as it does now, for the rest of my life.
Friday, 20 April 2012
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Stability
I spent my childhood living in a war zone. Not literally, although until I was seven I lived in Rhodesia under Ian Smith's UDI government. The terrorists - sorry, freedom fighters - were never far from our thoughts or our doorstep. The war that did far more damage to me was waged between my parents, who hated one another with a passion that astonishes me to this day. I once asked my Dad why on earth he'd married Mum, given his obvious loathing of the very sight of her. 'Sex.' He said, loudly.
Dad was away most of the time, either on business or avoiding UK tax. I missed him desperately, viscerally and yearned for his return when he was absent. When he did come home I swear he was in a screaming row with my mother within an hour. It was always about money (he didn't give her enough; she was too profligate with what he gave her). I loved and still love my mother too and found it unbearably upsetting to witness the two central figures in my life at war. So I intervened, or tried to. I interposed my little eight-year old body between my enraged parents and begged them to stop.
So far as I recall, there was never any physical violence. Dad was a peaceful man, perhaps even a pacifist and Mum had better ways of hurting him than hitting him. But for me, they might as well have locked me in a cage and beaten me till I howled for all the joy I extracted from their parenting style.
It is fair to say that my childhood was miserable. The handful of happy memories that I have salvaged from my childhood are as tiny islands in an ocean of anguish. I could not wait to grow up - I yearned for freedom from the slavery of childhood - and it has been one of life's cruelest lessons that adulthood is even worse. Precisely because of my own miserable childhood, I did not want children of my own. My two children were both conceived unintentionally. One quickly realises, as a father, that the unconditional love that exists between a parent and a child is automatic. It requires no effort. So I did not have to decide to love my children. The feeling of their small, warm bodies clinging to mine in answer to some ancient primate need is enough to keep up bonded.
When Elsje, my daughter, was born, I was full of hopes, not only about how I wouldn't screw her up, but about how I'd help to raise her in a household full of fun, ideas, delicious food and love. She would spend her entire childhood in one house, a place she would forever think of as home.
Well, it wasn't to be. Elsje is seven and has had three addresses. Tonight she is spending her first night in her fourth home. I cannot now recall whether I had lived at more than four addressed before I turned seven, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true. Elsje and her brother, my son, Pieter are wildly excited about 'changing houses', for which they have Corinne to thank. In fact, Corinne is the rock to which their young lives are tethered and she deserves sole credit for the fact that they seem to be wonderfully well-adjusted, polite, friendly and ever-so-slightly mischievous young people.
I would have liked to give them the stable home that I craved when I was a child but they seem not to need it. In a sense, this was obviously going to be true. Providing them with solutions to my problems was never going to provide answers to theirs. In fairness to myself, I think this is not something most parents understand before it is too late. Or maybe that is special pleading from me.
What I mean to say is that I feel absolute anguish. I do not seem able to control the flow of events, except within a very limited purview, and I worry that my beloved children will end up as fucked-up as me, as a result of this failing. I have found a way of getting though the day, from the point where I emerge from a drug-induced coma, to the point where I sink into a drug-induced coma. But my children deserve better (or at least have done nothing to earn worse). Hey ho. Night night.
Dad was away most of the time, either on business or avoiding UK tax. I missed him desperately, viscerally and yearned for his return when he was absent. When he did come home I swear he was in a screaming row with my mother within an hour. It was always about money (he didn't give her enough; she was too profligate with what he gave her). I loved and still love my mother too and found it unbearably upsetting to witness the two central figures in my life at war. So I intervened, or tried to. I interposed my little eight-year old body between my enraged parents and begged them to stop.
So far as I recall, there was never any physical violence. Dad was a peaceful man, perhaps even a pacifist and Mum had better ways of hurting him than hitting him. But for me, they might as well have locked me in a cage and beaten me till I howled for all the joy I extracted from their parenting style.
It is fair to say that my childhood was miserable. The handful of happy memories that I have salvaged from my childhood are as tiny islands in an ocean of anguish. I could not wait to grow up - I yearned for freedom from the slavery of childhood - and it has been one of life's cruelest lessons that adulthood is even worse. Precisely because of my own miserable childhood, I did not want children of my own. My two children were both conceived unintentionally. One quickly realises, as a father, that the unconditional love that exists between a parent and a child is automatic. It requires no effort. So I did not have to decide to love my children. The feeling of their small, warm bodies clinging to mine in answer to some ancient primate need is enough to keep up bonded.
When Elsje, my daughter, was born, I was full of hopes, not only about how I wouldn't screw her up, but about how I'd help to raise her in a household full of fun, ideas, delicious food and love. She would spend her entire childhood in one house, a place she would forever think of as home.
Well, it wasn't to be. Elsje is seven and has had three addresses. Tonight she is spending her first night in her fourth home. I cannot now recall whether I had lived at more than four addressed before I turned seven, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true. Elsje and her brother, my son, Pieter are wildly excited about 'changing houses', for which they have Corinne to thank. In fact, Corinne is the rock to which their young lives are tethered and she deserves sole credit for the fact that they seem to be wonderfully well-adjusted, polite, friendly and ever-so-slightly mischievous young people.
I would have liked to give them the stable home that I craved when I was a child but they seem not to need it. In a sense, this was obviously going to be true. Providing them with solutions to my problems was never going to provide answers to theirs. In fairness to myself, I think this is not something most parents understand before it is too late. Or maybe that is special pleading from me.
What I mean to say is that I feel absolute anguish. I do not seem able to control the flow of events, except within a very limited purview, and I worry that my beloved children will end up as fucked-up as me, as a result of this failing. I have found a way of getting though the day, from the point where I emerge from a drug-induced coma, to the point where I sink into a drug-induced coma. But my children deserve better (or at least have done nothing to earn worse). Hey ho. Night night.
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Value destruction
When I started writing 'Life in the Sauce', the predecessor to Alphatuosity, 15 months ago my hope was that writing about my catastrophe-prone random wobble through existence would prove cathartic. I also hoped that it would be funny, at least to anyone with an appreciation of slapstick and a guilty fondness for schadenfreude, that unloveliest but most distinctively human of emotions. In the first aim, LitS was a qualified success. I think the only reason I survived the darkest hours was that, when I was suicidal, I was often too busy writing to surrender to the mesmerising, beckoning call of oblivion. In the second aim I certainly failed and one unintended consequence of my blogging life has been the discovery that I possess one sick sense of humour. You, my friends, seem not to find my travails funny, for which I suppose I should be grateful.
In addition to my blogging, three other props have kept me limping along. The first and most useful of these is obviously alcohol, about which I have written more than enough. The second is the knowledge that, however far I fall, there will always be Christians, Muslims and other religious scum beneath me. Finally, there have been plants, thousands upon thousands of plants. Shortly before I went mad, when I was still forcing myself, in a daily effort of will that is now beyond my comprehension, onto the London train every day, one of my colleagues caught me browsing a plant catalogue online. 'Do your plants know you look at other plants on the internet?' He asked and I knew it was game over.
I do not, of course, think that a belief in fate is coherent but I do think that there are grooves and fissures in the landscape of possible futures down which real human lives flow like water on a beach. My recent life has been running through a particularly deep channel, a Grand Canyon snaking across the Arizona of alternative lives. This is not to absolve myself of blame. On the contrary, my precipitous decline has been entirely of my own making, to the extent we have any control at all. As a friend (sic) put it in an email, 'in the supernovae of fuck-ups, you are certainly one of the brightest and most admirable dead stars', one of the nicest compliments that has ever been paid to me.
Recent events have not so much been a case of decline and fall as turn turtle and plummet. At one time I flew across the Atlantic so frequently that I was briefly one of Virgin's most valued customers and in this capacity was invited to spend a night in a warehouse in Crawley with other gold card holders, testing out the new 'Upper Class' cabin. As experiences go, this was as surreal as they come without drugs (except alcohol, of which there was plenty), complete with piped background engine noise, which stopped momentarily every time the tape looped, causing me to awake in terror, imagining I was hurtling earthwards in a burning airframe. In the morning we assembled to provide feedback. One question we were asked was whether, if an airbag were incorporated into the seat belt (only in Upper Class naturally), we would feel safer. If you have ever felt envious of the fat cats at the front of the plane, reflect that most of my fellow panelists answered 'yes' and the airbags were duly installed.
The props that I've been leaning on these past few years feel as comforting now as an airbag between me and an uncontrolled descent into the sixth cordillera of the Andes. I'm going down and nothing, but nothing, is going to break the fall. Ironically, I'm no longer suicidal. Although death would be an eminently rational choice now (reproductive life over, children not yet fucked-up by alcoholic father, friends still abundant, not yet incontinent), I am too curious about what next spring might bring to top myself.
Today I signed a contract that wipes out my entire net worth. I sold my house for a loss of £650,000, which is what I was technically worth yesterday. I did this because there seems to be no choice. The day would soon have come when I could no longer pay the mortgage and the house would have been repossessed, leaving me bankrupt, with no house. At least this way my wife and children have salvaged enough money to start again, free of debt and the far more onerous burden of an association with me. I have some land and an awful lot of plants, around which I must now organise my life. There are also three stables, which I use for storage of pots and compost. It seems appropriate, at this time of year, to reflect that whereas Christ was born in a stable and went on to achieve immortality, I am likely to die in one and go quietly into the void.
In addition to my blogging, three other props have kept me limping along. The first and most useful of these is obviously alcohol, about which I have written more than enough. The second is the knowledge that, however far I fall, there will always be Christians, Muslims and other religious scum beneath me. Finally, there have been plants, thousands upon thousands of plants. Shortly before I went mad, when I was still forcing myself, in a daily effort of will that is now beyond my comprehension, onto the London train every day, one of my colleagues caught me browsing a plant catalogue online. 'Do your plants know you look at other plants on the internet?' He asked and I knew it was game over.
I do not, of course, think that a belief in fate is coherent but I do think that there are grooves and fissures in the landscape of possible futures down which real human lives flow like water on a beach. My recent life has been running through a particularly deep channel, a Grand Canyon snaking across the Arizona of alternative lives. This is not to absolve myself of blame. On the contrary, my precipitous decline has been entirely of my own making, to the extent we have any control at all. As a friend (sic) put it in an email, 'in the supernovae of fuck-ups, you are certainly one of the brightest and most admirable dead stars', one of the nicest compliments that has ever been paid to me.
Recent events have not so much been a case of decline and fall as turn turtle and plummet. At one time I flew across the Atlantic so frequently that I was briefly one of Virgin's most valued customers and in this capacity was invited to spend a night in a warehouse in Crawley with other gold card holders, testing out the new 'Upper Class' cabin. As experiences go, this was as surreal as they come without drugs (except alcohol, of which there was plenty), complete with piped background engine noise, which stopped momentarily every time the tape looped, causing me to awake in terror, imagining I was hurtling earthwards in a burning airframe. In the morning we assembled to provide feedback. One question we were asked was whether, if an airbag were incorporated into the seat belt (only in Upper Class naturally), we would feel safer. If you have ever felt envious of the fat cats at the front of the plane, reflect that most of my fellow panelists answered 'yes' and the airbags were duly installed.
The props that I've been leaning on these past few years feel as comforting now as an airbag between me and an uncontrolled descent into the sixth cordillera of the Andes. I'm going down and nothing, but nothing, is going to break the fall. Ironically, I'm no longer suicidal. Although death would be an eminently rational choice now (reproductive life over, children not yet fucked-up by alcoholic father, friends still abundant, not yet incontinent), I am too curious about what next spring might bring to top myself.
Today I signed a contract that wipes out my entire net worth. I sold my house for a loss of £650,000, which is what I was technically worth yesterday. I did this because there seems to be no choice. The day would soon have come when I could no longer pay the mortgage and the house would have been repossessed, leaving me bankrupt, with no house. At least this way my wife and children have salvaged enough money to start again, free of debt and the far more onerous burden of an association with me. I have some land and an awful lot of plants, around which I must now organise my life. There are also three stables, which I use for storage of pots and compost. It seems appropriate, at this time of year, to reflect that whereas Christ was born in a stable and went on to achieve immortality, I am likely to die in one and go quietly into the void.
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Psychiatry Redux
Will someone please remind me what psychiatrists are for? At one time I thought I knew the answer to this question but a lot of things have become less clear, since I stopped taking the blue pills.
My first psychiatrist impressed me hugely by summarising my life story in short, declarative sentences (about five of them) after a 45 minute consultation. Then, when I'd internalised the implications of this intellectual tour-de-force, I sank deeper into depression. I decided that suicide was the only sensible option and got as far as a wine bar, into which I descended to drink my last bottle of wine. Three bottles of wine later, I had lost the will to die and I went sheepishly home, never to return to work.
Psychiatrist number two operates out of the Priory, a loony bin for the well-insured. She changed my drugs, doubled the doses occasionally and advised me to find a therapist.
Shrink number three is an addiction specialist and has so far succeeded in trampling underfoot the miniscule sense of self worth that had survived the last few years of misery.
Presumably most psychiatrists embark on their careers with a sense of mission. Or perhaps I am being too generous. I really wonder, having suffered at the hands of the profession, whether its practitioners ever ask themselves what they are trying to achieve. Are they trying to minimize their patients' suffering? Are they trying to maximize their happiness? Are they trying to find a socially acceptable way of reintroducing mentally ill people to general society? Are they simply going to work and trying to get through the day without irretrievably fucking up their careers?
The three that I've been exposed to haven't, so far as I can tell, asked themselves this question. No. 1 was more interested in discussing his bond portfolio than my mental health. No.2's over-riding goal was to improve the IRR of The Priory's owner, my employer, RBS. No.3 is messianic in his conviction that substance abuse is the source of all evil, in which respect he is mistaken.
Over the years since I received the cathartic but fateful diagnosis of depression I have encountered dozens of general practitioners, psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists, only one of whom I admire. Only this one person can be said to have done me any good. I cannot help but wonder whether, if the profession of psychiatry were abolished, the quota of good in the world would increase or diminish.
My first psychiatrist impressed me hugely by summarising my life story in short, declarative sentences (about five of them) after a 45 minute consultation. Then, when I'd internalised the implications of this intellectual tour-de-force, I sank deeper into depression. I decided that suicide was the only sensible option and got as far as a wine bar, into which I descended to drink my last bottle of wine. Three bottles of wine later, I had lost the will to die and I went sheepishly home, never to return to work.
Psychiatrist number two operates out of the Priory, a loony bin for the well-insured. She changed my drugs, doubled the doses occasionally and advised me to find a therapist.
Shrink number three is an addiction specialist and has so far succeeded in trampling underfoot the miniscule sense of self worth that had survived the last few years of misery.
Presumably most psychiatrists embark on their careers with a sense of mission. Or perhaps I am being too generous. I really wonder, having suffered at the hands of the profession, whether its practitioners ever ask themselves what they are trying to achieve. Are they trying to minimize their patients' suffering? Are they trying to maximize their happiness? Are they trying to find a socially acceptable way of reintroducing mentally ill people to general society? Are they simply going to work and trying to get through the day without irretrievably fucking up their careers?
The three that I've been exposed to haven't, so far as I can tell, asked themselves this question. No. 1 was more interested in discussing his bond portfolio than my mental health. No.2's over-riding goal was to improve the IRR of The Priory's owner, my employer, RBS. No.3 is messianic in his conviction that substance abuse is the source of all evil, in which respect he is mistaken.
Over the years since I received the cathartic but fateful diagnosis of depression I have encountered dozens of general practitioners, psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists, only one of whom I admire. Only this one person can be said to have done me any good. I cannot help but wonder whether, if the profession of psychiatry were abolished, the quota of good in the world would increase or diminish.
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Perspectives
One of the benefits of having scientific, as opposed to religious heroes is that you are free to disagree, vehemently, with some or most of what your hero believes. Richard Feynman, for instance, was notoriously contemptuous of philosophy. 'Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.' Is one of the kinder ways he found to express this loathing. But I think he underestimated the need that ordinary scientists have to be told (by philosophers) what they meant when they said... If you think that believers have the same freedom with respect to their heroes, ask yourself when you last heard a priest say 'Yeah, I admire God but I think he's a bit unsound on buggery.' Religious critics of God's alleged views on buggery are reduced to arguing that God did not in fact claim that buggery's just reward is an appointment with the state executioner (Leviticus 20:13).
So the fact that David Deutsch doesn't just look like he ought to be a genius but is in fact a genius does not in the least deter me from thinking he's got a dodgy sense of perspective. Promoting his book The Beginning of Infinity, which I recommend, he performs an entertaining stunt in this lecture, illustrating what it is like to occupy a 'typical' place in the universe. It is of course dark there and cold. Apparently photons are so rarefied out there that a supernova in the nearest galaxy wouldn't register on your retina if you were staring right at it when the light reached you. He concludes that, therefore, living in a brightly lit, warm part of the universe is pretty special. In a couple of skips and a jump he's gone from there to the claim that there are no limits to (suitably augmented) human understanding and that we are at the very beginning of a journey of intellectual discovery that will transform our descendants into gods. David Deutsch is, I think it fair to say, an optimist.
Deutsch's mistake is surely the same as that made by the lottery winner who thinks to himself, 'well fuck me, I'm a millionaire, when yesterday I was a simple toilet cleaner. Makes you think. There must be someone up there looking out for me.' Come off it, David. The odds imply that someone had to win the lottery. That doesn't mean there's anything special about the winner. The physical constants that pertain in our universe imply that most of it is devoid of photons and heat but also that a few bright spots must exist, for a while. Of course David Deutsch exists in one of those bright spots. To be fair, Deutsch is not helping himself to the claim that he was put here, but he is certainly reading much more into the fact of his existence than that mundane event warrants. Douglas Adams' vainglorious puddle would find itself in an unusual alliance with Deutsch and the Pope.
I think that many of the mistakes that our species has made stem from failures of our sense of perspective. For various reasons, I have spent a lot of time recently driving up and down the M5 motorway, which runs roughly north-south through southern England. There are several sections of this road that are, so the signs say, being 'upgraded to managed motorways'. For present purposes it implies that the speed limit in these zones is 50mph and new average speed cameras enforce rigid compliance. As a result of this triumph of technology over liberty, I have noticed that the difference between 49mph and 51mph is really obvious. To the extent that I become impatient with the driver of a car ahead of me in the same lane traveling 1mph slower than the limit. I presume that the reason for this sensitivity is that, despite the fact that until a couple of hundred or so years ago, no human had traveled at these speeds, the mechanisms that enable us to gauge our velocity when walking or running still function at the velocities prevailing on a typical British motorway. Step into an aeroplane, however, and once you are at cruising altitude all sense of speed is lost. Of course you know that you are moving at 500mph but, gazing down at the land below, it just doesn't feel that way.
Or what about the alleged wisdom of 'ancient' civilisations? Whenever some cretin tells me that a certain 'ancient' remedy is a sovereign cure for the common cold I want to tie the fucker down and saw his leg off using ancient surgical techniques. Recorded history extends, at the very most, three millennia into our past. Homo sapiens is about 200, 000 years old (that is, the lineage that led to all extant human beings diverged from other hominids about that long ago). In other words, the most ancient 'wisdom' to which we have access is about 1.5% as old as our species, which is in turn a neophyte on the global biodiversity stage. In comparison with the span if the history of life on earth, our most ancient texts are insignificantly earlier than contemporary texts.
Well, OK, but we are still at the summit of the immense mountain that evolution has scaled to produce us, aren't we? This is the most pernicious of all human conceits. Evolution didn't have us 'in mind' on its long, blind journey from our ancestors. We are precisely - no more and no less - as 'evolved' as every other extant organism on earth. We occupy a position at the terminus of one of millions of spokes on the wheel of life. The bacteria in her small intestine can trace their ancestry exactly as far back as the Queen of England, to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).
One of the things I'm trying to learn about at the moment is how my conspecifics have thought about ethics during our very recent (say 3,000 year) history. When you approach the literature on this subject from a more-or-less random direction, as I have done, you quickly realise that there are two camps. According to one camp, humans of all societies are all the same, ethically speaking. Just as you can take a day-old baby from anywhere on earth, place it in a family anywhere else on earth and watch it acquire effortlessly the language of its adoptive parents, this camp says, the same baby will effortlessly acquire the moral mores of the culture in which it is raised. This is because humans posess a 'moral grammar' analogous with the universal grammar that all humans share (see here). What matters, therefore, is how we use the knowledge that our values are as much the product of natural selection as the shape of our noses. The other camp says no, no, no, morality is a cultural construct. Biology has nothing to do with it. Criticism of cannibalism or Nazism is therefore just another form of imperialism and should not be taken seriously.
This second claim makes me so cross that I want to stamp my feet, preferably repeatedly on the heads of the morons who adhere to this view. I defy you to look at the picture above and understand it and remain proud of your status as a human being. We humans are, to all intents and purposes, identical with respect to our values. The difference between Camus and a cannibal is trivial in comparison with the difference between both of them and a chimpanzee. Perspective. It's all about perspective.
So the fact that David Deutsch doesn't just look like he ought to be a genius but is in fact a genius does not in the least deter me from thinking he's got a dodgy sense of perspective. Promoting his book The Beginning of Infinity, which I recommend, he performs an entertaining stunt in this lecture, illustrating what it is like to occupy a 'typical' place in the universe. It is of course dark there and cold. Apparently photons are so rarefied out there that a supernova in the nearest galaxy wouldn't register on your retina if you were staring right at it when the light reached you. He concludes that, therefore, living in a brightly lit, warm part of the universe is pretty special. In a couple of skips and a jump he's gone from there to the claim that there are no limits to (suitably augmented) human understanding and that we are at the very beginning of a journey of intellectual discovery that will transform our descendants into gods. David Deutsch is, I think it fair to say, an optimist.
Deutsch's mistake is surely the same as that made by the lottery winner who thinks to himself, 'well fuck me, I'm a millionaire, when yesterday I was a simple toilet cleaner. Makes you think. There must be someone up there looking out for me.' Come off it, David. The odds imply that someone had to win the lottery. That doesn't mean there's anything special about the winner. The physical constants that pertain in our universe imply that most of it is devoid of photons and heat but also that a few bright spots must exist, for a while. Of course David Deutsch exists in one of those bright spots. To be fair, Deutsch is not helping himself to the claim that he was put here, but he is certainly reading much more into the fact of his existence than that mundane event warrants. Douglas Adams' vainglorious puddle would find itself in an unusual alliance with Deutsch and the Pope.
I think that many of the mistakes that our species has made stem from failures of our sense of perspective. For various reasons, I have spent a lot of time recently driving up and down the M5 motorway, which runs roughly north-south through southern England. There are several sections of this road that are, so the signs say, being 'upgraded to managed motorways'. For present purposes it implies that the speed limit in these zones is 50mph and new average speed cameras enforce rigid compliance. As a result of this triumph of technology over liberty, I have noticed that the difference between 49mph and 51mph is really obvious. To the extent that I become impatient with the driver of a car ahead of me in the same lane traveling 1mph slower than the limit. I presume that the reason for this sensitivity is that, despite the fact that until a couple of hundred or so years ago, no human had traveled at these speeds, the mechanisms that enable us to gauge our velocity when walking or running still function at the velocities prevailing on a typical British motorway. Step into an aeroplane, however, and once you are at cruising altitude all sense of speed is lost. Of course you know that you are moving at 500mph but, gazing down at the land below, it just doesn't feel that way.
Or what about the alleged wisdom of 'ancient' civilisations? Whenever some cretin tells me that a certain 'ancient' remedy is a sovereign cure for the common cold I want to tie the fucker down and saw his leg off using ancient surgical techniques. Recorded history extends, at the very most, three millennia into our past. Homo sapiens is about 200, 000 years old (that is, the lineage that led to all extant human beings diverged from other hominids about that long ago). In other words, the most ancient 'wisdom' to which we have access is about 1.5% as old as our species, which is in turn a neophyte on the global biodiversity stage. In comparison with the span if the history of life on earth, our most ancient texts are insignificantly earlier than contemporary texts.
Well, OK, but we are still at the summit of the immense mountain that evolution has scaled to produce us, aren't we? This is the most pernicious of all human conceits. Evolution didn't have us 'in mind' on its long, blind journey from our ancestors. We are precisely - no more and no less - as 'evolved' as every other extant organism on earth. We occupy a position at the terminus of one of millions of spokes on the wheel of life. The bacteria in her small intestine can trace their ancestry exactly as far back as the Queen of England, to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).
 |
| 'You are here' at about 10.30 |
One of the things I'm trying to learn about at the moment is how my conspecifics have thought about ethics during our very recent (say 3,000 year) history. When you approach the literature on this subject from a more-or-less random direction, as I have done, you quickly realise that there are two camps. According to one camp, humans of all societies are all the same, ethically speaking. Just as you can take a day-old baby from anywhere on earth, place it in a family anywhere else on earth and watch it acquire effortlessly the language of its adoptive parents, this camp says, the same baby will effortlessly acquire the moral mores of the culture in which it is raised. This is because humans posess a 'moral grammar' analogous with the universal grammar that all humans share (see here). What matters, therefore, is how we use the knowledge that our values are as much the product of natural selection as the shape of our noses. The other camp says no, no, no, morality is a cultural construct. Biology has nothing to do with it. Criticism of cannibalism or Nazism is therefore just another form of imperialism and should not be taken seriously.
This second claim makes me so cross that I want to stamp my feet, preferably repeatedly on the heads of the morons who adhere to this view. I defy you to look at the picture above and understand it and remain proud of your status as a human being. We humans are, to all intents and purposes, identical with respect to our values. The difference between Camus and a cannibal is trivial in comparison with the difference between both of them and a chimpanzee. Perspective. It's all about perspective.
Monday, 12 March 2012
Perspective
The spacecraft Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in the early 1970s and are drifting silently away from earth to this day. On the side of each probe is a small gold-anodised, aluminium plaque, six inches by nine depicting representations of the species - Homo sapiens - that built
and launched them. The wonderful, whimsical idea, conceived by Carl Sagan, was that an alien
intelligence discovering the probe in the far future could decipher the
inscriptions and learn something of what we had been and hoped to become.
What do you say to a hypothetical alien species using no more than 52 square inches of aluminium plate and how do you express yourself? A great question surely for A-level students
of critical thinking. NASA's answer was to use the language of
mathematics, which seems to be universal, and to provide a sort of
Rosetta Stone in the form of depictions of the hydrogen atom (hydrogen
is the commonest element in the universe) and a pulsar map. It also included
drawings of a man and a woman, naked, provoking the utterly delicious criticism that NASA was using taxpayers' dollars to 'send smut to the stars' (note the censorship of the woman's genitalia).
Voyager I, launched in 1977 - later than the Pioneer craft - is further from earth than any other human artefact. It is currently approaching interstellar space, 120 times further from earth than earth is from the sun (that's 180, 000, 000, 000 kilometers or 4.28 kilometers for every dollar of net worth of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest man in the Solar System), and in 2014 will cross the heliopause, the theoretical boundary where the solar wind is balanced by whispers from elsewhere in the galaxy. Building on the Pioneer plaque, NASA included in each Voyager spaceship a disc encoding a few images of typical earth scenes (e.g. multicultural groups of well-fed children playing happily together) and a diverse selection of music from recent earth history. There's a lovely story (also attributed to Sagan) told about the late Douglas Adams. When he heard that a snatch of Bach's music had been considered for inclusion (and rejected) he said something like: 'don't you think that would have been showing off?'
The story may be apocryphal. It doesn't matter. It's trademark Douglas Adams in that it puts an explosive bullet through the center of parochialism's underdeveloped frontal lobes. The very finest Adams riff was a spontaneously delivered demolition of the hard anthropic principle, the vainest and most absurd of all our species's many parochial fantasies.
'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
Douglas Adams is a hero of mine because he made me simultaneously acutely aware of my own insignificance and glad to be a relatively well-educated human being. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think it is fair to say, provides a sounder assessment of our species' importance ('mostly harmless') than all the creation stories of all our holy books combined. There's no point in rehearsing here the statistics that demonstrate our ephemerality (Sagan's 'Cosmos' does an unimpeachable job on this score but Monty Python makes the same point just as well, with added humour here).
Imagine you're a passenger on Voyager I, gazing back at Earth which is long-since irresolvable by your human eyes. Even the Sun is just a bright speck against the glorious galactic skyscape, like Venus viewed at dawn from the Atacama Desert back home. You've subscribed to a news digest service from Earth, just to keep in touch, and today's edition (a few hours out of date, for reasons that Einstein could probably have explained) contains an op-ed piece about this guy Rorty, who says that science and technology are just 'narratives', indistinguishable from other narratives about gods that make the sun rise each morning or devils who whisk away the souls of unbaptised children to an eternity of suffering in a hell beyond human imagining. Your eyebrows, frostbitten in the chill of interstellar space, rise a fraction of an inch (or should that be millimeter? it doesn't seem to matter out here) and you think 'but here I am, a few billion miles from home, thanks to the narrative that put me on top of a ten minute controlled explosion and launched me into space on a trajectory that took me via four gas giants and a few big rocks to this slightly lonely and very dark place. Could Huitzilopochtli really have brought me all this way? Or Jesus? He had some serious powers. Surely the Faculty of Social Studies at the Sorbonne could have designed a semiotic hermeneutics engine that could have propelled me at least this far on the crest of an immense wave of fart gas?
Sagan understood perfectly that the chances of an alien intelligence - if such exist - intercepting one of the Pioneer or Voyager probes is vanishingly small and that the messages were intended for human not alien audiences. Even if near-Earth interstellar space were littered with curious aliens, which it ain't, the chances of one of them noticing our toy rockets are miniscule. But let's just say that, in this, or a virtually identical parallel universe the unthinkable happened and the little green men happened upon Voyager I and decided to haul it into the cargo bay. What are the chances they'd be able to decipher and 'listen' to the recordings? What are the chances they'd appreciate Beethoven and Chuck Berry, both of whom made it onto the recordings, unlike Bach?
In the forgettable Monty Python movie 'Erik the Viking', Erik and his crew arrive at Hy-Brasil and are astonished to find it occupied by welcoming but musically incompetent people. This is funny because such a place could never exist, at least not on Earth. Why not? Because musicality is universally present in normal humans and hospitality to strangers is, if not universally absent, certainly not conspicuous by its presence in the tales and legends that have filtered down to us from prehistory.
Human musicality is a genuine puzzle for evolutionary biologists. New born human babies have it; almost all adults (even those, like me, with a tin ear) have it; other primates appear not to; some birds might. Steven Pinker described music as 'auditory cheesecake', a super-stimulus that tickles pleasure centers that evolved for other reasons. He came in for a lot of criticism from people with a fine grasp of music but limited appreciation of the gaping holes in their own education (see here)1. The Dutch psychologist Henkjan Honing is also sceptical of Pinker's theory and has done some brilliant and fascinating research, which he summarises here, 16 minutes of unadulterated pleasure.
Music of course has an underlying mathematical structure. Sounds lacking rhythm are noise. An octave is the interval between two musical pitches that harmonise and it so happens that the ratio between the frequencies of corresponding pitches in successive octaves is 2:1. This pattern was discovered independently by many musical traditions long before the mathematical relationships were quantified. But the mathematics of music runs much deeper than this. In this article for example, Dmitri Tymoczko is quoted as claiming that 'When you are sitting at a piano, you are interacting with a very complicated geometry...In fact, composers in the early nineteenth century were already implicitly exploring such geometries through music that could not have been understood using the mathematics of the time...Just as a mountaineer will find that only a small number of all the possible routes between two points are actually negotiable, so musicians will have discovered empirically that their options are limited by the underlying shapes and structures of musical possibilities.'
The narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' novel The Library of Babel is a librarian in a vast hive of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each lined with bookshelves packed with books, each 410 pages long. The books appear to be randomly arranged on the shelves but the librarians have inferred that the library contains every permutation of a limited set of symbols, spaces and punctuation marks. Of course, almost all the books are gibberish or religious tracts but somewhere in the library there must exist improved versions of Shakespeare's plays, perfect predictions of the future and succinct, lucid explanations of true scientific theories not yet discovered. There are vastly many of these literary gems randomly scattered through the library but, because they represent a vanishingly small proportion of all the books, they cannot in practice be located. The librarians, unsurprisingly, go nuts.
There is a musical equivalent of the Library of Babel, a library containing all possible musical scores, of a certain length written with a small, finite number of symbols representing a restricted number of octaves, each divided into an arbitrary number of pitches, say twelve. Most of these scores, when played would be noise. A handful, however, would render Bach's sonatas banal by comparison. Unlike Borges' library, the 'musical' as opposed to noisy scores would run together like veins of ore in a lump of conglomerate. This is not just to say that these rivulets of music are the only scores in the library that could in principle be appreciated but that everything else isn't music, it's noise.
I do not begin to understand either the music or the mathematics underlying Tymoczko's analysis - so feel free to shoot me down - but it suggests the fascinating possibility that music might be a property of nature that humans in the course of our evolutionary history have not so much invented as discovered. Just as flying machines built by other civilisations on planets with gaseous atmospheres will operate using the same laws of aerodynamics that permit heavier-than-air flight on Earth, it is conceivable that intelligent denizens of another reasonably similar world (who will certainly have sense organs capable of interpreting sound waves) might have discovered some of the same pathways through the 'complicated geometry' of musical space. In other words, it is vanishingly improbable but just conceivable, that Chuck Berry could have another hit with 'Johnny B. Goode' on a different planet in another solar system in the far, far future. How cool is that?
1. As an aside, the following sentences from a review of The Music Instinct by Philip Ball, are as fine an example as you could wish for of complete gibberish I've read outside a holy book: 'We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves.' This half-wit wants so badly that music be mysterious, he is prepared to bury all evidence to the contrary, while his audience watches him dig his own intellectual grave.
Voyager I, launched in 1977 - later than the Pioneer craft - is further from earth than any other human artefact. It is currently approaching interstellar space, 120 times further from earth than earth is from the sun (that's 180, 000, 000, 000 kilometers or 4.28 kilometers for every dollar of net worth of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest man in the Solar System), and in 2014 will cross the heliopause, the theoretical boundary where the solar wind is balanced by whispers from elsewhere in the galaxy. Building on the Pioneer plaque, NASA included in each Voyager spaceship a disc encoding a few images of typical earth scenes (e.g. multicultural groups of well-fed children playing happily together) and a diverse selection of music from recent earth history. There's a lovely story (also attributed to Sagan) told about the late Douglas Adams. When he heard that a snatch of Bach's music had been considered for inclusion (and rejected) he said something like: 'don't you think that would have been showing off?'
The story may be apocryphal. It doesn't matter. It's trademark Douglas Adams in that it puts an explosive bullet through the center of parochialism's underdeveloped frontal lobes. The very finest Adams riff was a spontaneously delivered demolition of the hard anthropic principle, the vainest and most absurd of all our species's many parochial fantasies.
'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
Douglas Adams is a hero of mine because he made me simultaneously acutely aware of my own insignificance and glad to be a relatively well-educated human being. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think it is fair to say, provides a sounder assessment of our species' importance ('mostly harmless') than all the creation stories of all our holy books combined. There's no point in rehearsing here the statistics that demonstrate our ephemerality (Sagan's 'Cosmos' does an unimpeachable job on this score but Monty Python makes the same point just as well, with added humour here).
Imagine you're a passenger on Voyager I, gazing back at Earth which is long-since irresolvable by your human eyes. Even the Sun is just a bright speck against the glorious galactic skyscape, like Venus viewed at dawn from the Atacama Desert back home. You've subscribed to a news digest service from Earth, just to keep in touch, and today's edition (a few hours out of date, for reasons that Einstein could probably have explained) contains an op-ed piece about this guy Rorty, who says that science and technology are just 'narratives', indistinguishable from other narratives about gods that make the sun rise each morning or devils who whisk away the souls of unbaptised children to an eternity of suffering in a hell beyond human imagining. Your eyebrows, frostbitten in the chill of interstellar space, rise a fraction of an inch (or should that be millimeter? it doesn't seem to matter out here) and you think 'but here I am, a few billion miles from home, thanks to the narrative that put me on top of a ten minute controlled explosion and launched me into space on a trajectory that took me via four gas giants and a few big rocks to this slightly lonely and very dark place. Could Huitzilopochtli really have brought me all this way? Or Jesus? He had some serious powers. Surely the Faculty of Social Studies at the Sorbonne could have designed a semiotic hermeneutics engine that could have propelled me at least this far on the crest of an immense wave of fart gas?
Sagan understood perfectly that the chances of an alien intelligence - if such exist - intercepting one of the Pioneer or Voyager probes is vanishingly small and that the messages were intended for human not alien audiences. Even if near-Earth interstellar space were littered with curious aliens, which it ain't, the chances of one of them noticing our toy rockets are miniscule. But let's just say that, in this, or a virtually identical parallel universe the unthinkable happened and the little green men happened upon Voyager I and decided to haul it into the cargo bay. What are the chances they'd be able to decipher and 'listen' to the recordings? What are the chances they'd appreciate Beethoven and Chuck Berry, both of whom made it onto the recordings, unlike Bach?
In the forgettable Monty Python movie 'Erik the Viking', Erik and his crew arrive at Hy-Brasil and are astonished to find it occupied by welcoming but musically incompetent people. This is funny because such a place could never exist, at least not on Earth. Why not? Because musicality is universally present in normal humans and hospitality to strangers is, if not universally absent, certainly not conspicuous by its presence in the tales and legends that have filtered down to us from prehistory.
Human musicality is a genuine puzzle for evolutionary biologists. New born human babies have it; almost all adults (even those, like me, with a tin ear) have it; other primates appear not to; some birds might. Steven Pinker described music as 'auditory cheesecake', a super-stimulus that tickles pleasure centers that evolved for other reasons. He came in for a lot of criticism from people with a fine grasp of music but limited appreciation of the gaping holes in their own education (see here)1. The Dutch psychologist Henkjan Honing is also sceptical of Pinker's theory and has done some brilliant and fascinating research, which he summarises here, 16 minutes of unadulterated pleasure.
Music of course has an underlying mathematical structure. Sounds lacking rhythm are noise. An octave is the interval between two musical pitches that harmonise and it so happens that the ratio between the frequencies of corresponding pitches in successive octaves is 2:1. This pattern was discovered independently by many musical traditions long before the mathematical relationships were quantified. But the mathematics of music runs much deeper than this. In this article for example, Dmitri Tymoczko is quoted as claiming that 'When you are sitting at a piano, you are interacting with a very complicated geometry...In fact, composers in the early nineteenth century were already implicitly exploring such geometries through music that could not have been understood using the mathematics of the time...Just as a mountaineer will find that only a small number of all the possible routes between two points are actually negotiable, so musicians will have discovered empirically that their options are limited by the underlying shapes and structures of musical possibilities.'
The narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' novel The Library of Babel is a librarian in a vast hive of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each lined with bookshelves packed with books, each 410 pages long. The books appear to be randomly arranged on the shelves but the librarians have inferred that the library contains every permutation of a limited set of symbols, spaces and punctuation marks. Of course, almost all the books are gibberish or religious tracts but somewhere in the library there must exist improved versions of Shakespeare's plays, perfect predictions of the future and succinct, lucid explanations of true scientific theories not yet discovered. There are vastly many of these literary gems randomly scattered through the library but, because they represent a vanishingly small proportion of all the books, they cannot in practice be located. The librarians, unsurprisingly, go nuts.
There is a musical equivalent of the Library of Babel, a library containing all possible musical scores, of a certain length written with a small, finite number of symbols representing a restricted number of octaves, each divided into an arbitrary number of pitches, say twelve. Most of these scores, when played would be noise. A handful, however, would render Bach's sonatas banal by comparison. Unlike Borges' library, the 'musical' as opposed to noisy scores would run together like veins of ore in a lump of conglomerate. This is not just to say that these rivulets of music are the only scores in the library that could in principle be appreciated but that everything else isn't music, it's noise.
I do not begin to understand either the music or the mathematics underlying Tymoczko's analysis - so feel free to shoot me down - but it suggests the fascinating possibility that music might be a property of nature that humans in the course of our evolutionary history have not so much invented as discovered. Just as flying machines built by other civilisations on planets with gaseous atmospheres will operate using the same laws of aerodynamics that permit heavier-than-air flight on Earth, it is conceivable that intelligent denizens of another reasonably similar world (who will certainly have sense organs capable of interpreting sound waves) might have discovered some of the same pathways through the 'complicated geometry' of musical space. In other words, it is vanishingly improbable but just conceivable, that Chuck Berry could have another hit with 'Johnny B. Goode' on a different planet in another solar system in the far, far future. How cool is that?
1. As an aside, the following sentences from a review of The Music Instinct by Philip Ball, are as fine an example as you could wish for of complete gibberish I've read outside a holy book: 'We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves.' This half-wit wants so badly that music be mysterious, he is prepared to bury all evidence to the contrary, while his audience watches him dig his own intellectual grave.
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Re-Kant-ation
In a previous post I described 'An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics' by Scott James as 'dismal'. This assessment was unfair and I take it back. In fact, on a second reading, I view the book as a concise, impartial exposition of the state of the art in ethics thinking. I wish I were capable of expressing myself with James's clarity. I ought to have directed my ire not at the book's author but at his intended audience - students of philosophy. To the extent that philosophy is an enterprise concerned with clarifying the ideas being generated on the disputed frontiers of human understanding - perhaps the kindest definition one can offer - it is incumbent upon practitioners to familiarize themselves with the most recent maps. Reading James's book, one receives the impression that most students of ethics are working from charts marked 'here be dragons' at the edge of the known world.
Contrary to my earlier rash assertion that two thirds of the book is devoted to convincing readers that evolution happened, only the first two chapters - 47 pages - address this subject directly. Come on guys! Even Darwin's contemporaries accepted the fact of evolution; all that he did was to supply the mechanism, natural selection. Biologists have been exploring the implications of his astonishing insight for more than 150 years and have made quite a lot of progress. For example, the evolution of altruism has been studied intensively since Darwin's time and, in the last few decades, the problem that he feared represented a 'fatal flaw' in his theory has been largely resolved. Whenever Richard Dawkins or another prominent atheist writes a newspaper article, you can guarantee that some pathetic parish priest will write a letter to the editor asserting that evolution can't explain charity, self-sacrifice or love. This claim isn't just fatuous, it's pig-ignorant. I cannot comprehend how any literate human being can have avoided noticing that, not only can natural selection explain such phenomena, it is the only theory that explains all of them without resort to special pleading.
The problem that caused Darwin the most angst was existence of eusocial insects, for example honeybees or ants, in which worker castes are sterile and work for the benefit of the queen and her offspring, their sisters and brothers. How, he wondered, could a behaviour that required some individuals to eschew the ability to reproduce ever evolve? The manner in which this problem has been studied and resolved is an object lesson in how to approach an intellectual puzzle, one that all theologians and many philosophers would do well to heed. As an undergraduate, I was taught that the problem had been solved by William Hamilton, who argued that a quirk of hymenopteran genetics (female honeybees arise from fertilised eggs and therefore have two sets of chromosomes, whereas male bees derive from unfertilised eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes) implies that female bees are more closely related on average to their sisters (by 3/4) than they would be to their children (by 1/2), implying that their genes would be better served (i.e. copied more often) if sisters worked for the benefit of their female siblings than if they worked for their children. This insight (the 'haplodiploid hypothesis') was regarded as one of the finest intellectual achievements of Darwinian thinking. Amusingly enough, it turns out that Hamilton was wrong. For one thing, he neglected to take account of the fact that female workers work not just for sisters but for brothers (to whom they are related by 1/4) too, and for another he was not aware of the many social animals with conventional genetics that have subsequently been discovered. Here is E.O. Wilson, the founding figure of sociobiology, writing recently on the demise of the haplodiploid hypothesis.
'Hamilton's perception, later called the haplodiploid hypothesis, and intensively promoted (not least by myself, while synthesizing the new discipline of sociobiology in the 1970s...), became firmly entrenched as an explanatory idea in studies of the evolution of animal colonies...It turns out, however, that this is wrong. Hamilton made three mistakes, which have led to the vitiation of his main thesis concerning altruism and the origin of sociality...these developments in sociobiology are in full progress, and surprises no doubt lie ahead. The interpretation I have presented here [that a type of group selection led to the evolution of eusocial insects] may itself in time be swept aside.'
The main point that I wish to make is that explaining altruism depends upon an extremely subtle understanding of the consequences of natural selection, operating within the rules imposed by genetics. A subsidiary point is that, faced with compelling evidence that a brilliant, beautiful theory is unfortunately false, Wilson does what any good scientist would do and ditches the theory. When was the last time you witnessed such humility in the teeth of evidence in a churchman?
But back to 'evolutionary ethics'. Hamilton's concept of 'inclusive fitness' (roughly the idea that genes that favour their own replication, whether the copies exist in their own host or others, will spread) does explain altruism towards kin. Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism does explain atruism towards non-kin. The old philosophical chestnut 'is an act altruistic if ultimately it is motivated by selfish ends?' is shown by these theories to be not just the wrong question but a meaningless question. Genes that confer on their bearers the propensity to behave in a way that increases the gene's fitness will prosper and vice versa. All acts are ultimately 'motivated' by selfish ends, in the sense that selfless actors (i.e. genes) die out. There are numerous subtle consequences of this simple fact: for example, sibling rivalry; infanticide and conflict between paternally and maternally inherited genes, the last of which may explain certain psychological diseases in the human animal. But the main point, once again, is that there is simply no useful way in which to approach the study of altruism or its reflection, ethics, except in the light of evolution.
We know that we share a common ancestor with all extant life on earth. We know that we share with our closest extant relatives a moral mind. We know that more distant relatives behave in ways that indicate they possess a moral sense, albeit one we don't recognise as a close cousin (female mice, for instance, will be perfect parents to their offspring when times are good but will kill and eat them without a second thought when their own survival is called into question). We know, therefore, that our moral sense evolved. We have known all this for an awfully long time but the news doesn't seem to have reached the people who's mission is to clarify the way we interpret these findings.
Nothing in the preceding several paragraphs is controversial. Everyone familiar with the evidence and not ideologically committed to some theory-from-revelation agrees that this is the way the world works. I'm not trying to bully you into accepting as true something you don't understand. I'm simply pointing out that, if you decline to acquaint yourself with the relevant evidence from natural history, your ethical opinions are precisely worthless. Immanuel Kant may very well, for example, have possessed the most fabulous mind ever to have enquired into the origins of virtue but the Categorical Imperative is nevertheless more interesting to historians than ethicists. Kant didn't know where our ethical sense comes from (he assumed, incorrectly, that it comes from God), so his fabulous mind could never achieve traction on the problem of what one ought to do. It is, in my view, a delightful comment on the enlightening power of science that the comedian Tim Minchin (see here) comes closer to the truth than Kant when he sings 'if you cover for another mother fucker who's a kiddy-fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the mother-fucking rapist...if you look into your mother-fucking heart and tell me true if this mother-fucking stupid song offended you...are just as morally misguided as that mother-fucking, power hungry, self-aggrandizing bigot in a stupid fucking hat'.
Contrary to my earlier rash assertion that two thirds of the book is devoted to convincing readers that evolution happened, only the first two chapters - 47 pages - address this subject directly. Come on guys! Even Darwin's contemporaries accepted the fact of evolution; all that he did was to supply the mechanism, natural selection. Biologists have been exploring the implications of his astonishing insight for more than 150 years and have made quite a lot of progress. For example, the evolution of altruism has been studied intensively since Darwin's time and, in the last few decades, the problem that he feared represented a 'fatal flaw' in his theory has been largely resolved. Whenever Richard Dawkins or another prominent atheist writes a newspaper article, you can guarantee that some pathetic parish priest will write a letter to the editor asserting that evolution can't explain charity, self-sacrifice or love. This claim isn't just fatuous, it's pig-ignorant. I cannot comprehend how any literate human being can have avoided noticing that, not only can natural selection explain such phenomena, it is the only theory that explains all of them without resort to special pleading.
The problem that caused Darwin the most angst was existence of eusocial insects, for example honeybees or ants, in which worker castes are sterile and work for the benefit of the queen and her offspring, their sisters and brothers. How, he wondered, could a behaviour that required some individuals to eschew the ability to reproduce ever evolve? The manner in which this problem has been studied and resolved is an object lesson in how to approach an intellectual puzzle, one that all theologians and many philosophers would do well to heed. As an undergraduate, I was taught that the problem had been solved by William Hamilton, who argued that a quirk of hymenopteran genetics (female honeybees arise from fertilised eggs and therefore have two sets of chromosomes, whereas male bees derive from unfertilised eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes) implies that female bees are more closely related on average to their sisters (by 3/4) than they would be to their children (by 1/2), implying that their genes would be better served (i.e. copied more often) if sisters worked for the benefit of their female siblings than if they worked for their children. This insight (the 'haplodiploid hypothesis') was regarded as one of the finest intellectual achievements of Darwinian thinking. Amusingly enough, it turns out that Hamilton was wrong. For one thing, he neglected to take account of the fact that female workers work not just for sisters but for brothers (to whom they are related by 1/4) too, and for another he was not aware of the many social animals with conventional genetics that have subsequently been discovered. Here is E.O. Wilson, the founding figure of sociobiology, writing recently on the demise of the haplodiploid hypothesis.
'Hamilton's perception, later called the haplodiploid hypothesis, and intensively promoted (not least by myself, while synthesizing the new discipline of sociobiology in the 1970s...), became firmly entrenched as an explanatory idea in studies of the evolution of animal colonies...It turns out, however, that this is wrong. Hamilton made three mistakes, which have led to the vitiation of his main thesis concerning altruism and the origin of sociality...these developments in sociobiology are in full progress, and surprises no doubt lie ahead. The interpretation I have presented here [that a type of group selection led to the evolution of eusocial insects] may itself in time be swept aside.'
The main point that I wish to make is that explaining altruism depends upon an extremely subtle understanding of the consequences of natural selection, operating within the rules imposed by genetics. A subsidiary point is that, faced with compelling evidence that a brilliant, beautiful theory is unfortunately false, Wilson does what any good scientist would do and ditches the theory. When was the last time you witnessed such humility in the teeth of evidence in a churchman?
But back to 'evolutionary ethics'. Hamilton's concept of 'inclusive fitness' (roughly the idea that genes that favour their own replication, whether the copies exist in their own host or others, will spread) does explain altruism towards kin. Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism does explain atruism towards non-kin. The old philosophical chestnut 'is an act altruistic if ultimately it is motivated by selfish ends?' is shown by these theories to be not just the wrong question but a meaningless question. Genes that confer on their bearers the propensity to behave in a way that increases the gene's fitness will prosper and vice versa. All acts are ultimately 'motivated' by selfish ends, in the sense that selfless actors (i.e. genes) die out. There are numerous subtle consequences of this simple fact: for example, sibling rivalry; infanticide and conflict between paternally and maternally inherited genes, the last of which may explain certain psychological diseases in the human animal. But the main point, once again, is that there is simply no useful way in which to approach the study of altruism or its reflection, ethics, except in the light of evolution.
We know that we share a common ancestor with all extant life on earth. We know that we share with our closest extant relatives a moral mind. We know that more distant relatives behave in ways that indicate they possess a moral sense, albeit one we don't recognise as a close cousin (female mice, for instance, will be perfect parents to their offspring when times are good but will kill and eat them without a second thought when their own survival is called into question). We know, therefore, that our moral sense evolved. We have known all this for an awfully long time but the news doesn't seem to have reached the people who's mission is to clarify the way we interpret these findings.
Nothing in the preceding several paragraphs is controversial. Everyone familiar with the evidence and not ideologically committed to some theory-from-revelation agrees that this is the way the world works. I'm not trying to bully you into accepting as true something you don't understand. I'm simply pointing out that, if you decline to acquaint yourself with the relevant evidence from natural history, your ethical opinions are precisely worthless. Immanuel Kant may very well, for example, have possessed the most fabulous mind ever to have enquired into the origins of virtue but the Categorical Imperative is nevertheless more interesting to historians than ethicists. Kant didn't know where our ethical sense comes from (he assumed, incorrectly, that it comes from God), so his fabulous mind could never achieve traction on the problem of what one ought to do. It is, in my view, a delightful comment on the enlightening power of science that the comedian Tim Minchin (see here) comes closer to the truth than Kant when he sings 'if you cover for another mother fucker who's a kiddy-fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the mother-fucking rapist...if you look into your mother-fucking heart and tell me true if this mother-fucking stupid song offended you...are just as morally misguided as that mother-fucking, power hungry, self-aggrandizing bigot in a stupid fucking hat'.
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