In the post below, originally published during the Lenten
season of this year, we locked horns with the Darwinist défi, from a mathematical/philosophical/theological point of
view. Herewith, by way of preface,
a brief companion-piece, which abjures all those disciplines, and sticks to
biology and sociology.
Characterizing
Freud’s stance in 1908, in an article published in Mutterschutz (“Defense of Motherhood”), his admiring
biographer Jones writes:
The glorifying of monogamy paralyzes the process of selection,
which is the only hope of improving the human constitution, a hope which
humanitarianism and hygiene has
already reduced to a minumum.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of
Maturity (1955), p. 293
This
passage may be difficult for today’s young people to understand. By selection
he means Darwinian Natural Selection, nowadays mostly known as “Evolution” --
Nature’s ruthless culling of the unfit.
Constitution here means
‘genome’. Humanitarianism refers to welfare
payments and the like, which provide survival -- and opportunities for further
procreation -- to individuals who would, in an earlier age, have gone by the
board without issue. Hygiene
refers to state-sponsored measures of Public Health, which, reducing mortality across the population, again
nurtures the frail along with the rugged.
Such
thoughts are no longer publically expressed these days, let alone in such
old-fashioned words. In earlier
decades, such qualms were mainstream: though seldom was monogamy
singled out as a factor in
devolution. Yet the thrust is
meet, and must be met.
Jones’
preceding paragraph reports, from
the same article, Freud’s view that “the prevailing sexual morality of
civilization is characterized by the transference of feminine demands on to the sexual life of the man”
(though on the next page he avers that “women suffer more than men from the
prevailing morality” -- the apparent contradiction is never addressed), which “leads to a double moral life,
with evil consequences”. In that
context, I at first assumed that Freud was referring to
garden-variety marital fidelity.
And that, surely, is immune
from Darwinian attack: the
appalling consequences of agamy in
our barrios and ghettoes are
apparent to all. Now, I have not
actually read Freud’s article -- unaccountably, that issue of Mutterschutz
is missing from my shelves (probably one of the pesky neighborhood boys has made off with it) -- but I venture
to suggest that he may have had in mind an idea that grew to prominence in his
later years, the years of Totem und Tabu: the scenario of the alpha male, lording it over his harem,
infusing their wombs with his übermensch
übergenes, while his less-fit cousins and brothers circle, snarling, just
outside of the firelight.
Now, if the highest pitch
of your ambition is to hunt the
mastodon, such a scheme might well
work; certainly, it works for
walruses. But if you set your
sights higher -- on the Gospels, on Paradise Lost, on the Riemann Hypothesis
-- you need a system maximally protective and nurturing of each individual
offspring, since the monogamous couple’s offspring are so few; a goal favored in that now each child
has both a dedicated-mommy and dedicated-daddy, schooling him daily in
Scripture and in analytic number theory. This happy scenario does not refute
the truths of Darwinism, but simply sublates them, or transcends them: for we, cognitively alert and
free-willed beings, have other goals, not shared by the newts and toads, for
whom Darwin is surely good enough.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
[And
now to the original essay.]
~ ~ ~
It would ill become me, as if I
were afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular facts, by
means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical
conclusions; or to be angry with
science because religion is bound
to take cognizance of its teaching.
-- John Henry Newman, Apologia
pro Vita Sua (1864)
In Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (2002),
Edward Craig writes (p. 92):
For Descartes, human reason was a faculty given to us and guaranteed by God … and that was why he could rely on it
to tell us about the essential nature of mind and matter ... What if, instead ,
he had thought of it as a natural instrument which had developed because, and to the extent that [emphasis in
original], it gave its possessors a competitive advantage over those without
it? Would he then have supposed
that what it appeared to tell us on such matters could, with complete
confidence, be taken as the truth?
This challenge is absolutely valid. On this basis, we should, indeed, do as
Descartes did, and call everything -- all our beliefs, absolutely everything --
into question. Yet alas, now without
the Cartesian certainty that our Idea of the Perfect must come from The
Perfect, Himself.
Epistemologically, we are much humbled. We are sweaty, dust-caked survival machines -- that has been shown
-- much like the cockroach and the rat.
Are we anything else as well ?
At this point, some despair, and take to drunkenness or
drugs or Postmodernism (I cite these in descending order of worthlessness).
And yet, when we look about the landscape, we find something
unexpected, unexplained, and entirely surprising:
=> ~ ~ ~ the Urysohn Metrization Theorem ~ ~ ~ <=
along with all the other truths of abstract mathematics:
truths that are seen to be true, by anyone with wit enough to see them; truths
not relativized to space or to time, to culture or to … species. If the Humble Woodchuck should ever
make it as far as point-set topology, he too will discover , and celebrate, this truth.
Its survival value: Zero.
What gives?
Well, we don’t know
what gives, but something does. We have a stark staring
ideational miracle in our midst, something no-wise selected for, something
simply True.
Now, it is no contradiction to Darwinism to posit that,
quite independently of the brute world ever evolving and evolving, to no
purpose and upon no plan, there might be a world apart, of Platonic forms, or
celestial calliopes, or whatever you will. What does contradict Darwinism -- fly in the face of
it, knock its socks off -- is our repeated and reliable ability to discover this World of Forms, again and
again struggling through jungles of calculation and conception, to arrive, from different directions, at the
same ice-crowned mountain. A World
of Forms of no use at all in
escaping the sabre-tooth, whose bite is so fierce, or in hunting the mighty
mastodon.
Though, let us hasten to add, among the facts that attest to
the reality of these abstract truths, is that, in recent times, these have
manifested themselves, not only in the clear understanding of minds suitably
prepared, but in sheer physical engineering : our spacecraft land where we want them to, and our nuclear
power plants generate useful energy, owing to applications of our understanding
of these Forms.
And if this be true, might it likewise be, that our insights
and intuitions about our Maker, at first dimly conceived, but gradually taking
form across the millennia, and finally developed to a state of great excellence
by the finest minds in Christendom -- might it be that these too contain their share of truth?
~
Notice that, despite what we repeatedly read about the
advance of science undermining the foundations of faith, we are now intellectually in a much better position
to appreciate what it might mean for there to be a God who is the maker of
visibilium omnium et
invisibilium
-- all things visible and invisible -- than was
Aquinas.
[Update: I had the sense, writing this, of committing
a certain hardihood; yet just now happened upon the following
passage, by a Jesuit of impeccable credentials:
Intellectual virtues may be an
essential aspect of our existence, and prepare us for what is revealed.
-- James Schall, S.J., The Order
of Things (2007), p. 198 ]
~
Note: Despite
possible appearances to the contrary, nothing on this blog should be taken as
an attack upon Darwinism, or even a critique. Charles Darwin himself is for me an
intellectual and even a moral hero, who just gets better the more you learn about him. The whole field of evolutionary biology
has been characterized by remarkably brilliant practitioners, who in addition
are often philosophically alert.
The appearances-to-the-contrary stem from the accidental facts that,
(a)
You don’t need me to expound the findings of this fine science, since there are
easily available volumes from writers far more professionally qualified, and
who, by happy circumstance, are in many cases quite gifted writers, simply as
writers: Darwin himself, Steven
Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, H. Allen Orr, in writings too numerous to mention,
along with excellent though lesser-known figures like D’Arcy Thompson, George
Gaylord Simpson, J.B.S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, Matt Ridley, Paul Colinvaux,
Richard Fortey, George Williams, and John Maynard Smith.
(b)
With Darwinism, just as with any scientific idea in fashion, starting with
atomism, magnetism, radiation, vortices, relativity, quantum mechanics, and
even some mathematical ones like point-set topology and nonlinear dynamics,
there have been some fanciful overreaching and stupid abuses in attempts to apply these ideas to
things to which they do not apply, mostly in the popular media. With these I feel the need to
break a lance, particularly when their agenda is to reduce those created in the
image of God, to the level of cockroaches. But the tick that feeds upon the rump of Pegasus, in no wise
lessens the majesty of that noble steed.
~
A word on the … evolution
(not by natural selection) of our ideas about science and about theology.
In both cases, if, naïvely, we thumb through some books and
behold what our distant ancestors used to believe, we gape and gasp. And in the perspective -- long
regnant, but by now adequately criticized -- of the Whig Theory of History,
those poor old dotards were simply clueless.
If, however, we examine the matter with more study and
attention, we learn that the best minds of Antiquity and of the Middle
Ages were a lot smarter than our
shallow understanding of their doctrines
would imply.
For science, this post-Whig re-evaluation has been ably and
painstakingly carried out by a distinguished body of historians and
philosophers. For theology -- I
really don’t know; but I do
recall that C.S. Lewis says
somewhere that the old folk-images
tended to be held until some historical juncture causes them to be
actually examined: in which cases
the Historical Church proved generally capable of refining its conceptions and
language. Yet -- a subtle point, but crucial -- this replacement of the
traditional image is a dialectical
sublation, and no mere negation. Even from the standpoint of our modern
and more nuanced understanding, the original idea, while dethroned, is yet in a
sense preserved -- aufgehoben. Thus, the image of Jehovah as a tribal patriarch with a long
white beard, sending down laws on stone tablets and speaking, should occasion demand it, from a burning
bush, remains yet a more faithful and more fruitful symbol, a more adequate
gateway to eventual fuller comprehension, than would the alternative
representation, as, say, a black-face minstrel, or a used-car salesman in a bow
tie. True, He is ultimately none
of these three; but he participates of one of them more than he does the others (proportionate to our
understanding).
In science, it is the same. You’ll hear it said that the Copernican heliocentric theory
was resisted because
(a)
it “demoted the earth from its privileged position at the center”;
(b)
the Bible declares that Earth is stationary.
The efforts of the debunkers have decisively refuted (a) --
Craig himself has a good short summary of their findings -- but just a word
about (b), since for some reason, philosophers of science are less eager to
come to the rescue of the Bible.
True, it takes the Earth as stationary. And so, by the bye, does any modern scientist in his right
mind, when solving any practical problem such as the trajectory of a shell or a
baseball: the pitcher lobs it due
south at x miles per hour; the bat
strikes it, traveling due north with such&such momentum; the wind is from
the northeast at eighteen miles per hour, and the Earth… is stationary. You do not factor in the sweep of this green planet round
the Sun, nor Sol’s more stately wheeling along the rim of our spinning galaxy,
nor that nebula’s proper motion through the celestial void, a vagrant among the
observing unspeaking witness of the Fixed Stars -- which, as we now know, are
not fixed in the least; it’s just
a manner of speaking.
~
A note on that last proviso, “proportionate to our
understanding”. This is actually a
key idea.
By chance, I just now happened to re-read a most amusing
poem from 1913, by Rupert Brooke, entitled “Heaven”. Here he depicts fish,
contemplating the afterlife:
somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
is wetter water, slimier slime!
and they imagine their unimaginable Maker,
immense, of fishy form and mind,
squamous, omnipotent, and kind
-- along with much more in this vein.
Now, this is satire, possibly even intended to be
offensive;
yet let us take no
offense.
Rather, the poem
expresses a truth, from whatever base motivations.
For we are each, each species, but a small and finite part
of the visible Creation;
which in
turn is only an infinitessimal part, of the Creator.
We each receive, and cherish, such tatters and
fragments of truth as we may.
And
let Saint Francis be my witness: I doubt not, indeed, I do not doubt, that
whither those fishes are destined, they shall find water
wetter than wet; that the
celestial penguins shall throne upon ice-floes frozen to perfection, immutable; and that
the sweet small vole, that dwelleth in the fields, shall … dwell there
forever:
World without end.
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