The Chauvinism of Michael Le Page

Since the late 1990’s, I have been teaching a course called Human Nature and Human Values.  Every year I get exactly one very bitter complaint on my student evaluations.  I don’t know why it is so consistently just one.  This year was no exception; however, in this case the student was unusually honest and articulate.  She or he complained about the material.  I am paraphrasing here. 

The professor talked about human beings and animals raping and abusing and killing one another; about women’s reproductive value and men being horny and greedy.  I was uncomfortable with this. 

I can only plead that I was doing my job.  College is about becoming a grownup.  To do that, you have to have some awareness of how the world really works and have some idea what the people who shape the human world (including, especially, scientists) are thinking.  This sometimes means finding out things that you don’t want to know.  I warn students at the beginning of every class: if you don’t want to know that your parents had sex, you might have a problem with this material. 

I am genuinely sympathetic to the author of the above comment, in large part because of the honesty and self-knowledge evident in it.  Usually the one bitter complaint focuses on something other than the real issue: the tests were unfair, he misspelled words on the board, oh, and he talked about lesbian monkeys.  This student laid the real problem on the table: he or she did not like to watch a film clip of a male lion killing the cubs of his predecessor. 

One of the first times I taught the course and young woman visited my office after the final and confessed that, every day after she left the classroom she would go to her car and cry.  She thought I was telling her that, because there are evolutionary explanations for maternal love, that her mother didn’t really love her.  I belatedly corrected that error (see the previous post) and have been mindful about it ever since. 

On the other hand, the class is very popular and I always get a lot of favorable comments.  This is so despite the fact that most of my students come from traditional religious backgrounds.  I explain that what they believe is none of my business.  I make it clear that I respect them even if they disagree with me on really important things. 

I also try to show them that even if they cannot accept certain fundamental parts of evolutionary theory, for example the common ancestry of human beings and chimpanzees, they can still recognize how natural selection works on a daily basis and appreciate how our similarity with chimpanzees can help us understand ourselves.  My favorite teach phrase is this: human beings may be more than mere animals, but we are at least animals.  That’s all they want. 

One of the great obstacles to this kind of approach is the chauvinism of many Darwinian apostles.  Recently I have been reading a collection of articles from the New Scientist magazine.  Life on Earth: Origins, Evolution, Extinction is great reading.  Michael Le Page leads off the chapter on evolution with a list of misconceptions and myths about the theory.  I found almost all of the items on his list convincing: no, everything is not an adaptation (#1); no, evolution is not disprovable (#2); no, natural selection is not the only means of evolution (#8). 

At #6 (It doesn’t matter if people don’t grasp evolution), I was appalled.  This misconception has nothing to do with evolution; it has only to do with Le Page’s political bias. 

If a Republican wins the 2016 US election the world’s biggest superpower will be run by a man who rejects evolution, thanks to the support of millions of people in the US who also cannot accept reality. 

I happen to be a Republican.  My chances of winning the 2016 are slim, I grant you; however, if I did win, this superpower would be run (in so far as Presidents run anything) by someone who does not reject evolution.  I swim in it.  This is how prejudice works.  All those people are the same. 

I suspect that some significant Democratic constituencies are also hostile to evolution, but that aside: does it really advance the cause of science to wed the theory of evolution to the claim that all Republicans are stupid?  Even if you believe that the latter is true, is this good strategy?  It gets better. 

The success of western civilization is based on science and technology, on understanding and manipulating the world… Any leader who thinks that evolution is a matter of belief is arguably unfit for office. 

The first part of that quote is at best only partly true.  Modern science and technology are largely available to poor countries.  What they lack, among other things, are the elements of western political culture: individual liberty, property rights, democracy, religious tolerance, the rule of law, etc. 

The second part of the quote is the kind of non sequitur would cause whiplash in any rational person who tried to accept it.  How many leaders of any western nation over the course of the last century had a good grasp of Newtonian physics, the laws of thermodynamics, let alone quantum physics or Einstein’s relativity?  Yes, technology and science are fundamental elements of the strength of Western civilization; however, that is not because we have been ruled by engineers or scientists. 

It is true that “evolution is directly related to many policy decisions”.  Le Page mentions infectious diseases.  He might be surprised to learn that neither chief executives nor members of Congress or of a parliament routinely make decisions on a level at which such a theory is relevant.  They generally trust experts to make those decisions.  Might it not undermine that trust to tell a Republican Senator that she is not fit for office? 

If the recent Brexit vote in England or the rise of Donald Trump in America shows anything, it shows what happens when elites are routinely contemptuous of their constituents.  Scientists (and science writers) are necessarily among the elites.  If there should ever be a republic where more than a small percentage of the population is deeply invested in science, it won’t appear soon. 

All things considered, I would like to have a president who has a good grasp of modern science, including evolution.  I would be much more concerned to have a chief executive who has a general grasp of economics and a common sense understanding of foreign policy.  Meanwhile, I would like to see more scientists and science writers who are less contemptuous of people who do not fall into either of those categories.  I humbly suggest that this might advance the cause of science more than the former spiting on the latter. 

Perhaps Le Page should come to Northern State University and sit in on my class.  He might learn something. c 

A Pious View of the Evolution of Piety

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates arrives at the courthouse to face indictment and encounters a young man who is there to sue his own father for the murder of a hired hand.  This is an astonishing act in view of ordinary Greek morality.  Murder was conceived of as a crime against families.  The role of the court was to reconcile the families with some kind of settlement.  Euthyphro explains that he is acting out of a piety that transcends familial obligation. 

This setting is extraordinarily informative.  It gives us a sense of how much distance some Greeks had achieved from their traditional, pagan moral view.  It also allows Socrates to cross the stage as it were.  In Aristophanes’ the Clouds, Socrates’ teaching brought a young man to assault his father.  In the Euthyphro, he defends the father against the son. 

The question of the dialogue is ‘what is piety?’  Euthyphro’s first answer is that piety is what the Gods love and impiety is what the God’s hate.  This quickly leads to a difficulty, because Euthyphro accepts the traditional myths in which the Gods quarrel.  If they quarrel, Socrates points out, then what one God loves another will not love and so the same thing will be both pious and impious.  Socrates allows the two of them to paper over this problem with the revision that piety is what all the Gods love and vice versa. 

Then, however, Socrates asks a cleaving question.  He is my revised version:

Suppose that some act is pious.  Does God love it because it is pious or is it pious because God loves it?

That question drives a wedge between philosophy and religion, opening a gap that will never again be fully closed.  If what is right is right because and only because God loves it, then justice begins and ends with determining God’s will.  This leads to something like the Judaism of Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994), who argued that an act can only be religious because God commands it and for no other reason.  That an act is socially or medically beneficial is religiously irrelevant. 

If, however, God loves the pious because it is pious, then one can look for additional reasons why it is pious.  This leads in the direction of philosophy and of course it is the route that Socrates takes. 

I note that one can try to have it both ways.  That is the strategy chosen by Thomas Aquinas.  Some of God’s law is valid only by revelation (remember the Sabbath Day) and some of His law can be explained rationally (do not murder).  Thus philosophy becomes the handmaiden, if not the ally, of faith. 

If the pious is loved by God because it is pious, what makes it pious?  Socrates has to provide Euthyphro with a lot of help, but they agree that pious is a kind of justice and justice is in general a kind of benefiting.  When we take care of other people, that is a form of justice in the ordinary sense.  When we tend to the requirements of the gods, that is pious proper.  The problem here is that the gods are presumably self-sufficient.  They are, after all immortal.  To understand piety as tending to the needs of the gods would mean that the gods are needy.  That would imply imperfection and defect.  Neither Socrates nor his young interlocutor are willing to accept this. 

The dialogue ends with Euthyphro’s exasperation.  All I can tell you, he tells Socrates, is that piety is serving the gods in a way that saves cities and families.  At that point, the young man is out of steam and walks away from Socrates and the Porch of the King.  Socrates has successfully defended the father. 

Although the dialogue ends without a decisive answer to the question, an answer is implied.  We cannot understand why God or the gods care about human beings or are concerned about what we do, if indeed we understand the divine as Socrates did and as did the great Christian theologians.  God is perfect.  He cannot need us to do anything.  We can however understand why we need the gods.  The ubiquitous presence of religion in human history leaves no doubt that our turning to the divine is a turn motivated by human neediness. 

Scott Atran has a piece in This View of Life that speaks to these issues.  He is arguing with Sam Harris (a worthy cause). 

Harris’s views on religion ignore the considerable progress in cognitive studies on the subject over the last two decades, which show that core religious beliefs do not have fixed propositional content (Atran & Norenzayan, “Religion’s Evolutionary Landscape,” BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, 2004).

Indeed, religious beliefs, in being absurd (whether or not they are recognized as such), cannot even be processed as comprehensible because their semantic content is contradictory (for example, a bodiless but physically powerful and sentient being, a deity that is one in three, etc).

It is precisely the ineffable nature of core religious beliefs that accounts, in part, for their social and political adaptability over time in helping to bond and sustain groups (Atran & Ginges, “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict,” SCIENCE, 2012). In fact, it is the ecstasy-provoking rituals that Harris describes as being associated with such beliefs which renders them immune to the logical and empirical scrutiny that ordinarily accompanies belief verification (see Atran & Henrich, “The Evolution of Religion,” BIOLOGICAL THEORY, 2010).

This strikes me as largely correct.  It is precisely the incomprehensible element in religious beliefs and doctrine that saves families and cities, or as Atran puts it, helps “to bond and sustain groups.” 

I would not endorse the term “absurd,” however.  If core religious beliefs lack propositional content, that is based on a more or less conscious proposition.  What is proposed is that world time (time, space, and comprehensible causation) is not a closed system.  The divine is something outside the world of nameable, which is to say, rationally knowable things, something that has an impact on that world.  We can nonetheless respond to that thing.  That is why God refuses to name Himself to the shoeless Moses. 

This led Moses Maimonides to conclude that the only theology possible is a negative theology.  We cannot say anything about God except to say what He is not.  He is not mortal, not limited in power…etc.  Likewise, we cannot understand why God loves the pious, but we cannot understand why we love it.  The abstract of Atran’s paper on “Religion’s Evolutionary Landscape” is informative. 

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions.

Again, that strikes me as correct.  This does not in any way answer the question whether the Kosmos is or is not a closed system, which is to say, whether the Divine is real or not.  Instead, it recognizes the limits to human thinking.  That, in itself, is a kind of piety.