"Medieval People Set Aside December 24 As The Feastday of Adam and Eve."
Of course I believe in evolution, or, rather, that the physical evidence
as subjected to modern physics and geology and genetics and cladistic
analysis points to it as the most likely means by which the present day
and past diversity of life came about. That's a far cry from avowing
that on the basis of what was known about that in Britain in 1859, which
filled in just about everything from that list of science - excepting
contemporary geology and a different system of classification than is
used now - with the atrocity of Malthusian economics and the greatest
wishes of the aristocratic class under the British caste system that
controlled science got it right in natural selection.
I say that because it is certain that all right thinking secular,
moderny people will be scandalized, shocked and infuriated by what
Marilynne Robinson said at the end of her great and long essay,
"Darwinism" from her great book, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern
Thought. I worked my way back from the ending and the essay is so
great, such a brilliant line of thinking, it was hard to decide where to
break into it. I started here. . .
I
am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern
thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of
error as the worst thinking that it has displaced. Daniel Dennett
scolds Judeo-Christianity for Genesis 1:28, in which humankind is given
dominion over all the earth, as if it licensed depredation [I will post more about that after Christmas].
Notions of this kind go unchallenged now because the Bible is so little
known. In the recapitulation of creation that occurred after the
waters have receded in the narrative of the Flood (Genesis 9:1-4) people
are told, as if for the first time, that they may eat the flesh of
animals. It would appear the Edenic regime was meant to be rather
mild. And of course the most reassuring images of the lordliness of God
in both Testaments describe him as a shepherd. Over against this we
have Darwin and Nietzsche and their talk of extermination.
If it is objected - and there would be grounds for alarm if it
were not objected - that the passages I have quoted from Darwin and
Nietzsche are misread by those who take issue with them, their
defenders must make some little effort to be fair to the context of
Genesis. It may be true historically that people have justified brutal
misuse of nature on the authority of Genesis 1:28, but it is surely true
that they have taken a high hand against the whole of creation on the
pretext offered them by "the survival of the fittest" or "the will to
power." The verse in Genesis 9 that permits the eating of animals is
followed by a verse that forbids the shedding of human blood, pointedly
invoking the protection of the divine image This is the human
exceptionalism which Dennett and the whole tribe of Darwinians reject as
if on a moral scruple. But its effect is to limit violence, not to
authorize it.
In nothing is the retrograde character of modern thought more
apparent. These ancients were never guilty of the parochialism of
suggesting that any ambiguity surrounds the word "human," or that there
is any doubt about human consanguinity, though such notions would be
forgivable in a people surrounded by tribes and nations with which their
relations were often desperately hostile. To say this is to grant what
is clearly true, that they often failed to live up to their own most
dearly held beliefs. This can be looked at from another side. however.
They were loyal over many centuries to standards by which they
themselves (though less, no doubt, than human kind in general) were
found guilty and wanting. This is a burden they could have put down.
It is the burden Western civilization has put down, in the degree that
it has rejected the assertion of human uniqueness. Darwin's response to
objections to the idea of kinship with monkeys was, better a monkey
than a Fuegian, a naked savage.
History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of
religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as
well as benign. Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in
terms religion has supplied. The proof of this is that, in the
twentieth century, "scientific" policies of extermination, undertaken in
the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or
recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak
or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror
to new extremes. Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the
disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word
"science," which quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant
"truth." Surely it is fair to say that science is to the "science" that
inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the "Christianity" that
inspired Crusades. In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts
seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and
appropriated the great part of its language and resources and
legitimacy. In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have
been discredited together. In the case of science, neither has been
discredited. The failure in both science and religion are effectively
lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.
These are not the worst consequences, however. The modern fable
is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less
supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion
because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no
reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over
fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is
excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where
we are now.
"Worship" means the assigning or acknowledging of worth.
Language, in its wisdom, understands this to be a function of creative,
imaginative behavior. The suffix "-ship" is kin to the word "shape."
It is no wonder that the major arts in virtually every civilization have
centered around religion. Darwin, always eager to find analogues and
therefore inferred origins for human behavior among the animals, said
that, to a dog, his master is a god. But this is to speak of religion
as if it were mere credulous awe in the face of an apparently greater
power and wisdom, as if there were only one natural religion, only the
Watchmaker. The relationship between creation and discover - as Greek
sculpture, for example, might be said to have discovered the human form,
or mathematics might be said to have discovered the universe - is
wholly disallowed in this comparison .
Religion is inconceivable because it draws on the human mind in
ways for which nature, as understood by Darwinists, offers no way of
accounting. Collaboratively, people articulate perceptions of value and
meaning and worth, which are perhaps right and wrong, that is,
profoundly insightful, or else self-interested or delusional at about
the rate of the best science. We forget that it is only fairly
recently that the continents have been known to drift. Until very
recently the biomass of the sea at middle and great depths has been
fantastically underestimated, and the mass and impact of microbial life
in the earth has been virtually unreckoned. We know almost nothing
about the biology of the air, that great medium of migration for
infections agents, among other things. The wonderful Big Bang is beset
with problems. In other words, our best information about the planet
has been full of enormous lacunae, and is, and will be. Every grand
venture at understanding is hypothesis, not so different from
metaphysics. Daniel Dennett attributes the brilliance of J. S. Bach to
the fortuitous accumulation of favorable adaptations of his nervous
system. Bach, of all people, is not to be imagined without a
distinctive, highly elaborated conception of God, and life in a culture
that invoked the idea of God by means of music. That is why his work is
profound, rather than merely clever. And it is profound. It is not
about illusion, it is not about superstition or denial or human
vainglory or the peculiarities of one sensorium.
We try now to establish value in economic terms, lacking better,
and this has no doubt contributed to the bluntly mercenary character of
contemporary culture. But economic value is extraordinarily slippery.
Buying cheap and selling dear is the essence of profit making. The
consumer is forever investing in ephemera, cars or watches that are made
into symbols of prosperity, and are therefore desirable because they
are expensive. So people spend a great deal of money for the advantages
of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money. These
advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either
toward or away from the thing they have bought, which is either
commonplace or passé.
Or manufacture is taken from a setting in which adults work for
reasonable wages and there are meaningful protections of the
environment, and moved into a setting where children work for meager
wages and the environment is desolated. This creates poverty among
workers in both settings and destroys the wealth that is represented in a
wholesome environment - toxins in the air or water are great destroyers
of wealth. So economic value is created at a cost of the economic
value of workers who are made unable to figure as consumers, and of
resources that are made unsuitable for any use. A few people may get
rich, but the transaction altogether is a loss, perhaps a staggering
loss. A global economy organized on these principles will be full of
poor, sick,dispirited people, and shoddy goods, since they will be
cheapened to suit the dwindling prosperity of the workforce, who are
also the buying public. An objective accounting of value would find
disaster here. Human limits to the exploitation of people would solve
the problem, but that would interfere with competition which is the
great law of nature, supposedly, and which therefore functions as a
value, because "science" has supplanted religion.
How much misery and premature death (most of it out of sight,
granted) do we agree to when we accept this new economic order? Is it
in any way an advance on colonialism? Do we imagine, as the colonists
sometimes did, that we are bringing benefits of civilization to the far
reaches of the world? Are we not in fact decivilizing ourselves as we
decivilize them? Why is there no outcry? Is it because we have cast
off the delusion of human sanctity? I think we should study our silence
for insight into other momentous silences of recent history.
This is not the worst of it. Now that the mystery of motive is
solved - there are only self-seeking and aggression, and the illusions
that conceal them from us - there is no place left for a soul, or even
the self. Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in
the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible. We use analysts
and therapists to discover the content of our experience. Equivalent
trauma is assumed to produce more or less equivalent manifestations in
every case, so there is little use for the mind, the orderer and
reconciler, the artist of the interior world. Whatever it has made will
only be pulled apart. The old mystery of subjectivity is dispelled;
individuality is a pointless complication of a very straightforward
organic life. Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that
house of many mansions, with its stores and competences, and all its
deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be
the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another's sympathy and
courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective
life that was addressed to it - religion, art, dignity, graciousness.
Philosophy, ethics politics, properly so called. It is a thing that
bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought
declared the death of Adam.
