FIGHT THE FUTURE :

The Future Ain't What It Used to Be (Hank Parnell, 6/14/02, The Texas Mercury)
Hank Parnell has seen the future, and it doesn't seem all that appealing to me, nor to him, for that matter :

* "A good part of the world's economy will be bankrupted trying to 'forestall' a nonexistent problem: 'global warming.'" [...]
* "Starvation and hunger will increase worldwide as bans on genetically-modified foodstuffs are enacted."
* "Mortality rates will rise and lifespans begin to shorten as medical advances, especially those in the areas of stem-cell and cloning research, are
outlawed because of the fears of technophobes and religious fanatics." [...]
* "Government will become increasingly more invasive and intrusive." [...]
* "Finally, the "global economy" will collapse as governments go bankrupt from entitlement programs..."

But he also knows why we're headed toward this future :

[W]hile I believe humans are by nature delusion-prone, I also believe human delusionality has an adaptive survival value, else it wouldn't have evolved. To reiterate: all behavior, of plants, animals and humans—life itself—is selfish. The key question of human psychology was, to my mind, not asked by Freud, but rather by Nat Branden: "What is this belief/behavior doing for me?" And this is especially true of our delusions. Ridiculous, idiotic, or even insane as they sometimes (and often) appear to be, they are in the end doing something for us. Otherwise we wouldn't have them.

The great paradox though is that Mr. Parnell's vision and his belief can't both be correct. If all behavior is determined, as the sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists tell us it is, by biological forces beyond our control, by the blind and relentless drive of our selfish genes to preserve and propagate themselves, if reason and morality really are mere delusions that must yield to the iron laws of Darwinism, then it is simply not possible for us to behave in such a way as to threaten our own existence. Those who would seek to deny the existence of God and of the human soul and of free will and to yield up the explanations for human behavior on the altar of science can not then turn around and complain that said behavior is inimical to
our own interests. Either our behavior is a function of the biological imperative to survive and therefore can not lead to the kinds of dismal and fatal scenarios that Mr. Parnell imagines or else we retain some measure of control over our behaviors and therefore over human destiny and we may freely choose oblivion or we may choose another, better, way.

Personally, I believe the latter to be the case, but more than that, I believe that we must try to behave as though the latter were the case. Maybe someone will prove one day, as the science requires, that each letter that appears on this page appears not because my mind wills it so but because my selfish genes require it for their survival, in some way as yet unfathomable to our meager brains. But until that day, it seems to me a worthwhile endeavor to try to hold ourselves to certain moral standards to try to make our behavior conform as closely as possible with what we believe it should be rather than to assume that any way we behave can be excused because it reflects how things must be.

It also seems imperative to me for advocates of this kind of biological determinism to face the full implications of their beliefs. It was, for instance, an inability to accept such implications that turned Stephen J. Gould into a pariah within the evolutionary set. One implication that is a particularly bitter pill for us to swallow, and the one that Mr. Gould seems to have choked upon, is that genocide, rather than being one of the most horrific and evil acts of which humankind is capable, is instead a benefit to the species. For genocide to occur it must indicate that some ethnic subset of homo sapiens has become so diseased or debased as to represent a threat to the continued health and survival of the rest of us. The wholesale slaughter of the Jews by the Germans must not be freighted with unjustified moral significance, it should be seen merely as one gene pool taking prophylactic measures to prevent contamination by another. Ah, but it's here that things get really confusing, for what are we to make of the fact that the Americans, the British and the Russians then stepped in to preserve the last of the Jews, even at the expense of the Germans? Were the selfish German genes mistaken or did they serve their purpose, which must ultimately be our purpose, by reducing the Jewish population? Can both the exterminationist German genes and the preservationist American genes have been acting in the best interest of the survival of the species? Well, of course, there's the rub--the theory would require that yes indeed they both were.

In fact, when pushed to its final absurd limits, the theory requires that both a prospective murderer and the hero who takes a bullet for the intended victim be acting in the best interest of their genes. Both the killing and the saving of the target must be commanded by genes. And if the hero dies instead of the target, this too must be the work of the genes, for genuine altruism is an impossibility. The gene can never act against its own interest and its only interest is the survival and spread of its particular genetic code. The truest of the true believers are reduced to arguing that in that fraction of a second our "hero" was not thinking of saving the life of another, was not sacrificing his own life, but instead his genes recognized something about the target that made it likelier that they would be preserved if the hero died than if the target died. Perhaps they recognized a long lost cousin or a bastard brother or something. We may never know, but we can trust the science. The gene determined behavior can not lie.

Like the theory of free will which it replaces, the theory that all behavior is biologically determined is unfalsifiable. It explains everything. Every behavior is simply understood to contribute, in whatever unfathomable way, to survival. Like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss we may say that this is the best of all possible worlds--because it is the one our genes have created. Man is simply along for the ride. This worldview is elegant, irrefutable, and I will readily confess (as perhaps I must) that it fills me with dread. But even if it is true, even if life is one vast Matrix or Truman Show, I will continue to cling to my delusions, to the hope that man can better his own lot, that we are moral beings, and that we are answerable for our behaviors--answerable to ourselves, to each other and to God. Quite honestly, I prefer a beautiful delusion to an ugly truth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2002 11:11 PM