Evolutionary mistakes

Paul Johnson continues to use his supposedly historical column to deliver lectures about secularism. Since his ideas on that subject are long since fixed, there is little value in each new column, and I miss his reflections on history. Still, it is interesting to read arguments that are elements of who I thought I was, worn and familiar as an old blanket. Johnson dislikes and rejects Darwinism for the same reasons I did, primarily because of perceived moral and social consequences, mixed with a vibrant dislike of scientific dogmatism (more often brash, philosophically naive confidence than actual dogmatism, but it feels much the same if you do not sympathize with it).

The temptation to bow before scientism is given an extra edge by the current deification of Darwin, who finds himself, poor fellow, in the role of the anti-Christ, with his natural selection as an alternative to Christianity. Some people might argue that the survival of the fittest is a sound principle. Indeed that was the principle underpinning Hitler’s race-theory and other manifestations of social Darwinism. I believe it will lead rapidly and inevitably to the self-destruction of the human race. The crisis in the world economy, and the great war it seems likely to promote, make all these issues highly topical.

I need to read some Spencer (I read a little once for class, without retention), but I trust Jonah Goldberg when he says this use of Social Darwinism is inaccurate. The reductio ad Hitlerum, sadly, has come to subtract from an argument. What is really interesting here is the category error at the center. "Survival of the fittest" cannot be considered a "sound principle" because those two phrases belong to distinct categories, and the meanings of the words in "survival of the fittest" are different in each category. Principles make use of moral vocabulary, because a principle is a basis for moral action, while Spencer's phrase is meant to use scientific vocabulary, which freely eliminates secondary meanings from words or invents new words and meanings to serve a technical purpose.

If "survival of the fittest" is used as a principle, it becomes an implicit metaphor, with "survival" and "fittest" both changing meaning. In biology, survival only means the propagation of a genome (or perhaps individual genes, per Dawkins) and fittest only means "most able to propagate." So, "survival of the fittest" is a technical reduction, re-casting survival in the barest terms. In moral terms, however, the phrase evokes the "the flourishing of the best," which does leave room for nasty ideas like lebensraum and a master race. In moral terms, survival implies many additional things; it is in the moral world that man does not live by bread alone. Equally, "fitness" in the moral world has in view the entire organism of a man with all his behaviors, verging on "worth." The connection between the two uses of "survival of the fittest" is no more sound than the connection between chaos theory as in mathematics and chaos theory as used in Jurassic Park, where the words slide into their popular meanings, as though it were "science says [theory] that complexity is unpredictable [chaos]."

I am not trying to get at the is-ought problem here. Converting descriptive biology to prescriptive morality requires additional premisses, certainly, but in this case the conversion is by slipperiness of language. The is-ought problem would only arise if someone were arguing that evolution meant he had a moral obligation to spread his genes.

Update: Michael Shermer has an article in Scientific American making a similar point.

In a weary land

Wisdom from one unwise man to another:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There as a king reigned in the east:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

Whether happiness may be found in political change

Dalrymple's essay in the current City Journal is unlocked now. It is a little wandering, but as always it is rewarding to read him. He quotes John Stuart Mill's self-reflection on happiness and political change:

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

It is humbling to compare my own experience, not all that different in nature, with Mill's. In 2000, when it briefly looked as though Gore would win on the day of the election, it was as though my own hope for the future was dying. For an hour I was inconsolable, though strangely I was not a great supporter of Bush himself. The sudden access of grief and despair, so manifestly out of proportion to a mere election, shocked me into a thorough examination of not just my beliefs but the place they had in my life; my political maturity began that day. Yet Mill was able to ask himself this question of his own genius, without the rough impetus of a noisy campaign and political defeat.

Like Mill, I was young, though at 25, not so very young. Unlike Mill, whose remarkable genius had been paired from early childhood with an astonishing education, I had been happy only to try to make sense of the world through comparatively scanty reading; he, of course, had already constructed a philosophical view of considerable power. Yet the same falsehood had gripped us both, the belief that a rightly ordered world would bring happiness, not just to a greater number of men, but personally; that the work of increasing happiness in the world is at one with working towards one's own happiness. Escaping that falsehood means abandoning the hope that all the struggle to learn about man (for ethics, economics, and politics are only branches of the study of man) has any meaning beyond the pleasure of learning itself.

Minds of great power, like Mill's, may alter the world a little, but then again they may not, and the changes worked often bear little resemblance to the intention. I doubt Mill would approve of the excesses of libertarianism, despite its closest resemblance to his thought; he did not mean to include the exuberant hedonism libertarians so often present as their highest good. Nor again would the use of cold utilitarian calculus to justify great cruelty to a few suit his character, yet it might well be that such abuses in the 20th century by totalitarians would have been harder to dress in a presentable rhetoric without Mill's work. Thoughts die as well; we scarcely know if Pythagoras really existed or what Heraclitus meant, even in the little of his writing that survives. If great minds can little expect to know the consequences of their thoughts, or even to see effects at all, lesser minds must expect no return on their efforts.

Thus the happiness in the study of man can be nothing more than the happiness in learning itself. Imlac describes the pleasure of knowledge (I think it is safe to take this as Johnson's own opinion) in Rasselas:

Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas. Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction, and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget. I am therefore inclined to conclude that if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.

That man is so various, so utterly resistant to reduction to a system, makes his nature a study that can bring happiness for a lifetime. And yet it is so painful to learn about man and see it bear so little fruit! Imlac himself faults ignorance because it produces nothing, yet how much does the study of man produce? I have learned a little better to preserve an aequus animus; that is an increase in my happiness, at the cost of some intense pleasures; I have learned, a little, to hear the underlying sense in men's incoherence; that is an increase in happiness, though at the cost of alienation of words from sense; I have learned at last and greatest cost how tenuous are the threads that tie reason to the self; a slight understanding, that forgives much and costs more. Little enough; and when I die it will pass away with me. Surely happiness, though the emotion of it may fade, ought in its essence to partake of eternity?

I can easily believe that my mind is simply too weak to learn enough to win an unambiguous increase in personal happiness above the happiness of learning itself, but it does not seem that anyone has ever had a strong enough mind. There is, then, no happiness to be found either in contributing to the right formation of society or in the understanding of man that must precede a correct theory of society. In the end, I can only believe that in good or bad thought, in well or badly ordered societies, in knowledge or ignorance, there can be more or less happiness in the world, but only the pleasure of the learning falls to the learner, and to whom the excess or deficiency of happiness falls is the work of chance alone.

Romance

A routine essay in Luddite sentiment here, but the last sentence implies something astonishing:

Seventy per cent of women said they would rather receive a love letter or poem than a text message or email, while 53 per cent of men agreed.

That is, 30% of women would rather get a text message or email. Who are these women? All the functional illiterates and the hard-faced club girls, sure, but can that really be 30%? What a horrifying thought.

Quotations too good to die

One of the many almost-quotations everyone knows is the one Paul Johnson uses here:

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense.

Like the spurious quotation from Dostoevsky about all things being permitted if God is dead, the quotation accurately reflects the thought of the writer. In this case, it mimics Chesterton's paradoxical style as well. However, it's just as well to point out that Chesterton, in all his millions of words, never wrote exactly that.

I admire Johnson, but he goes on to commit a common error among conservative Christians:

The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect.

The global temperature has been rising, if not all that rapidly, for quite a long time now; barring some revolutionary discoveries, it is not reasonable to disbelieve in "global warming." Feel free to disagree with man-made global warming (AGW or anthropogenic global warming), or more reasonably, disagree that the warming is 100% man-made; it is also a fine position to take that the warming is not all that big a threat compared to other environmental problems.

The reflex rejection of global warming tout court is embarrassing, but it is borderline lunacy to throw in the greenhouse effect, which is a well-confirmed theory about the insulating effect of atmospheres. Venus is otherwise terribly hard to explain, and we ourselves would be v. v. cold. Johnson most likely means the bundle of policy recommendations popular with the people who talk most about those things, but flabby writing like that is what helps further the stupid caricature of conservatism as the enemy of science.