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“The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand—that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’
“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.”
Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice—all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn’t evolve for the “good of the species” and aren’t reliably employed to that end.
That parents seldom lecture children on the virtues of lying doesn’t mean that they’re not teaching them to lie. Children, it seems, will keep lying unless strongly discouraged.
Now, there is nothing wrong with being a leading barnacle authority. But some people are capable of greater things. Why Darwin took so long to realize his greatness has been the subject of much reflection. The most common theory is the most obvious: writing a book that affronts the religious beliefs of virtually everyone in your part of the world—including many colleagues and your wife—is a task not to be approached without circumspection.
The keen sensitivity with which people detect the flaws of their rivals is one of nature’s wonders. It takes a Herculean effort to control this tendency consciously, and the effort must be repeated on a regular basis. Some people can summon enough restraint not to talk about their rivals’ worthlessness; they may even utter some Victorian boilerplate about a “worthy opponent.” But to rein in the perception itself—the unending, unconscious, all-embracing search for signs of unworthiness—is truly a job for a Buddhist monk. Honesty of evaluation is simply beyond the reach of most mortals.
“that scientists are humble and devoted truth-seekers; that doctors dedicate their lives to alleviation of suffering; that teachers dedicate their lives to their students; that we are all basically law-abiding, kind, altruistic souls who place everyone’s interests before our own.”
Except in barrooms, junior-high schoolyards, and other venues of high testosterone, the support consists of information, not muscle.
We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we’re designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals—sex, status, and so on—often brings happiness, at least for a while. Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive.
Being a person’s true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.Whether this bias toward a friend’s interests is deeply unconscious is a matter for research that hasn’t yet been done. A purely positive answer would clash with the treachery that has been known to infect friendships. Still, it may be that the hallmark of the strongest, longest friendships is the depth of the shared bias; the best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly. Anyway, however conscious of unconscious the lies, one effect of friendship is to take individual nodes of self-serving dishonesty and link them up into webs of collective dishonesty. Self-love becomes a mutual-admiration society.
And enmity becomes two mutual-detestation societies.
The stereotypes of the arrogant, inconsiderate jock and the ingratiating, deferential wimp are no doubt overdrawn, but they may reflect a statistically valid correlation, and they seem to make Darwinian sense.
Ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day. Cutting-edge talk shows are massively self-referential, with jokes about cue cards written on cue cards, camera shots of cameras, and a general tendency for the format to undermine itself. Architecture is now about architecture, as architects playfully and, sometimes, patronizingly meld motifs of different ages into structures that invite us to laugh along with them. What is to be avoided at all costs in the postmodern age is earnestness, which betrays an embarrassing naïveté.
A society in which everyone holds the door open for people behind them is a society in which everyone is better off... If you can create this sort of system of mutual consideration—a moral system—it’s worth the trouble from everyone’s point of view.
the simplest single source of guidance is to bear in mind that the feeling of moral “rightness” is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly. Morality, you could almost say, was designed to be misused by its own definition.
We are potentially moral animals—which is more than any other animal can say—but we aren’t naturally moral animals. To be moral animals, we must realize how thoroughly we aren’t.
And to know all is to forgive all. Once you see the forces that govern behaviors, it’s harder to blame the behavior.This has nothing to do with a supposedly right-wing doctrine of “genetic determinism.” To begin with, the question of moral responsibility has no exclusive ideological character. Though some on the far right might be thrilled to hear that businessmen can’t help but commit crimes. And neither Bible-thumpers in the “moral majority” nor feminists especially want to hear male philanderers say they’re slaves to their hormones.
More to the point: the phrase “genetic determinism” exudes ignorance as to what the new Darwinism is about. As we’ve seen, everyone (including Darwin) is a victim not of genes, but of genes and environment together: knobs and tunings.
Then again, a victim is a victim.
Serotonin and Darwinism together could thus bring sharp testament to otherwise vague complaints about how criminals are “victims of society.”
He [Robert J. Axelrod] finds robust moral codes rest not just on norms, but on “metanorms”: society disapproves not only of the code’s violators but also of those who tolerate violators by failing to disapprove.
The basic paradox here—the intellectual groundlessness of blame, and the practical need for it—is something few people seem eager to acknowledge.
To call things in the past inexorable makes more things in the future inexorable. To tell people they’re not to blame for past mistakes is to make future mistakes more likely. The truth is hardly guaranteed to set us free.Or, to put the point another, perhaps more upbeat way: the truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply “natural,” essentially irrepressible, then the impulse—for those men, at least—may indeed be so. In Darwin’s day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.
Morality makes us mindful of the welfare of people other than family and friends, raising society’s overall welfare. You don’t have to be a utilitarian to think that’s a good thing.
This is the rigorous answer to people who ask why terms like morality and values should be taken seriously. Not because tradition is a good thing in itself. But because of what a strong moral code is uniquely able to offer: the more elusive benefits of non-zero sumness, without lots of police.
Certainly Mill would attack residues of mindless Victorianism, such as homophobia. But he might well not favor the sort of hedonism that, in the late 1960s, was identified with the left (hallucinogenic drugs and sex) nor the sort that, in the 1980s, was identified with the right (nonhallucinogenic drugs and BMWs).
He was troubled by the Old Testament’s “manifestly false history of the world” and its depiction of God as “a revengeful tyrant.” He wondered about the New Testament too; though he found the moral teachings of Jesus beautiful, he saw that their “perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.”
Go above and beyond the call of smoothy functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal.
if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.
At heart it was the same problem of mind and matter that Eddington has tried to rescue for the side of angels by invoking the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Already by 1950, Alan Turing was an unperson, the Trotsky of the computer revolution.
Dip the apple in the brew
Let the Sleeping Death seep through
And the waves of inspiration had come only once every five years since Christopher Morcom’s death: the Turing machine in 1935, naval Enigma in 1940, the ACE in 1945, the morphogenetic principle in 1950.
Christian doctrine no longer mattered to the state, but belief in its social and political institutions certainly did. The family system, depending upon sex as a commodity for men to earn and women to surrender, remained a central doctrine of that faith, and the very idea of homosexuality undermined it.
but then he had never sought to change the world, only to interpret it.
“Here, in Dachau, my troubles began.”
“Diplomats! The best diplomat I know is a fully activated Phaser Bank!”
They’ve been intimidated by officious and sometimes sexist teachers and others who may themselves suffer from math anxiety.
At least part of the motivation for any book is anger, and this book is no exception. I’m distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems so indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens; with a military that spends more than one quarter of a trillian dollars each year on ever smarter weapons for ever more poorly educated soldiers; and with the media, which invariably become obsessed with this hostage on an airliner, or that baby who has fallen into a well, and seem insufficiently passionate when it comes to addressing problems such as urban crime, environmental deterioration or poverty.
“You are no Duke with a famous name, no broad American with a Red Indian figure.”
“Yes, we’re both in the right, and to keep us from being irrevocably aware of it, hadn’t we better just go on our separate ways home?”
“Do you really have this friend in St. Petersburg?”
“I sentence you now to death by drowning!”
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
I am a sick man . . . a mean man.
But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation.
Why protest? Two and two do make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice.But, good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four!
That makes you laugh? I’m very happy it does. Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself. After all, how can a man with my lucidity of perception respect himself?
If only my doing nothing were due to laziness! How I’d respect myself then!
I would even say that the best definition of man is: ungrateful biped. But this is still not his main defect. His main defect is his chronic perversity, an affliction from which he has suffered throughout his history, from the Flood through the Schleswig-Holstein crisis.
Only asses make a show of courage, and even then, only until they come up against the wall. But why bother about them anyway, since they are of no importance.
At sixteen, I was already grimly wondering at the pettiness of their thoughts, the inanity of their talk, their games and their preoccupations. They couldn’t understand the essential things and were not interested in the most thought-provoking subjects, so I came to consider them as inferiors.
Boldly and freely enter my house
To be its mistress, my sweet spouse.
—taking your cowardice for reasonableness, thus making yourselves feel better. So I may still turn out to be more alive than you in the end.
Left without literature, we immediately become entangled and lost—we don’t know what to join, what to keep up with; what to love, what to hate; what to respect, what to despise! We even find it painful to be men—real men of flesh and blood, with our own private bodies; we’re ashamed of it, and we long to turn ourselves into something hypothetical called the average man. We’re stillborn, and for a long time we’ve been brought into the world by parents who are dead themselves; and we like it better and better.
culture is the flesh which adheres to the skeleton of biology. Less metaphorically, what I would argue is that the human mind is not a tabula rasa but is informed by various capacities, constraints, and dispositions, which come to us innately.
No one believes that a human grows to maturity, knowing innately that God exists, or that 2+2=4. Rather, the claim is that there are underlying channels, as it were, into which culture must flow.
We believe that 2+2=4, not because it is a reflection of absolute reality, or because some of our ancestors made a pact to believe in it, but because those proto-humans who believed in 2+2=4, rather than 2+2=5, survived and reproduced, and those who did not, did not. Today, it is these same selectively produced techniques and rules which govern the production of science.
The key point, never to be forgotten, is that we are in many respects self-centered. Nature has made us that way and it is just as well, or we would never survive and reproduce. Imagine if every time you got a piece of bread you gave it away! Imagine if every time you fell in love you denied your feelings so someone else could take your place! But because we have taken the route of sociality, we need a mechanism to make us break through that self-centered nature on many, many occasions. Evolution has given us this logically odd sense of oughtness to do precisely that.
I believe that ethics is an adaptation, put in place by our genes as selected in the struggle for life, to aid each and every one of us individually.
, Dostoevski shows quite brilliantly that human nature has a nasty (he would say ‘good’!) way of making little of fancy philosophical theories.
According to Huff, malarial plasmodia were originally associated with insects, to which they caused no harm, and have invaded vertebrates relatively recently, giving rise to fatal infections in the latter.
Ostensibly there is a basic clash in human nature. Mankind is a biological species which belongs to the animal kingdom. But man is also the creator and the creature of his society and of his cultural heritage. And finally, the inspiration of the mystics sees man in still a third light—that of the Son of God. The intellectual history of mankind can be written in terms of shifting emphasis on one or the other of these aspects of the human nature. And the history of human error could well be portrayed in terms of attempts to understand everything, instead of something, about man by investigation of only one of these aspects to the exclusion of the others. In particular, the study of human evolution has often been handicapped by this pur-blindness. Darwin’s affirmations that man is a part of nature seemed to many of his contemporaries, and still seems to some misguided souls, downright blasphemy.
The biological meaning of the diversity among humans, like that of the organic diversity on the biological level, is adaptation to the variety of the environments which the organism encounters or creates. The evolution of life has only one discernible goal, and that is life itself.
Latin is majestic, especially when you don’t understand it.
But novels, like genomes, consist mostly of intron baggage. And as with evolution, you can’t always get there efficiently from here.
Leap rogue, and jump whore,
And married be forever more!
Jump rogue, and princess leap,
My wife art thou and mine to keep!
The Artist And His Work
How can that be, lady, which all men learn
by long experience? Shapes that seem alive,
wrought in hard mountain marble, will survive
their maker, whom the years to dust return!
Beauty And The Artist
Too much good luck no less than misery
May kill a man condemned to mortal pain,
If, lost to hope and chilled in every vein,
A sudden pardon comes to set him free.
Beauteous art, brought with us from heaven,
will conquer nature; so divine a power
belongs to him who strives with every nerve.
If I was made for art, from childhood given
a prey for burning beauty to devour,
I blame the mistress I was born to serve.
The most perfect guide is nature.
Continue without fail to draw something every day.
Sculpture is an art, by which removing all that is superfluous from the material under treatment, reduces it to that form designed in the artist’s mind.
YOUR AUNT MAW DIED LAST NIGHT STOP FUNERAL THURSDAY IN LIBYA HILL STOP COME HOME IF YOU CAN.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
“What strange and magic things these oaths and ceremonies are!” she [Mrs. Jack] thought. “They give a kind of life to people who have none of their own. They make a kind of truth for people who have found one for themselves. Love, beauty, everlasting truth, salvation—all that we hope and suffer for on earth is in them for these people. Everything that the rest of us have to get with our blood and labor, and by the anguish of our souls, is miraculously accomplished for them, somehow,” she thought ironically, “if they can only swear to it ‘by the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead.’”
Webber had done what so many beginning writers do: he had written it out of the experience of his own life. And that got him into a lot of trouble.
“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry—that is a trade for potwashers. You are too young. Come back in a year.”
He [Gottlieb] reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a few damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the measures to save lives to which he lends his genius might in the end be the destruction of all human life.
“The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy the medical profession. As for laymen, they can be sure of but one thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health is not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler shows in [Samuel Butler’s dystopian novel (1872)] ‘Erewhon’—the swine stole that idea from me, too, maybe thirty years before I ever got it—the only crime for which we should hang people is having tooberculosis.”
“But the scientist is intensely religions—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists”
“Thought is a primitive superstition. Reason is an irrational idea. The childish notion that we are able to think has been mankind’s costliest error.”
“Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions.”
“Let us break the chains of the prejudice called Logic. Are we going to be stopped by a syllogism?”
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?
Have you ever asked what is the root of money?
you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth”
“Oh, I can’t answer you. I don’t have any answers, my mind doesn’t work that way, but I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.”
“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”
“This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does.”
“To work—and whenever men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work—with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on hearth. To work—with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college.”
“Through the ages,” he said, “the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter—every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation—every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad—have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking through the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which—in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders—some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive”
“But there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all”
“To live, man must hold three things as supreme and ruling values of his live: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtures, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.”
“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice”
“That choice is yours to make. That choice—the dedication to one’s highest potential—is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”
“Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility—learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.”
“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach of contract or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.”
“I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
“Get the hell out of my way!”
A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.
There were Esperantists—a harmful group which Stalin undertook to smoke out during the years when Hitler was doing the same thing.
There is no way of sidestepping this comparison: both the years and the methods coincide too closely. And the comparison occurred even more naturally to those who had passed through the hands of both the Gestapo and the MGB. One of these was Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich, an émigré and preacher of Orthodox Christianity. The Gestapo accused him of Communist activities among Russian workers in Germany, and the MGB charged him with having ties to the international bourgeoisie. Divnich’s verdict was unfavorable to the MGB. He was tortured by both, but the Gestapo was nonetheless trying to get at the truth, and when the accusation did not hold up, Divnich was released. The MGB wasn’t interested in the truth and had no intention of letting anyone out of its grip once he was arrested.
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
“Aha, the Vlasov bastard got caught, did he! Shoot the rat!” They were vehement in their rear-line wrath (the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear), and they added a good deal more in mother oaths.
So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.
If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That is how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.
Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which to not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed
Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.
Incidentally, it is very naïve to say What for? At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.
After all, we have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor in war (or the kind that’s needed for flying in outer space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of valor—civil valor. And that’s all our society needs, just that, just that! That’s all we need and that’s exactly what we haven’t got.
It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all
When I was still quite young my father said to me, “My beloved daughter, you are an amoral little wretch. I know this, because you take after me; your little mind works just the way mine does. If you are not to be destroyed by your lack, you must work out a practical code of your own and live by it.”
I thought about his words and felt warm and good inside. “Amoral little wretch—” Father knew me so well.
“What code should I follow, Father?”
“You have to pick your own.”
“The Ten Commandments?”
“You know better than that. The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.”
“All right, teach me about the second five. How should they read?”
“Gratitude”: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, “altruism.” Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion. Long ago Mr. Clemens demonstrated in his essay, “What Is Man?” that every one of us acts at all times in his own interest. Once you understand this, it offers a way to negotiate with an antagonist in order to find means to cooperate with him for mutual benefit. But if you are convinced of your own “altruism” and you try to shame him out of his horrid selfishness, you will get nowhere.
I am aware that the themes of the unwritten stories linking the second and third volume thus briefly stated above have not been elaborated sufficiently to lend conviction, particularly with reference to two notions; the idea that space travel, once apparently firmly established, could fall into disuse, and secondly the idea that the United States could lapse into a dictatorship of superstition. As for the first, consider the explorations of the Vikings a thousand years ago and the colonies they established in North America. Their labors were fruitless; Columbus and his successors had to do it all over again. Space travel in the near future is likely to be a marginal proposition at best, subsidized for military reasons. It could die out—then undergo a renascence through new techniques and through new economic and political pressures. I am not saying these things will happen, I do say they could happen.
As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.
I have been told (probably at various cocktail parties) that human beings are the only animal who kill for sport, the only animals always in heat, the only animals to kiss on the mouth during sexual intercourse, and the only animals conscious of their own deaths... But would anyone in his right mind attempt to build a moral theory on a basis so inane?
(If ballistics bores you, here is another place to skip.)
A daisy-clipping orbit of Luna (assuming that Luna has daisies, which seems unlikely) takes an hour and forty-eight minutes and some seconds. Golden Rule, being three hundred kilometers higher than a tall daisy, has to go farther than the circumference of Luna (10,919 kilometers), namely 12,805 kilometers. Almost two thousand kilometers farther—so it has to go faster. Right?
Wrong. (I cheated.)
The most cock-eyed, contrary to all common sense, difficult aspect of ballistics around a planet is this: To speed up, you slow down; to slow down, you speed up.
I'm sorry. That's the way it is.
In This Room on Tuesday 14 May 2075
Adam Selene, Bernardo de la Paz,
Manuel Davis, and Wyoming Knott
Created the Plan That Gave Rise to Free Luna.
Here They Declared the Revolution!
“It is true indeed, that the actions we approve in others, are generally imagin’d to tend the natural good of Mankind, or that some Parts of it. But whence this secret chain between each person and mankind? How is my interest connected with the most distant parts of it?”
For [Joseph] Butler, morality is grounded in human nature and comprises both elements of the passions and reason. Hume will focus on the passions; Kant, on the element of reason. A richer Butlerian position emerges in Adam Smith’s view of conscience as the impartial spectator.
“To abolish State action, because its direction in never more than approximately correct, appears to me to be much the same thing as abolishing the man at the wheel altogether, because, do what he will, the ship yaws more or less.”
Is there a ‘secret chain’ that links evolution, biology, and morality? Unequivocally, yes. If human beings are moral creatures at all, it is as a result of evolution
We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
To be strict, this book should be called not The Selfish Cistron nor The Selfish Chromosome, but The slightly selfish big bit of chromosome and the even more selfish little bit of chromosome.
The essential concept Maynard Smith introduces is that of the evolutionary stable strategy, an idea which he traces back to W. D. Hamilton and R. H. MacArthur
An evolutionary stable strategy or ESS is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
He [Williams, G. C. Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966)] concluded, as had Darwin, that delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species which are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals.
The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die—on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.
We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
“Where are your followers? Where is you father in Heaven, you fool? All have forsaken you. Go on! Go faster! Go to your self-chosen doom!”
“I will go, but thou shalt tarry until I return.”
“We must appear neither rich enough to excite envy, nor so poor that we become contemptible and pathetic.
Mediocrity, Kotikokura, is the salt of the earth. In mediocrity, all things flourish. Below it they wither; above it they are struck by lightning.”
Infuriated, the horseshoer struck his opponent a powerful blow. The man fell, his face covered with blood. The horseshoer raised his hammer over the victim’s head. “Do you believe he is the Prophet?”The man grumbled, “I believe.”
“Truth always conquers, Kotikokura, for that which conquers is truth.”
“Why was I so delighted? Was it less an amalgamation of superstitions? Neither Christ nor Mohammed tolerated reason, and I would be an outcast whether the golden cross or the silver crest glittered.”
“Kotikokura, by saving the life of a human being, we merely endanger the life of another. It is futile to be kind and generous. ‘Homo homini lupus.’ Wolves all—devouring one another—and always the Jew the final scapegoat. So be it! We cannot help it. We must laugh or go mad.”
“Truth should be demonstrable.”
“All religions speak of the true light. Meanwhile, man gropes in the dark.”
“Man, however, is destined to suffer whether gods or devils rule. He is the sacrificial goat.”
Modern
Paperback:
It may be safely assumed that, two thousand years ago, before Cæsar set foot in southern Britain, the whole country-side visible from the windows of the room in which I write, was in which is called “the state of nature.”
However, I doubt whether even the keenest judge of character, if he had before him a hundred boys and girls under fourteen, could pick out, with the least chance of success, those who should be kept, as certain to be serviceable members of the polity, and those who should be chloroformed, as equally sure to be stupid, idle, or vicious. The “points” of a good or of a bad citizen are really far harder to discern than those of a puppy or a short-horn calf; many do not show themselves before the practical difficulties of life stimulate manhood to full exertion. And by that time the mischief is done. The evil stock, if it be one, has had time to multiply, and selection is nullified.
For I imagine there can be no doubt that the great desire of every wrongdoer is to escape from the painful consequences of his actions.
Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos might well seem to stand condemned. The conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature, and the microscopic atom should have found the illimitable macrocosm guilty. But few, or none, ventured to record that verdict.
It seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns upon you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.
Besides adultery and rape, just about every other kind of sexual behavior that has been regarded as sinful or unethical can be found abundantly in nature. Brother-sister matings are the rule in many species (Hamilton 1967). Masturbation is common in mammals (Beach 1964). Hershkovitz (1977) noted that it was especially likely for juvenile male marmosets whose mothers are in heat. Males may mount obviously pregnant females or other inappropriate objects (Stuart Altman 1962). Homosexual behavior is common in a wide variety of vertibrates (Beach 1978; Organ and Organ 1968) and there may be some examples of homosexual preference (Weinrich 1983).
The production of an organ capable of threading needles and turning doorknobs was made possible as an incidental consequence of selection to be better than one’s neighbor at swinging through the trees.
The one necessary and sufficient reason for a meme spreading through a human population is that it is good at getting itself spread.
“I shall die, but you must live! ...You are too vile for the grave!”
“In Persia, Salome, you have become the mother of Zoroaster who was born of a virgin. In Arabia you are Princess Scheherazade who embroiders a thousand and one nights. Among the Barbarians you are the divinity of love. In China and India you are the theme of poets, philosophers and philologists. You are the vision of perfection appearing each century in the gardens of the Emperor. You are the symbol of immortality. You are the golden tortoise supporting the world.”
“I sought my soul and the final meaning of Life in the hollow of my navel. Contemplation without action, Lakshmi, leads not to Nirvana but to vacuity.”
“Cartaphilus is wrong to fight religion, Joan. If he succeeded, and Logic ruled life, man would soon turn Logic to God, and the lemmata, the data, the enthymemes, the sorites and the dilemmas into devils and saints. He would worship or fear them as fervently, as falsely, as tenaciously, as illogically, as he does Jahveh and Jesus and Mary and Joseph and Allah and Mohammed. He would raise a cathedral in honor of Saint Epagoge, a monastery to Holy Postulate, and a convent to Virgin Premise. There would be quite as many friars and nuns and rabbis and sheiks and bishops, and a Pope, just as now, and superstition and hatred and bloodshed would not diminish. Indeed it is Logic which makes of religion a thing of ugliness and cruelty. What Jesus said had its origin in the heart, not the brain. If his followers obeyed him without attempting to rationalize his words the world would be a gentler place to live in. Alas, the theologians discovered Logic!”
John said, “You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he’s a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don’t know anything about the man himself.”
Phyllis shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“But it is,” John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady to look up from the next table. “Look, there’s a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It’s an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There’s a kind of archeology, and anthropology—a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear—how it came about, what needs it fulfilled.”
“But he’s just aliterary construct,” John repeated doggedly. “Something like Sherlock Holmes, or the Lone Ranger. And you didn’t answer my question about the miracles.”
They all scoffed at once, Marina most persistently: “...there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecological accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.
“Why were we sent here in the first place, Frank?”“Because Russia and our United States of America were desperate, that’s why. Decrepit outmoded industrial dinosaurs, that’s what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in Asia. And we had all this space experience going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here on the chance that we’d find something worthwhile, and it paid off! We struck gold, so to speak. Which is only more gasoline poured onto things, because gold rushes show who’s powerful and who’s not. And now even though we got a head start up here, there are a lot of new tigers down there who are better at things than we are, and they all want a piece of the action. There’s a lot of countries down there with no room and no resources, ten billion people standing in their own shit.”
“I thought you told me Earth would always be falling apart.”
“This isn’t falling apart. Think about it—if this damned treatment only goes to the rich, then the poor will revolt and it’ll all explode—but if the treatment goes to everyone, then populations will soar and it’ll explode.”
a large proportion of the slum populations consists of ...“morons”—that is, of mental defectives of comparatively high grade. These people are lacking not only in intelligence but also in self-control, which is the basis of morality
a punishment for the economic sin of producing more children than the parents can support.
Mutual grooming, mutual removal of parasites and mutual protection, traits common among social mammals and birds, cannot have been produced by prudent calculation, because the creatures in question are not capable of calculation on this scale. Nor are these habits a deceptive cover for some other motive, because animals are not skilled full-time hypocrites. Social creatures, including all our primate relatives, did not build their societies by plotting their way out of an original war of all against all. What makes them able to live together, and sometimes to co-operate in remarkable tasks of hunting, building, joint protection or the like, has to be their natural disposition to love and trust one another.
Some of these patients were quite aberrated until they were in a hypnotic amnesia trance at which time they could be freed of operator control. The aberrations were not present. Stutterers did not stutter. Harlots became moral. Arithmetic was easy.
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