David Brooks—a pundit turning philosopher, who seems to have wearied of the merely topical—makes a case that where we come from does not entirely determine or limit where we go:
Our origins are natural; our depths are man-made — engraved by thought and action.
This amendment seems worth making because the strictly evolutionary view of human nature sells humanity short. . . .
While we start with and are influenced by evolutionary forces, people also have the chance to make themselves deep in a way not explicable in strictly evolutionary terms.
So much of what we call depth is built through freely chosen suffering. . . . Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions. . . .
Babies are not deep. Old people can be, depending upon how they have chosen to lead their lives. Babies start out very natural. The people we admire are rooted in nature but have surpassed nature. Often they grew up in cultures that encouraged them to take a loftier view of their possibilities than we do today.
It’s very hard for people to hear or pay attention to what we don’t already think. I am grateful to David Brooks for striking out at an angle to today’s roads most traveled, even though his gentle, humanistic rebuke to scientistic reductionism will be scoffed at by “skeptics” as wishful thinking and by religious conservatives as wimpy appeasement. (They’re much more Manichaean: it’s salvation or it’s sin.) It’s a little sad, too, that to many, Brooks will seem to be making tracks in new snow, when it’s really only a thin layer of amnesia over the well-trodden paths of the past 5,000 years. I’m still glad he’s saying it, even if (or maybe just because) he may be speaking too softly to be heard by many, even from his political pundit’s bully pulpit.
The more I immerse myself in science and the culture surrounding it, the more the territory not ruled by biology seems to shrink, and the more cheered I am by the rare exceptions, those evaporating puddles of freedom from the totalitarianism of the selfish gene. Almost everything can be, and is, reduced to the marionettery of those coiled strands of DNA: any altruistic impulse can be, and is, explained away by kin selection or group selection, any creative impulse by competitive sexual display, attachment by its advantages for survival, most of high culture (literature, philosophy, faith) by the denial of death. At least one pair of thinkers has posited that evolution eliminated advanced intelligence until H. sapiens came up with denial: no other species had found a way past the threshold where the dawning awareness of mortality brings on such a sense of futility that it kills the impulse to reproduce.
That’s debatable—as one Amazon critic of that book wrote, “the fact that I know that I am going to die some day … and even obsess about it from time to time … hasn’t prevented me from having a family”—but what seems undeniable is that all this reductionism kills the impulse to transcend, possibly justifying “low” behavior, tearing the clothes off any “pure” motive, and certainly lowering expectations of oneself and fellow humans. This began with Freud, who saw everything but sex as sublimated sex; he and his iconic cigar have now been replaced by an inflatable Darwin parade float.
To be immersed in the world of science-think, which extends well beyond science into its cultural corona, is to be almost brainwashed by this reductionism. I play this game with myself: a thought or emotion comes up, and I slot it into its biological context. Of course my family is all excited about the newborn twins, my parents’ third and fourth great-grandchildren: we’re programmed to ooh and ahh over little bundles of our own genes. As the only childless one in this fecund family—not by choice—I’m a loser in the only game that counts, lamely serving the germline from the auntly sidelines. Whatever I do or write will no longer boost my reproductive success by attracting attention, resources, and mates (if it ever would have—even now it doesn’t work quite like that for females, which helps explain our divided motivation), so what’s to drive it?
Which brings me back to David Brooks’s point: the only qualities, motives, and acts that are uniquely human are those that can’t be reduced to biological utility, that even defy it. They are few, and they compose a thin layer of human life—the new snow of the neocortex falling on deep reptilian ruts of rutting and brawling. They are the rare and precious things that cheer me up. Empathy, the ability to imagine another’s subjectivity, sometimes to the point of one’s own disadvantage. Witness, the way we are the universe’s way of looking at itself, wanting to know out of wonder and curiosity and not only for advantage. Love, what happens AFTER (in Brooks’s words) “we’re aroused by people who send off fertility or status cues,” when we’re living with another individual, getting bruised by the rough edges and gazing into the depths. Creation, a transaction of witness between you and the universe whether a fellow primate ever praises it or not.
What Brooks says is that is that this thin layer of human existence is what we experience as “depth.” The depths of our biological heritage, on the other hand, feel driven, propulsive, powerful, intoxicating . . . and ultimately stereotyped, fleeting, and shallow.
Later: That isn’t stated right. Most of what makes our lives meaningful is biological, starting with . . . um . . . being alive. Most of our strongest emotions are about staying alive, passing life on, and protecting it.
But. It’s that extra dimension that gives those emotions depth, much as shading a line drawing of an apple makes it look three-dimensional. That added dimension of stopping and wondering and imagining What is this? WTF is all this?—the gaze of that third eye, neither predatory nor desirous, with no agenda but astonishment, opened by language and death—may be the thinnest veneer on our consciousness, but as the Higgs boson gives every other particle its mass, this is what gives everything its depth.
Later still: In the course of a dialog with commenter realpc at my other blog Ambiance, it struck me that nature is not reductive (as scientists keep finding out to their fascination and chagrin). Our current popular concept of it is. The culture that has grown up around science, crafted by certain popularizers—the Pinker-Dawkins-Dennett axis, the aggressive “skeptic” blogs (a culture which I think misrepresents and undersells science itself)—is proudly reductive, billing materialism and evolutionary psychology as the antidote to sentimentality for the tough-minded. It’s very macho (which is not to say women can’t play), and a good part of what drives it is pleasure in feeling superior to and putting down others who are soft-minded enough to see any sign of meaning, purpose, or mystery in nature. If you traced this ‘tude’s cultural history, it might lead you back to the French existentialists, particularly the trousery swagger of Sartre and his compatriots, who billed themselves the only ones tough enough to look a meaningless universe in the eye and to emblazon their will on the void . . . boys peeing their names on blank snow.