One of the central tenets of the New Atheist program lately being peddled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al., is that rational atheism does not entail moral nihilism. But what happens when scientists, working in the new field of moral psychology, find out that our moral thinking depends less on reason than it does on naturally-selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine, recognizes the threat:

“Morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appearances, but his solutions aren’t very convincing. He proposes that we conjure moral principles out of the lessons of nonzero-sum games and our ability to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, which is supposed to result in—surprise!—a morality that just happens to look a lot like a rudimentary market-driven liberal society.

But granted that nobody—well, almost nobody—likes to be called a nihilist, it would be nice to see Pinker own up to the facts that he so clearly lays out. “Amoral nihilism” is precisely what you get if you accept evolutionary explanations as the first and last word on human behavior. To say otherwise is either deception or sentimentality.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that the science is wrong. But it does suggest that the pious platitudes of the New Atheists depend on faith just as much as the religions they so despise. Sartre at least had the courtesy to acknowledge that the prospect of a world without values might inspire something other than a hectoring optimism:

The absurd is not, to begin with, the object of a mere idea; it is revealed to us in a doleful illumination. “Getting up, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, in the same routine…,” and then, suddenly, “the seeing collapses,” and we find ourselves in a state of hopeless lucidity.

++++++++

A Forsaken Garden
Algernon Charles Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-birds’s song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,”
Did he whisper? “look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die—but we?”
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end -but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.

Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faithbased religion.

In place of religion, Wilson puts forth something he calls “scientific humanism”:

Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin”.

On its face, nothing could be more unobjectionable. You might wince at the smugness of that “tiny minority of the world’s population,” you might wonder why he’s so worked up about godless communism,¹ and you might sniff out an allegiance to evolutionary psychology in the phrase “guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning,” but you believe in science, don’t you?

The problem is that “scientific humanism” as a “world view” is neither scientific nor humanist. As soon as the facts about the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens are put forth as a source of values that would rival “God-centred religion and atheistic communism” they stop being scientific. (Say what you will about the permeability of facts and values, but some distinction between them is necessary for anyone who accepts the epistemological priority of science.)

What’s more, the particular science that Wilson is concerned with here—evolutionary biology—is anti-humanist by definition.² To assert a humanism you have to claim that there’s something special about humanity, something that is not merely a contingent fact of our evolutionary history (like language or “unprecedented intelligence”). Evolutionary biology has no room for such privileges. Humans may be different from zebra fish, but that difference is no more significant than the difference between zebra fish and bonobos.

That said, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with anti-humanism except for the PR-unfriendly name. It’s a serious philosophical position, and one that just might be on the right side of things. But it would be nice to see people like Wilson (and Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker) start to talk about science and its implications with some minimum degree of philosophical awareness,³ especially if they’re going to wander off their biological preserves and make claims like this:

The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

++++++++

Notes:

1/ The answer, I’m sure, has to do with Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which names Marxists, and academic Marxists in particular, as one of the groups most susceptible to the “myth of the Blank Slate.”

2/ The most common place to spot the anti-humanism of scientistic world views is in talk about the humility of science. According to the founding myth of modern science, it was only a humanist pride that kept people from recognizing the truth of a Copernicus or a Darwin. Here’s Wilson’s version:

In all of the history of science, only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth, and therefore humanity, is not the centre of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble.

It’s a matter of some annoyance that this account ignores or neglects the fact that for the Aristotelians who resisted the Copernican discovery, being at the center of the universe was a bad thing. This is why Dante put Satan at the center-point of the Earth, as far as cosmically possible from God. In Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems it is Salviati, the Copernican, who defends the nobility of the Earth, while Simplicio, the Aristotelian, accuses him of supposing that Earth, “this sink of all corruptible material,” is located “among bodies as pure as Venus and Mars.”

3/ Yes, this complaint is a common one and no, it’s not less necessary for being so.

2/ From An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” Garrett Lisi’s proposed model of the universe, which is based on the E8 geometry**:

 
* For a more serious attempt to relate Dante’s Divine Comedy to modern physics, see Mark A. Peterson’s “Dante and the 3-sphere”

** New Scientist has an article on Lisi’s theory here, and Lisi’s explanation of the theory “in terms a layman could understand” runs as follows:

Differential geometry is the study of smooth manifolds, usually in many dimensions — it’s calculus on steroids. There are ways of classifying symmetric manifolds, and this links up with all other branches of mathematics; so differential geometry is sort of a hub where a lot of mathematics comes together. Now, there is one manifold in particular — the largest simple exceptional Lie group manifold, E8 — that is the most beautiful. The system of roots in the picture I sent you describes the 248 symmetries of E8. What I’m working on is identifying each of the elementary particle fields of the standard model and gravity as one of these symmetries. It turns out that this match is… perfect, as far as I’ve been able to tell. This model is very new, and there are still things I don’t understand about it, but it looks perfect so far. You have to be very careful with these things though, as they can encounter a fatal difficulty at any turn — and when theory contradicts experiment, or requires unreasonable revision, you have to toss it and move on. But this theory of fitting all the standard model and gravitational fields into E8 is working very well so far.

When we have a nice symmetric manifold, like E8, we can mathematically describe how this shape twists and turns over the four dimensional spacetime we live in. This description is called a principal bundle, and the field describing the twists and turns is called a connection, which determines the curvature. What I’m doing is identifying all the standard model and gravitational fields (everything) as parts of an E8 principal bundle connection, and it’s working amazingly well — it appears to have all the correct fields and their interactions. Each symmetry of E8 is a different part of this connection, and each symmetry manifests itself as a different type of elementary particle that we have in our universe. When someone unifies gravity with the other fields like this, it’s called a Theory of Everything — that’s what I’m after.

According to the article, Venter and his team have built from scratch a chromosome of 381 genes for a new bacterium they’re calling Mycoplasma laboratorium. With techniques invented by Venter’s team, they’re able to insert the chromosome into living bacteria and encourage it to take over for the host’s DNA. In this way, a bacterium based entirely on Venter’s synthetic genome may be born. He has already filed a patent for the new organism.

With characteristic immodesty Venter calls the step “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species.” “We are dealing in big ideas,” he said, “We are trying to create a new value system for life.”

Venter’s rhetoric is pitched to land him back in the only place he’s ever really happy: center stage in the media spotlight. And if the Guardian article is any indication—the subhead for the article reads “Breakthrough could combat global warming”—the world’s media stands ready to help. In the coming weeks we can expect a spate of hand-wringing editorials and waxings both optimistic and dismal that will pronounce on the new science. Brave New Jurassic Park, here we come.

I don’t mean to deny that the news is significant. Like him or not, Venter is one of the most important scientists of the day. His project has invented and developed several extremely important new techniques. But it’s a mistake to consider this a discovery of epochal philosophical significance. In fact, the philosophical and ethical issues raised by Venter’s project aren’t much different than those created by Paul Berg’s discovery of recombinant DNA in the mid 1970s.

Humans have been creating new life forms for centuries—as the corn on your plate and the dog on your street attest—but using recombinant DNA freed scientists from a dependence on natural processes for that creation. Berg’s discovery made it possible to create new genetic material by combining smaller strands of DNA. With Berg’s process, however, scientists still had to depend on extant genomes for their source material. Venter’s technology allows scientists to skip that step: now they can build new DNA from the bases up.

Mention of Paul Berg gives us an opportunity to recall just how different these two men are. When Berg discovered recombinant DNA he wrote in a famous letter, “There is serious concern that some of these artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically hazardous.” He called for a voluntary moratorium on all research until a panel of scientists, physicians, and lawyers could work out the implications. The Asilomar Conference developed a series of guidelines and procedures to make sure that their creations would cause no immediate harm to human beings. When Craig Venter makes a discovery, on the other hand, he files a patent and calls a press conference.

Science aside, the most charitable thing one can say about Venter’s general orientation is that it reminds us that the myth of the humble scientist usually is just that: a myth. At worst, one can predict that the “new value system for life” that Venter wants to push is one we already know all too well, the same system that rules every other corner of our dollar-denominated lives.

We have to show [China] what Wal-Mart is showing its competitors—that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more profitable, more healthy, more innovative, more efficient, more successful.

Friedman wants to go green. He knows that the threat of global warming is real. He chastises the federal government in general, and the Bush administration in particular, for not doing enough to try to stop it.

But what Friedman, ever gleaming in his Panglossian naivete, doesn’t seem to understand is that his prescription for fighting the problem dumps us right back into the thinking that caused the problem in the first place. If the bottom line is the bottom line, if the ultimate arbiters of every political decision are economic values—profit, innovation, efficiency, success—then we leave ourselves helpless in the face of problems that can’t be—or aren’t*—adequately described in economic terms.

Friedman gives a number of economic reasons to go green, but the reason we ought to fight global warming is that we like living in a world whose climate, food production capacities, and land areas are amenable to human life. The reason, in other words, is precisely that it is “right for the world”: “right” here understood not in the sense of liberal moral piety but in what the politicians have taken to calling an “existential sense,” a survival sense.

The particular steps necessary to counter global warming may or may not make business sense; some of them will and some of them won’t and whether they do or don’t will depend in large part on what business you’re in. But while we can appreciate a recent IPCC report that estimates carbon emissions can be effectively reduced at a cost of only 0.12% of annual global economic growth, it’s a mistake to sell carbon reduction as a low-cost effort.

Going green is not a profit strategy, just as it’s not a moral virtue. It is, rather, a tactic for species survival, and that’s true regardless of whether “it is better, more profitable, more healthy, more innovative, more efficient, more successful.”

*Note: I know that there are several proposals to quantify environmental costs in the works, but these efforts have not so far proven themselves adequate to the task at hand. They may do so in the future, but even then the underlying point would remain the same: not every decision is best made in terms of efficiency and economic value.