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Problems with conservative Darwinism
And, Moldbug’s commentary on Dawkins’s view of religion as a “complex of parasitic memes”
(See, further down in this thread, my response to Mencius Moldbug’s commentary on Richard Dawkins’s view of religion as a “complex of parasitic memes.”)
I repeat my admiration for Alan Roebuck’s statement of conservative Darwinism. It’s one of those clarifying ideas that rearrange our thoughts and put a subject in a new light.
At the same time, the fact that the conservative Darwinism statement helps traditional conservatives look more sympathetically at Darwinian conservatives, and perhaps helps Darwinian conservatives look more sympathetically at traditional conservatives, does not alter the problematic nature of Darwinian conservatism.
If conservative Darwinism were true, then why, e.g., would single motherhood and homosexuality be spreading? The conservative Darwinian has no conservative response to such phenomena, since whatever the Darwinian process throws up is what it throws up. Darwinian evolution does not ensure conservative values. It leads as well to a society with mass single motherhood as to a society led by traditional family values.
By contrast, the traditional conservative is not thrown by such phenomena, since he makes a distinction between what is and what ought to be. He knows that there is always sin, missing the mark, turning away from true order, and therefore the phenomenon of a society massively turning away from true order does not undercut the truth of true order. But the conservative Darwinian has no such basis on which to uphold conservative values against the actual prevalence of sin or moral disorder. Since sin has come into existence, that’s what the Darwinian process has ordered up, and there’s nothing to be said against it. Thus the very existence of mass single motherhood, homosexuality, etc. would seem to disprove conservative Darwinism.
- end of initial entry - Ken Hechtman writes:
You wrote:
If conservative Darwinism were true, then why, e.g., would single motherhood and homosexuality be spreading? The conservative Darwinian has no conservative response to such phenomena, since whatever the Darwinian process throws up is what it throws up. Darwinian evolution does not ensure conservative values. It leads as well to a society with mass single motherhood as to a society led by traditional family values.
I can answer the first half of your question from a second-year biology class I took many years ago. “Fitness” in the Darwinian sense does not mean the same thing as in does in the everyday English sense. Darwinian “fitness” refers to quantity of life. It has absolutely nothing to do with quality of life. If a girl has her first child at the age of 13 and her fifth at age 20 and then dies of a drug overdose and then her five children each have five children of their own under much the same circumstances, that satisfies the Darwinian definition of “fitness”. It’s a terrible and confusing term, but it’s the one we’re stuck with. I would expect a conservative Darwinian to look at that example and say “OK, as a Darwinian, I accept that these are the genetic traits that are better at propagating themselves whether I like them or not. As a conservative, I don’t like them.”
LA replies:
I think you’ve missed the point. Conservative Darwinists say that evolution is the sufficient source of conservative values. Obviously it is not.
Alan Roebuck writes:
Indeed, conservative Darwinism is false. Let nobody lose sight of this fact.
At the same time, tactical alliances are possible between us and them, and if a person holds some true and important views despite his premises, we ought to acknowledge and support those true views whenever possible.
Within the conservative alliance, we need to give people the freedom to express disagreements one with another on issues other than the immediate conservative goals of a properly ordered American society and the social primacy of proper conservative thinking. Otherwise, people who would be inclined to support us on at least some issues would likely hold back. A fully consistent Darwinist would not support properly conservative goals, but if his intuition is better than his premises, and if we can work with him, we should.
Happy Easter to all. The Lord is risen!
Ken Hechtman replies:
Maybe I have, because that’s just silly. If anyone seriously says that then I haven’t been following the debate as closely as I should have. I read John Derbyshire and that’s about it. “Darwinian evolution describes the origin of species” and “Conservative values describe the best way for men to live” are two completely independent propositions. Neither one is the “sufficient source” of the other. Who says different?
LA replies:
Well, there are conservatives who have adopted sociobiology, and said that conservatives should like sociobiology, because it supports the idea that there is an inherent human nature—including sex differences, including women’s focus on childraising and her dependence on her husband and thus the naturalness of patriarchy—that cannot be mucked around with by liberal social engineers. (See Steven Goldberg’s exciting book from the 1970s, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, though I think it was revised with a different title.) And there are Darwinists who consider themselves conservatives because they think that natural selection has produced stable, conservative values for mankind and therefore belief in a transcendent truth or God is not needed as a basis for conservatism. And there are now also the self-named secular right, with a website by that name, who think that scientific reason (including acceptance of Darwinism) applied to social issues is a sufficient basis to establish and maintain a conservative society.
Laura W. writes:
You’re right. The “conservative Darwinist” is in an impossible jam. No ethical system that’s utilitarian has ever inspired people in large numbers or held a society together for long. That’s all the Darwinist has to offer: pure utility. So what can he do? He feels contempt for the need of the ordinary person to find larger metaphysical meaning and receive some deeper reward for duty. Why can’t everyone be cool and rational, seeing what’s best for society and what’s inherent in human nature? He becomes a scold, a biological prude, toting around his dry facts about the logic of evolution. Who ever gave up a good time for these facts? Alas, no one will swallow his pills. [LA replies: But the conservative Darwinian would not be like that. He does not despise religion for example. He may not believe that religion is true, but he sees it as something produced by evolution that enables human societies and a decent human life to exist.]
By the way, in order for a Darwinist to accept your peace accord, I think you had better cease and desist from calling Darwinism “the greatest intellectual fraud in history.” That’s not very nice. You could call it “a scientific theory that falls short of perfection.”
LA replies:
The peace accord is based on agreement on conservative values, not on agreement on Darwinism. If it required me to delete much of my critical writings about Darwinism I think it would be a no go!
Let’s remember also that Darwinians are mainly liberal and that conservative Darwinians are a distinct minority. So conservative Darwinians recognize that they themselves are not typical and that they occupy a kind of in-between ground. Further, since Darwinism is by and large used to attack conservative values (a fact about Darwinism which I think is at least implicitly acknowledged in the Statement of Conservative Darwinism), the intelligent conservative Darwinian would not necessarily object to conservatives’ attacks on Darwinism, though I admit that my relentless attacks on the truth of Darwinism might be a problem.
Again, take the issue of religion. Darwinians are increasingly coming out of the “Inherit the Wind” closet and saying that Darwinism and God are incompatible, meaning acceptance of Darwinism requires rejection of God and religion. But conservative Darwinians respect religion as something that was created by Darwinian evolution and that makes human life work in a decent way. So their position requires them to be somewhat indirect and less thorough than the Darwinian true believers.
Laura replies:
The intelligent conservative Darwinist would not object to attacks on Darwinism, but would refrain from attacking religion. This is a very rare person. Perhaps the role model for this is Darwin himself. He did not directly attack religion in his major works (only in private correspondences) and was married to a religious woman whom he did not criticize for her views.
No, actually he wouldn’t qualify as an intelligent conservative Darwinian because he got very angry and cut people off when they attacked the logic of his theory. For most human beings, it’s hard not to feel some emotional connection to one’s basic worldview.
LA replies:
“The intelligent conservative Darwinist would not object to attacks on Darwinism, but would refrain from attacking religion. This is a very rare person.”
Well, maybe you’re right, maybe the peace accord with conservative Darwinians, outside a few, rare, individuals, is an impossible hope. It would require the Darwinian equivalent of moderate Muslims or “Muslim reformers” who recognize that parts of Islam are a problem
Ken Hechtman replies to LA’s earlier reply:
But this is ridiculous! You believe in laws of nature because the evidence supports them, not because if they were true then they’d support your values. Look, I wish human sex and power drives were malleable enough that we could cure pedophiles and serial killers. That would sit well with my liberal values. But they’re not and we can’t and that’s the way it is. I wish there was a way of generating electricity that didn’t produce expensive-to-treat-or-contain poisons. But there isn’t one that we know of. And so anything we do in that area involves managing expensive tradeoffs. That’s the way it is. Closer to your heart, many undesirable human traits probably are genetic and the cost of mapping and testing for them is going to become trivial in the next few years. I don’t like all the social implications of that but the physical world doesn’t care what I like. That’s the way it is.
LA replies:
I don’t think the conservative Darwinians believe in Darwinian evolution because it produces conservative results. They believe in Darwinian evolution because they think it is true, but they also think that Darwinian evolution has the added benefit that it produces conservative results.
However, it’s more complicated than what I’ve just said. Conservative results are not just a desideratum separate from scientific truth, a value as distinct from a fact. Conservative results—i.e., stable, functioning (and hierarchical) societies—are an actual fact of human history. If Darwinian evolution is true, and if Darwinian evolution is the source of all human things, then Darwinian evolution in order to be true must explain not just the origin of biological species but the evolution, existence, and persistence of stable human societies, including class and sex distinctions, and including the ubiquitous existence of religion. Therefore it would appear that if Darwinian evolution cannot explain the existence of conservative human values and beliefs including religion, Darwinian evolution is false. Thus, whether an individual Darwinian is a conservative or a liberal, he must find a way to make Darwinism compatible with conservatism.
Ken Hechtman replies to LA:
OK, but what if Darwinian evolution is the source of some human things but not all human things? Are these people really claiming “all”?
What if the rest is learned behavior—the logogram overriding the biogram, as Timothy Leary would have put it? And what if it’s hard to tell which is which when you’re on the inside looking out?
Myself, if I was looking to explain the ubiquitous existence of religion, I wouldn’t look to genetics and evolution to do it.
LA replies:
I think there is a range. John Derbyshire has said that Darwinian evolution is the source of all human things. Of course he’s not an authority in the field. But what about Richard Dawkins? In The God Delusion, a book devoted to demonizing and seeking the elimination of religion, Dawkins comes up with a strained theory to explain the actual ubiquitous existence of religion throughout human history. It’s that children need to have a trusting instinct toward their parents in order to grow up properly, and this trusting instinct toward authority figures then becomes the basis of religion.
So Dawkins seems to be saying that the trusting instinct is the result of Darwinian processes: children who had the trusting instinct (as a result of random mutation) would be more successful and have more offspring than children who didn’t have the trusting instinct. And then we’d have to suppose that the human groups that developed further elaborations on the trusting instinct into an entire religion, would be more successful than and would outbreed the groups that did not. So the most conservative human institution there is, the basis of all historic human societies, religion, was the result of Darwinian random change and survival of the fittest.
But then there are other Darwinians or socio-biologists, though I don’t know the specifics of their theories, who say that at the human level, once consciousness has come into existence (via Darwinian processes of course), consciousness then develops in directions of its own that are independent of biological Darwinian processes, thus explaining human civilization, religion, art, and so on. This Darwinian position is embarrassingly similar to the position of the Catholic Darwinians, who say that materialist Darwinian evolution via random mutations and natural selection explains everything up to the human stage, and then at the human stage God implanted the soul in man. [LA adds, 10-3-10: Here is one of the absurdities of the Catholic Darwinian position. In order for the human form to be “ready” for the implantation of the soul, it would have to be the complete human form that we have, with the distinct human biology and physical organs, attributes, and capabilities that we have. But according to the Catholic Darwinians, that physical human form is the result of a purposeless, naturalistic process of chance mutations plus natural selection. How could a purposeless process achieve the human form that God required as the vehicle to implant the soul? It would seem that according to the Catholic Darwinians, God did not say, “Let us create man, in our image and likeness.” No. Instead, the human physical form just happened to come into existence, by good fortune, and then God said, “Wow, cool, here is a being that is suited to receive the soul, so I will implant the soul in it.” Indeed, in the Theo-Darwinian view, God’s creation of man (or rather his merely being present at the creation of man) would seem to resemble Richard Brookhiser’s witty characterization of Progressivism: “Progress was not progress toward anything definite…. It was going with the flow, waiting in the baggage-claim area of history to see what rumbled up the belt next.”]
Mr. Hechtman’s view that genetics and evolution can’t explain the ubiquitous existence of religion is a further indication of how even non-believers, such as Mr. Hechtman, do not find in the materialist theory of Darwinism a sufficient explanation for the actual world we inhabit, and must add other, non-material factors onto materialist Darwinism to make it plausible, a phenomenon I’ve pointed out many times.
Also, on the subject of consciousness, Edward O. Wilson in a 2006 article said that he believes that consciousness came into existence as the result of Darwinian process, but admitted that we don’t know yet how this happened.
LA continues:
Also, I have yet to see Darwkins’s explanation why, if religion is the result of Darwinian evolution, he hates religion and regards religious believers as evil and dangerous. Does anyone understand this?
Ben W. writes:
Happened to see the film “Inherit the Wind” yesterday—it was shown on cable TV. This Stanley Kramer effort was laughable. I haven’t seen a choreographed piece of propaganda this funny since the old Soviet Communist film clips vaunting their agriculture showing peasant women sitting atop tractors. Subtle it wasn’t. I compared it in my mind with his “Judgment at Nuremburg” and wondered where he had left his writing and directorial skills this time. Almost every scene signals its intent a mile away like a bad piece of propaganda.
LA replies:
Whether it’s bad propaganda or not, it is indisputably one of the most influential works of propaganda—I think the single most influential work of propaganda—in modern times.
I just re-linked recently, and now I’ll relink it again, Carol Iannone’s eye opening counter-propaganda article, “The Truth About Inherit the Wind.”
Philip R. writes:
You write:
“There is an inherent human nature…that cannot be mucked around with by liberal social engineers.”
If only.
In any case, you want Darwinism to explain religion on the one hand, and single motherhood on the other. The problem is that it doesn’t. Not directly, anyhow. What is going on here is memetic evolution. Darwinian evolution explains how we got brains in which memes could survive, just as perhaps astrophysics explains how we got a planet on which life could survive. But memetic evolution is not Darwinian evolution in that it literally involves Intelligent Design. Moreover, a meme need not be adaptive in the Darwinian sense to persist. The interests of our genes and our memes may be at cross purposes.
Mencius Moldbug has discussed this extensively in “How Dawkins got pwned.” For him, liberalism is simply a dangerous, parasitic memeplex (or, “Tradition”). Presumably, Dawkins hates religion for the same reasons. I suppose unreasonable people can disagree on which of the two is more dangerous.
LA replies:
Well, this is what I need to read up on this, this “meme” business, which is obviously an extension of random variation and natural selection into the area of human society. By the way, I have never used the word “meme” at VFR and probably never will, except to respond to other peoples’ use of it and explain why I don’t use it. (See my subsequent discussion of Dawkins’s invention of the “meme.”)
You write:
you want Darwinism to explain religion on the one hand, and single motherhood on the other.
No, it is not I who want Darwinism to explain those things; Darwinism itself purports to explain those things, whether genetically or “memetically.” Meme, as I see from Mencius Moldbug’s article, is an extension of Dawkins’s idea of the selfish gene into the area of man’s mental life, or, at least, man’s external behavior. Just as the gene, according to Dawkins, is the real agent of life and evolution, occupying and exploiting organisms get them to carry it, the gene, forward, memes are the real agent of human beliefs, religions, civilizations, and social behavior patterns, occupying and exploiting human individuals and societies to get them to carry the meme forward. It’s a twisted, reductionist view of existence in which the smallest part controls the whole, and the whole is but a vast puppet serving its smallest part.
Mencius sort of explains the word “pwned” without actually defining it, without explaining how it applies to Dawkins (apparenlty we have to read the entire multi-part article to find that out), and without even telling us how it is pronounced. This disposes me badly toward him from the start.
Far worse and more serious is the contemptuous way he dismisses all notions of God or deity, yet he takes the existence of consciousness, mind, ideas, the entire world of his own thought, for granted. It doesn’t seem to occur to this genius, Mencius, that his own mental life is just as invisible to positivist scientific examination as is God, yet he expresses his complete contempt for any belief in God while indulging in and never questioning the reality of his own thoughts, which pour out of him like a waterfall. Other people’s thoughts are delusions; Mencius’ thoughts are real.
He agrees with Dawkins that religion is a “parasitic memeplex,” that is, a collection of ideas that, as I just said, has its own life and uses human beings and human society as its host to carry the meme forward, just as parasites use the bodies of their hosts to continue their own life. For Dawkins and Mencius, the highest products of mankind, the source of the highest human values, the entire basis of human life as we’ve known it, are a “parasitic memeplex,” of which man is the tool and puppet. Thus these modern thinkers adopt a stance of total superiority and disdain toward all human civilization, all human history, everything man has been and achieved, while also, at least in Mencius’ case, using highly obscure language and terminology divorced from ordinary human reason and experience. These gnostic seers “see” through what human civilization “really” is, which ordinary human beings never see. Essentially the entire content of ordinary human existence for the last ten thousand years has been a vast structure of delusion, and only Dawkins and Mencius see it for what it really is.
While I don’t have the patience to follow Mencius through every twist and turn of his self-indulgent argument, I do get his basic idea, that he’s constructing a paradigmatic parasitic meme, and then saying that Christianity perfectly fits that paradigm.
He writes:
First, a parasitic meme is not even parasitic if it is not delusional. It must contain some assertion which is alien to reason, which no sensible person would independently invent. The “God delusion”—a metaphysical construct, like Russell’s teapot, with no basis in reality—is a perfect example.
How can a delusion be, on its own, adaptive? Very easily. A delusion is a perfect organizing principle for any kind of political movement. By accepting some body of nonsensical doxology, you demonstrate your loyalty to the group. The result is cohesive collective action. As we’ll see, most forms of parasitic morbidity involve a political step in the replication cycle.
So Mencius regards God not just as untrue, but as a notion so bizarre and baseless that there is no reason for any sensible person ever to believe in a God. Virtually all human beings that have ever lived up to the modern period, and all societies up to the modern period, have believed in a deity in some form, but, according to Mencius, there was no more reason for them to believe in a deity than there is, say, for people to believe that President Bush was behind the 9/11 attack. It’s nothing but a baseless, absurd fantasy.
Mencius is an intellectual barbarian to say something like this, and I’ve lost all respect for him. As I’ve said many times, a person can be an agnostic or atheist and still be a conservative if he respects religion or at least accepts its role in society and refrains from despising it. But an atheist who vocally despises religion and describes religious believers as inferiors suffering from some mental defect, is not a conservative but a declared enemy of conservatism.
Mencius writes about Dawkins:
In the first chapter of The God Delusion, Professor Dawkins describes himself as “a deeply religious non-believer.” He calls his belief system “Einsteinian religion,” and waxes poetical as follows:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”
This is perfect proof of what I’m always saying, that these atheist materialist Darwinians such as Dawkins cannot live without transcendence, and keep trying to sneak it in to their materialist world view, which by definition radically denies the possibility of transcendence.
So, who is the parasite here? Dawkins is the parasite, and not only a parasite, but an evil, ungrateful parasite, despising his host. He is a parasite on Christianity, describing it in the most hateful terms imaginable, seeking to destroy it, even as he parasitically lives off the sense of transcendence that he would not have were he not a product of Christian society.
In any case, Mencius’s main disagreement with Dawkins appears to be not with Dawkins’s statement that religions are parasitic memes, but with Dawkins’s obsession that present day American evangelical Christianity is a particularly virulent and dangerous meme, a grave threat to civilization. He agrees with Dawkins’s overall gnostic and deeply anti-human world view, he simply disagrees with Dawkins’s particular bugaboo about American evangelicals.
Finally, you write:
For [Mencius], liberalism is simply a dangerous, parasitic memeplex (or, “Tradition”). Presumably, Dawkins hates religion for the same reasons. I suppose unreasonable people can disagree on which of the two is more dangerous.
You’re implying that Mencius does not see religious as a parasitic memeplex, that he sees liberalism that way, while Dawkins sees religion that way. This is not correct. At the beginning of the article, Mencius writes:
Professor Dawkins’ explanation of religion, with which I agree completely [italics added], is that religion is a memeplex built around a central delusion, the God meme—an entirely unsubstantiated proposition.
To the contrary, we know that the invisible and scientifically “unsubstantiated” God exists, by the same means that we know that Mencius Moldbug’s invisible and scientifically “unsubstantiated” consciousness exists: the existence of the invisible God is known through his expression of himself, the visible universe, just as the existence of Mencius’ invisible mind is known through its expression of itself, a Niagara of high-IQ, overcharged b.s.
There are people who are too clever by half. Mencius is too clever by about 400 percent.
April 12
Philip R. replies to LA:
You wrote:
he’s constructing an ideal parasitic meme, and then saying that Christianity perfectly fits that ideal.
Actually, he’s saying that modern liberalism fits that ideal. He connects modern liberalism to a detheologized Christianity, and, interestingly enough, a version of Christianity which a commenter argues amounts to abandoning Christianity for gnosticism (Mencius seems to agree, or at least trust the commenter’s judgment).
You’re implying that Mencius does not see religion as a parasitic memeplex, that he sees liberalism that way, while Dawkins sees religion that way.
What I meant was that both of them see both as parasitic memeplexes, but Mencius sees Christianity as between fairly benign and symbiotic, and liberalism as dangerous, whereas Dawkins has it the other way around.
Interestingly, Mencius did say recently “sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God.”
LA replies:
To repeat, Mencius said that he agrees completely with Dawkins’s explanation of religion, that religion is a delusional parasite. Your addition that Mencius happens to be less hostile to this delusional parasite than the rabid bigot Dawkins is hardly a defense of Mencius’s position.
As for Mencius’ saying he regrets his inability to believe in God, for a person to pronounce, as Mencius has, that God is a notion “with no basis in reality,” a notion “alien to reason,” a notion that “no sensible person” could ever believe, and then to turn around and say that he regrets his own inability to believe in God, meaning that he, Mencius, WANTS to believe in something that he himself says has no basis in reality and that no sensible person could believe, renders him utterly ridiculous. But this is what happens to people who don’t believe in truth. They think that anything can be true.
Once, in a group e-mail with several people about God and Darwinian evolution, I was arguing that if God guides evolution then the genetic mutations could not be random, and therefore God and Darwinian evolution are mutually incompatible. A non-believing correspondent insisted that God could do anything, including directing random mutations toward an end. For example, God could make two plus two equal five. The correspondent held to this assertion despite all opposition. He didn’t believe in God, yet he thought that God could make two plus two equal five. That’s what happens to people who don’t believe in truth. They think that anything can be true.
LA writes:
But how does the discussion of Dawkins and Mencius Moldbug relate to the original topic of this thread, whether Darwinism can be compatible with conservatism?
Dawkins extends the Darwinian processes of biological evolution into the evolution of human society, via the “meme,” an idea or belief that is selected and propagated much as a gene is. And Dawkins sees religion—which is both the basis and the largest creation of historic human society—as a parasitic complex of delusional memes that exists for no purpose but to propagate itself.
Now let’s refer back to the statement of conservative Darwinism:
[It is my belief that human morality] is the product of a long process of natural selection; that the human feelings of right and wrong, of moral obligation and duty, of fair dealing and proper behavior as a member of society, are the result of dearly bought, deeply tested, and carefully refined discoveries of our species over millions of years, and of our cultural forebears over the course of millennia. Our basic moral notions are thus grounded in and fitted to physical reality, in the same way that our sensations of vision and hearing are grounded in and fitted to physical reality. In this sense they are objective, and therefore authoritative. For these reasons I believe that traditional mores are not to be jettisoned lightly. Rather, it is prudent to conserve them as our default responses to changing situations. That is why I am a conservative.
… Therefore, as a conservative Darwinist, I stand wholeheartedly with any person fighting for the conservative goal of a properly ordered American society in which traditional ways and thought are paramount…
Obviously the notion that the religious and moral systems of mankind are delusional parasitic memeplexes that exist for no purpose but to propagate themselves and that exploit human societies parasitically for that purpose, is not compatible with conservatism, which says that our basic moral notions are fitted to and grounded in objective reality. According to Dawkins, there is no connection between the memes of a religious/moral system and objective reality, except for the memeplex’s success at surviving; and its success at surviving, moreover, has nothing to do with the moral good and other goods of the host society, which, again, the memeplex is only occupying and exploiting as a parasite occupies and exploits its host organism.
This doesn’t mean that a conservative Darwinism is impossible. But clearly the thinker who is best known for having applied Darwinian processes to the evolution of human society is radically anti-conservative.
Philip R. replies to LA:
You write:
“Your addition that Mencius happens to be less hostile to this delusional parasite than the rabid bigot Dawkins is hardly a defense of Mencius’s position.”
I agree completely. Basically what I meant was that you shouldn’t hate him the way you hate Dawkins. Dawkins is the sort of atheist who is your enemy. Mencius is the sort you can probably stand to share a country with.
“he, Mencius, WANTS to believe in something that he himself says has no basis in reality and that no sensible person could believe, renders him utterly ridiculous. But this is what happens to people who don’t believe in truth. They think that anything can be true.”
I don’t presume to explain what’s going on in his head here. Note, however, that there is nearly a two-year gap between the two essays in question. Perhaps his views have changed.
“Once, in a group e-mail with several people about God and Darwinian evolution, I was arguing that if God guides evolution then the genetic mutations could not be random, and therefore God and Darwinian evolution are mutually incompatible. A non-believing correspondent insisted that God could do anything, including directing random mutations toward an end.”
I think there’s something a bit off with both of your views of randomness (his are worse though). But this is a topic for another time. I do agree with your fundamental “People who believe in nothing end up believing in anything” point.
Philip R. writes:
I think that describing culture as a parasite which exists for no purpose other than to propagate is a little strong, however. After all, on this view, we still create and sustain it. The thing is, if it doesn’t propagate, if it in fact allows enemy parasites to colonize its hosts, it will die out. And this has nothing to do with whether it is a good parasite or a bad one.
Regardless of how seriously you think we ought to take this viewpoint (I’m guessing not at all), I think the take-home value is that we ought to be on guard against excessive faith that the truth will win out.
Being right is certainly an advantage, but it’s not enough to guarantee victory. Especially if there’s no depths your enemies won’t stoop to.
LA replies:
You write:
“I think that describing culture as a parasite which exists for no purpose other than to propagate is a little strong, however. After all, on this view, we still create and sustain it.”
I’m still trying to figure that out. But if we’re dealing here with “the selfish memeplex,” then that is what it’s all about isn’t it?
Even if the society gains some benefits from the parasite, that is not the parasite’s purpose. The parasite has no purpose other than to propagate.
However, it doesn’t even have that purpose. As I’ve pointed out many times, there is no purpose in Darwinian evolution. Genes only exist because their ancestors, as a result of chance random mutations, encoded features that made them effective at propagating, so the present genes have those same features. They do not have the purpose to propagate; they have no choice to be good at propagating. they are determined by heredity to be good at propagating. And the same would apply to memes, at least as described by Mencius in his article. Memes and memeplexes have no purpose. The memes exist because by chance they happen to be good at propagating, period. That’s all there is to it.
Evolutionary writers constantly attribute purpose to genes, organisms, and species (and now memes), but they have absolutely no basis for doing this, according to evolutionary theory itself.
Kristor writes:
You write,
Obviously the notion that the religious and moral systems of mankind are delusional parasitic memeplexes that exist for no purpose but to propagate themselves and that exploit human societies parasitically for that purpose, is not compatible with conservatism, which says that our basic moral notions are fitted to and grounded in objective reality. According to Dawkins, there is no connection between the memes of a religious/moral system and objective reality, except for the memeplex’s success at surviving; and its success at surviving, moreover, has nothing to do with the moral good and other goods of the host society, which, again, the memeplex is only occupying and exploiting as a parasite occupies and exploits its host organism.
But Dawkins is wrong about memes when he argues that there is no connection between memes and objective reality, except for the memeplex’s success at surviving. That would only be true of memes that were totally trivial, like an advertising jingle. But for any non-trivial memeplex, its success at surviving is totally dependent upon its agreement with objective reality, and with the real likelihood of success of the behaviors it amplifies. Any non-trivial meme is going to be a factor in practical decisions, which are going to result in greater or lesser reproductive success (I know, I know: “success” can’t really have any meaning in Darwinism, despite its reliance thereupon; but let’s hold our fire on that one for a moment) of the carriers of the memeplex. Thus the feedback from objective reality too the survival of the memeplex is relatively tight.
Delusion is a really bad way to run one’s life. Memes that are false harm their hosts.
Dawkins is really saying only that he thinks religion is a delusion. He is an atheist. But atheism is a religious doctrine. “There is no God,” is an unfounded belief, for it cannot be proved true. Thus, to say that religion is a delusion is to say that atheism is a delusion. So if Dawkins is right that religion is a delusion, then he is delusional.
The notion that memes—but let’s just call them by the name we have always used for them, shall we?—the notion that ideas compete with each other and have no relation to fact is not new. It’s called sophistry. Dawkins is the latest in a long line of sophists, who have said ever since Periclean Athens that it doesn’t matter whether what one believes is true, but rather that the only thing that matters is success.
Sean R. writes:
I’d like to address your post about conservative Darwinism.
You said:
“If conservative Darwinism were true, then why, e.g., would single motherhood and homosexuality be spreading? The conservative Darwinian has no conservative response to such phenomena, since whatever the Darwinian process throws up is what it throws up. Darwinian evolution does not ensure conservative values. It leads as well to a society with mass single motherhood as to a society led by traditional family values.”
Darwinism provides only an “is,” not an “ought.” You have to get your “oughts” somewhere else. There are lots of things that nature throws up that Darwinists, liberal or conservative, have no problem resisting. Blacks have evolved sickle cells to fight malaria, but nobody wants to just accept that as evolution’s blessing. We have violent drives, but nobody says that means they shouldn’t be controlled. We’re obese because we evolved in conditions in which high-calorie food was not readily available, but no Darwinist claims that we should just chow down and enjoy it. We’ve eliminated or modified all sorts of plants or animals in ways that nature never intended.
So, why would single motherhood or homosexuality spread? In general, Darwinism does not guarantee that harmful mutations (here applied to memes more than genes) can’t occur—it just says that the ones that don’t work get culled. More specifically, due to the wealth of modern society and the breakdown of old institutions, we are no longer constrained by the fact that previous generations faced, which is that bastards mostly ended up dead. If you look at total fertility rates, it’s the conservative religious folks, not the liberal feminists and most definitely not the homosexuals, who are doing most of the reproducing, so this will self-correct at some point. I expect that, centuries hence, feminism will be gone one way or another, and the 20th/21st centuries will be seen as an era of madness.
Why should it be opposed? Because, in the meantime, the result of single motherhood is a bunch of cads pumping and dumping women, resulting in kids who are improperly raised by single mothers, and who were naturally selected for caddishness. This “family” then votes for a bigger state/husband to pilfer the wealth of others (such as the aforementioned conservative religious folk). This reasoning lacks the heft of an injunction from God, but it’ll do for some people, including some who don’t believe in God. On the other hand, some Darwinists see the same thing and think it’s just great (see cad blogger Roissy or anybody who thinks that we should be more like Sweden). Like I said, Darwinism provides an “is,” not an “ought.”
In general, the “oughts” come from common sense or natural drives rather than from Darwinism itself. I would like my children or grandchildren to inherit a world that I would want to live in rather than a smoking ruin or a third-world cesspool, but Darwinism doesn’t require that I want that. It just points to reasons that certain courses of actions—like importing lots of low-IQ aliens—might lead to one result or another.
And I would like to stress that a fair number of non-believing Darwinists are far more positive towards religion than Dawkins, Harris and crew are. We’re just not as vocal as they are.
LA replies:
The main idea of this comment is that Darwinism does not supply conservative values and does not claim to. But, as I said previously, since conservative societies are a fact of human history, Darwinism has to account for them. It’s not a matter of an “ought”; it’s a matter of an “is.” If Darwinism cannot account for the existence of conservative societies, it fails. At the same time, we cannot rely on Darwinism to produce conservative results since the Darwinian process also throws up societies of goons on welfare—not forever, but long enough to destroy civilized society.
April 13
Ian B. writes:
Philip R. says:
What is going on here is memetic evolution. Darwinian evolution explains how we got brains in which memes could survive, just as perhaps astrophysics explains how we got a planet on which life could survive. But memetic evolution is not Darwinian evolution in that it literally involves Intelligent Design.
Actually, “memes” do not involve Intelligent Design. That’s the whole point of them. Dawkins came up with the meme concept precisely to remove intentionality and rational thought even from our thoughts themselves—to explain the mind as mindless.
That’s the whole difference between “memes” and beliefs: Beliefs are formed (at least partially) by a central, rational self, which decides its beliefs based on reasons, whereas memes supposedly infect brains in mindless fashion, with no centralized control (indeed, Darwinian “memologists” sometimes posit that the “self” itself is a meme-plex).
Of course, memologists think that their own beliefs are formed rationally. It’s just everybody else that’s a passive meme-bot. That’s why the whole meme thing is such a farce. In practice, it’s just a polemic to be used against people who disagree with the materialist making it, not anything approaching a coherent theory.
If Philip R believes that intelligent design is involved in belief-forming, then he ought to call beliefs “beliefs,” not “memes.” Memes don’t exist. They’re even further from existing than Santa Clause. At least the concept of Santa is coherent.
LA replies:
Thank you very much for this. Your comment really clarifies the issue.
Ian B. continues:
Sean R. says:
Darwinism provides only an “is,” not an “ought.” You have to get your “oughts” somewhere else. There are lots of things that nature throws up that Darwinists, liberal or conservative, have no problem resisting.
The problem with this is that Darwinism doesn’t merely lack the ability to provide “oughts.” It also denies the foundation for deriving “oughts” (that we were created for a purpose), and it replaces it with nothing.
The implication of Darwinism, then, is not that we must look elsewhere for our “oughts,” but that there is nowhere else to look, because objective “oughts” do not exist—only subjective preferences, which are not actually “oughts” at all. Thus, the conservative Darwinist cannot legitimately say that the liberal way of arranging society is wrong, and that his is better, but only that he prefers a certain way. Sean implicitly admits as much when he gives an account of his “oughts”: “I would like my children or grandchildren … “
Also, common sense and natural drives are both “is-es” as well, not “oughts.” It’s a bare fact that my common sense and/or natural drives result in me having particular preferences. That doesn’t imply an “ought” any more than Darwinism does.
Ian B. continues:
By the way, all this talk of memes, rationality, and Darwinian conservatism has got me thinking about something that I had meant to write to you about a couple weeks ago, but didn’t get around to doing.
I was browsing at National Review, and found an article by John Derbyshire, wherein he bemoaned the post-modernism of the universities, and the concomitant denial of objective truth that goes with it, because it was a hindrance to science, and in particular the facts (and “facts”) being shown by the “human sciences” (by which Derb means evolutionary psychology).
Then, on the same day, he linked approvingly to an article on an atheist physicist’s site that argued that there is no such thing as the self (based, of course, on reductionist Darwinian premises), calling the philosophy “deep.”
I had to chuckle. Where the devil does he think that the post-modernism he despises is coming from? The Pope?!
If our very selves, the subject of our most foundational intuitions, the premise from which all our other rational intuitions and reasoning proceeds, is deemed to be a mere illusion, then why on earth are we to supposed to continue believing in objective truth and the validity of empirical reasoning? How can any sane person think that he can radically deconstruct the most basic elements of our rational mental life, and expect everything else to come out unscathed? It’s absurd!
The evo-psychers are sawing off the branch they’re sitting on, even as they loudly protest their lack of support. It’s hilarious. They deserve to lie in the bed they’ve made.
The real tragedy isn’t that the evo-psychers are being spurned by the very post-modernists they have helped to empower. No, that part is well-deserved. The tragedy is that some genuine kernels of human knowledge are being thrown out with the reductionist philosophical garbage that the evo-psychers have disguised as science. And they bear as much responsibility for that as the post-modernists do.
Alan Roebuck writes:
Looking at Ian B.’s comments about memes and Darwinism generally, it strikes me that most important words now have two meanings: the Darwinist/Secular/liberal meaning, and the correct meaning. Thus “meme” to a Darwinist means “the mental equivalent of a gene, randomly propagated via mental Darwinism,” whereas the actual meaning, that is, the real-world entity to which people refer when they speak of “meme” is: an idea.
No wonder people are so confused: whenever we want to speak of important things, we must first clear away the intellectual underbrush that surrounds and obscures anything worth knowing, and then we constantly have to be on our guard against the illegitimate use of ideas. And the authorities rarely attempt to clarify the understanding of words because to do so would be to threaten liberalism. Not only that, but most of the people we converse with (outside of islands of relative sanity such as VFR) are either unaware of the underbrush, or else they love the weeds and will resist our attempts to clear the land.
Orwell was right: our first duty is to restate (and defend) the obvious.
LA replies:
Important insight. Yes to everything you’re saying, except that in this case I think the famous Orwell saying is less apropos than another, perhaps less famous, saying by Confucius via Irving Babbitt, that our first duty is to define the words we are using:
Confucius, when asked what would be his first concern if the reins of government were put into his hands, replied that his first concern would be to define his terms and make words correspond with things.
Consider how, when I discuss Darwinian evolution, I constantly repeat the definition of the term, to make sure readers know what I’m talking about. Otherwise they will think I mean something else. And this is more true in the area of evolution than any other, because Darwinists constantly alternate between using “evolution” to mean generic evolution, i.e., the fact that different life forms have succeeded each other on earth, and using “evolution” to mean the Darwinian theory of how evolution occurred. Thus, in Jerry Coyne’s recent book, “Why Evolution is True,” he states that “evolution” has been absolutely and overwhelmingly proven and no sane person can doubt it. What he’s actually talking about is generic evolution, about which indeed there is no controversy; but he wants his readers to think he means the Darwinian explanation of evolution, about which there are enormous unresolved questions.
Because virtually ALL participants in the evolution debate either actively practice or are passively prey to this inconsistent, dishonest, and delusive use of words, meaningful and honest discussion requires constant repetition of the definition of terms.
April 14
Sean R. writes:
Ian B. writes:
“[Darwinism] also denies the foundation for deriving “oughts” (that we were created for a purpose), and it replaces it with nothing … because objective “oughts” do not exist—only subjective preferences, which are not actually “oughts” at all.”
He’s right that Darwinism doesn’t provide objective reason to do anything. But neither does secular liberalism, and that hasn’t stopped it from crushing everything in its path. If there’s nothing other than subjective preferences, than subjective preferences are enough to determine what we do, and in practice secular people are just as vehement about their subjective preferences as religious people are about their injunctions handed down by God.
Frankly, I and most secular people don’t find the claims of Christianity credible, and it’s not really in the running for a lot of us. The fact of the matter is that I was a liberal before I got into this Darwinism thing, and now I’m not. I now probably favor 90 percent of what the trad crowd favors. I remember going to vote for gay marriage four years ago, but now I wouldn’t do that, so surely this must be an improvement from your perspective.
On another note, about memes, here’s the passage from The Selfish Gene where Dawkins coined the term, which may contribute something to the discussion.
LA replies:
I don’t think that secular liberalism formally states that there’s nothing other than subjective preferences. Or, rather, secular liberalism states that idea only when it is undermining traditional beliefs and practices. When it is asserting its own ideals and agendas, it says that certain things are right and good and that the opposite things are evil.
In fact, this contradiction does not only occur between different statements made at different times; it is built into the same statements.
Take this infamous passage in the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
At the heart of liberty [i.e. the liberty protected by the 14th amendment] is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
On one hand, the Court is saying that subjective preferences rule; everyone defines truth and good and bad the way he wants, and no state can infringe on this right. On the other hand, the Court is issuing this declaration of the supremacy of subjective moral preferences in the form of an authoritative statement binding on everyone. Thus the Court is simultaneously saying (1) that there is no universal or common truth, everyone has his own truth, and (2) that the idea that there is no universal or common truth is UNIVERSALLY TRUE AND BINDING ON EVERYONE.
Of course, the two statements contradict each other and no one has the right to indulge in such contradictions. But the contradiction is at the heart of liberalism and liberals will continue to indulge in it until they are dissuaded by non-liberal truth.
All of which is a long way of replying to your point that liberalism like Darwinism is not a set of oughts. I would disagree. Darwinism is not a set of oughts. Liberalism is.
Also, I appreciate your point about becoming non-liberal without becoming Christian, which is fuel for our “conservative Darwinism” discussion.
And thank you very much for the link to the Google books version of The Selfish Gene. Using some of the text, I did a Google search and found an html version of chapter 11 of the book where that passage occurs, and have posted a new entry quoting it.
Ian B. writes:
Sean R. apparently agrees with my assessment that Darwinism destroys any foundation for deriving moral “oughts,” in addition to providing none of its own. The best he can say is that after getting into Darwinism, he personally favors “90 percent of what the trad crowd favors,” not that this way is actually correct. [LA replies: Sean didn’t say he personally favors, he said he “probably” favors.]
He also says that “If there’s nothing other than subjective preferences, then subjective preferences are enough to determine what we do.” Note: subjective preferences determine what we do, not what we ought to do. This is another way of saying that there is no “ought,” but only “is.”
Now, let me explain why this is fatal to the conservative position. If there is no objective morality, but only competing preferences, then all moral claims are merely expressions of power. When I say that gay marriage is wrong, for instance, I am not referring to any objective fact, accessible by reason. I am merely trying to impose my preference on others by an expression of power.
You might recognize that claim. It is, of course, the underpinning of radical leftism, and echoes Marx. It is nihilism. Once you’ve accepted it, all possibility of rational discussion over the proper ordering of society is out the door. Sean R. cannot rationally argue to a liberal Darwinist that gay marriage is wrong. He can merely say, “I don’t like a society with gay marriage,” to which the liberal can simply reply “Well, I do.”
This is a losing proposition. Perhaps Sean thinks that in a power contest of Darwinian wills, his preferences will win the day. This is a pipe dream. While Sean might have become right-leaning after getting into Darwinism, he is the exception that proves the rule. As you have noted, the correlation between Darwinism and liberalism is very strong. The fact is, contrary to Darwinian expectations, people do not, once shorn of all belief in objective moral claims, naturally revert to reproduction, and to trying to ensure a bright future for the survival their offspring. Instead, they fall into hedonism—into justifying and gratifying their immediate whims and urges, with nary a thought about tomorrow. Crime and discontent escalate and fertility dwindles. This is an observable recurring fact of human history, and you can see it all around you now in the West. [LA replies: that’s a great point that I’m not aware anyone has made before. If, as Darwinism tells us, reproduction is the index of a successful species or society, then why is it that in the societies where Darwinism and atheism have become most widespread, marriage, reproduction, and belief in the future have plummeted? Look at how England, the home of Darwin and the most atheistic society on earth, has become the most decadent society on earth. By the lights of Darwinism itself, how can Darwinism be true, let alone desirable as a belief system, if widespread acceptance of Darwinism leads rapidly to extinction?]
While Darwinian conservatives can be helpful as a vote in forming a consensus, I just don’t think they can ever be any help in articulating a conservative worldview, since all they can do is express it as a series of biases and wants to compete with liberal ones. And the liberal ones will always win in such a match-up.
LA replies:
I was not satisfied with my reply to Sean, which dealt with a side issue, and I felt I was not understanding his main point. Ian has understood it and has replied to it very well.
Kristor writes:
Ian B. has nailed it when he says that under Darwinism, all moral claims are merely expressions of power. I said as much in my first “jawbone of an ass” comment in the long and contentious thread over at Secular Right back in February, which you cross-posted:
… if God doesn’t exist, then nowhere is there perfect knowledge. If no one has perfect knowledge, then no one knows perfectly what is good. But if no one truly knows the Good, then in effect it just doesn’t exist. Instead, all goodness is merely subjective—i.e., illusory. In that case, the contest between socialism and capitalism, or between the West and Islam, are just “he said she said.” No one is right, except in their own illusions. If no one is right, there is no intersubjective justification for any given social outcome; no Justice out there to be had. In that case, what can it matter—what can it matter really, that is, outside your own head—whether you live or die, or your children live or die, or whether your country lives or dies? It can’t. In that case, all society is just a power play, an amoral grab for utility, and nothing more, nothing more whatsoever.
I made the same point at VFR in a comment a year ago:
… atheist metaphysics inevitably gives rise to a moral philosophy founded on power, and nothing more. If morality is in no sense transcendent to my own preferences, so that it is not at all a problem for the world at large if those preferences run my behavior absolutely unchecked, then all other persons are reduced to nothing more than means to my ends, and I may use or abuse them as I wish. Take away morality and all that’s left is struggle.
Not only that, but the struggle is pointless and unmotivated, to boot.
However, the Darwinian Conservative can argue rightly that in a struggle for power, traditional societies will surpass libertine societies. They reproduce more, and they are more self-confident. Ditto for devout societies versus irreligious societies. In a message to you of about a week ago, which I don’t think was posted, I said:
The Darwinist Conservative could always respond to the spread of homosexuality, bastardy &c. by pointing out that errors, bad policies, maladaptations, can of course spread and propagate for some time before they are finally corrected by a massive die-off. Particularly so, when the local base of resources is rich, as is the case in lands that enjoy the patrimony of the West. Lots of room for deviance in the West, because we are so wealthy; not much selection pressure. Let too much of the non-West into the West, and that would of course change. So, in a way, what we see going on with the moral collapse of the West and the immense immigration of non-Western peoples may be a process of equilibration; of correction back toward the human mean from a local apogee of wealth.
But what the Conservative Darwinist will indeed have trouble doing is articulating precisely why, on strict Darwinist terms, social deviancy can really be characterized as “erroneous,” “bad” policy, “mal”-adaptive. Under strict Darwinism, there is no error; there is only random variation.
The interesting thing to me about Darwinist Conservatism is that it does indeed go ahead and label moral error as such, on the basis of the fact that such things as homosexuality and bastardy fairly obviously reduce the reproductive success of a population vis-a-vis its competitors. That is to say, that it takes reproductive success to be a “good” thing. It takes life to be a “good” thing. And I feel sure that most Darwinian conservatives do feel in their hearts that life is not just “good”—“good for us because we are wired by evolution to prize it”—but also really in fact good, good without equivocation. If they did not feel this way, they would have no problem with modernity.
They have realized, in other words (at least in their hearts) that it would be extremely unlikely that evolution would have discovered that life is to be prized unless it were objectively true that life is to be prized. Just as Darwinian evolution discovered that visible light generally conveys really true and valuable information about the relative solidity of different parts of the local environment, making photosensitivity a useful adaptation, so likewise the conscience is a useful adaptation because it apprehends moral realities, apprehends true information about the relative goodness of the various options for action open to an organism—of the various parts of its moral environment.
Kristor explains the above comment:
The only reason I sent this is that I feel very strongly about this necessary devolution of all morality, under an atheist worldview, to a sheer struggle for power. It turns every nook and cranny of the discourse of the family of man into “nature red in tooth and claw.” I was really happy to see Ian hitting that same theme, and wanted to emphasize it, because I think it is important. This because it is one of those things it is not really possible to believe in practice. Meaning it is certainly false. The baseline for humans is society—is love. Almost all of us love at least a few people quite deeply. I would instantly and gladly choose death to save one of my children. Atheism and Darwinism say that, in absolute terms, such sacrifice is the moral equivalent of killing the children of other men. [LA comments: I think what Kristor means is that from the point of view of Darwinism, dying for one’s children helps advance one’s genes, and killing the children of other men also helps advance one’s genes. Therefore both actions, so utterly different from the human point of view, are equally advantageous and equally “good” from the Darwinian point of view.] Nobody can live and really believe that, I think. So this consequence of Darwinism is one of those immense cognitive dissonances of that doctrine with life as really lived, life as really felt, for Darwinists generally, but in particular for conservative Darwinists. And I want to heighten that dissonance for them, so that some of them may be converted.
LA replies:
Kristor’s point that dying for one’s children and killing the children of other men are morally equivalent in Darwinism dramatically illustrates what reductionism really does, how it removes the very possibility of moral, human meaning from the world.
But that’s never the end of the story, is it? Because the Darwinists, such as Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, immediately turn around and start asserting all kinds of delectable meanings that they profess to find in life, It’s nihilism with a happy face—nihilism that has no right to that happy face.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2009 10:05 AM | Send
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