Habits enable us to function because neurons are “conversing” with networks involving thousands of other cells. But ethicists—and courts, and poets—will be warily watching what is learned about the neural basis of choices, habits, love, and other important things. Again, do we have bodies or are we bodies? What will become of the field of psychology as explorations of brain anatomy advance our understanding of how the brain’s architecture influences, or even determines, behavior? “The devil made me do it” is, in a secular age, no longer an exculpation. But what about “My brain circuitry made me do it”? Someday debates about free will might revolve around what we are really saying when we say that we are responsible for our actions because we each have “ownership” of the three pounds of matter that is our brain. The idea that we have in our skulls “thinking matter”—indeed, that we are thinking matter—seems powerfully counterintuitive. But that is because our intuitions have been conditioned by our language, which insists that the mind and the body are distinct. This distinction is further complicated by the theological legacy of language about the immaterial soul that survives the body.
The subject of the supposed mind-body dichotomy is not just, or even primarily, for philosophers to clarify. Neuroscientists, especially, but also psychologists, anthropologists, and even theologians have long since become central to the debate. In the 1950s, the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle argued that there is no “ghost in the machine.” That idea no longer seems radical. What remain to be sorted out are questions such as these: Is what we speak of, if we do still speak of it, as the “soul” different from what we speak of as the “self,” as in “self-control,” and if so, how is it different? If the soul or the self, or both, are “embodied” or “contained” or “generated” in the bit of the body called the brain, what problems does this pose for our understanding of identity?72 Given that the working of the brain can be measured, injured, stimulated, and even manipulated—chemically, electrically, by psychiatric analysis, and by many promptings from the social environment, from advertising to political rhetoric, what does this mean for our understanding of moral agency? The concept of human dignity is indissolubly linked to the fact of human agency, which is linked to each person taking responsibility for his or her life. Humanity’s dignity derives from the fact that it is not completely determined by external promptings from its social context. It is, ultimately, undetermined because it can make choices of a sort lower animals do not make—moral choices. To understand this is to understand Hitler’s unsurpassable radicalism.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder argues that the origins of Hitler’s most radical act, the Holocaust, have been hidden in plain sight, in his speeches and Mein Kampf. Snyder convincingly portrays Hitler as much more interesting and troubling than a madman: Hitler implemented the logic of a coherent worldview. His life was a single-minded response to an idea so radical that it rejected not only the entire tradition of political philosophy but even the idea, the possibility, of philosophy. Hitler supplanted philosophy with zoology. “In Hitler’s world,” Snyder writes, “the law of the jungle was the only law.” The immutable structure of life casts the various human races as separate species. Only races are real; other supposed human differences are superficial and ephemeral. The races are locked in mutual and unassuageable enmity because life is, always and everywhere, a constant struggle over scarcities—of land, food, and other necessities. Hitler thought, however, that one group poisoned the planet with another idea. To Hitler, says Snyder, “It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves.” To Hitler, “Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.” Hitler, who did not become a German citizen until eleven months before becoming Germany’s chancellor, was not a nationalist but a racialist. Hitler, in Snyder’s analysis, insisted that “the highest goal of human beings” is not “the preservation of any given state or government, but the preservation of their kind.” And “all world-historical events are nothing more than the expression of the self-preservation drive of the races.”73 The moral of this dreadful story is that no idea can have worse consequences than Hitler’s idea that human beings lack the capacity for moral agency. If they lack it, they are like lower animals. They might be cleverer than other animals in calculating their interests, but they are no more capable than other animals of making meaningful choices about what their interests should be and how they should be pursued.
A character in a John Updike novel says, “Life, that’s what we seek in one another, even with the DNA molecule cracked and our vitality arraigned before us as a tiny Tinkertoy.”74 But the mystery of our vitality is surely not “arrayed before us.” Cracking the genetic code has not, at least not yet, removed the mystery from the fact that matter can become conscious of itself. Or from the fact that human beings have the kind of consciousness that enables them—actually, in some as yet inexplicable way it causes them—to wonder this about themselves: Given what we are, how ought we to behave? The neural basis of mind does not nullify the role of reason, and hence of free choice, which is the basis of self-governance, by individuals and polities. Yes, our brains are material things from which come thoughts and actions. Yes, promptings from our physical surroundings influence how our brains function. Yes, the mind is not an emanation of the brain, it is the brain. This, however, does not make each of us, in the words of another Updike character, “just a soft machine.”75 And none of this means that our reasoning is beyond our control, or that we are, at bottom, beyond the control of our reasoning.
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shook people’s confidence in the idea of progress and of a divinely ordained orderliness of the universe. That earthquake was an intellectually improving event, as had been Galileo’s 1610 discovery of the moons around Jupiter. The earthquake shook intellectual complacency about the benign orderliness of things. Galileo’s discovery delivered the deflating news that Earth is not the center of the universe, so this planet’s passengers are not situated in a place of cosmic preeminence. Eventually, God was written out of the human story, replaced by a process that was depicted as having as its motor a constant churning of random changes. This meant not only the erasure of Jefferson’s Creator who endowed all persons equally with certain natural rights, but also, in some interpretations, the evaporation of the idea of a settled, durable human nature.
Already science has sown enough uncertainty about the integrity and responsibility of the self to disturb legal reasoning. James Q. Wilson noted how “abuse excuse” threatens the legal system and society’s moral equilibrium.76 Genetics and neuroscience seem to suggest that self-control is more attenuated—perhaps to the vanishing point—than our legal and ethical traditions assume. The part of the brain that stimulates anger and aggression is larger in men than in women, and the part that restrains anger is smaller in men than in women. “Men,” Wilson writes, “by no choice of their own, are far more prone to violence and far less capable of self-restraint than women.”77 That does not, however, absolve violent men of blame. As Wilson says, biology and environment interact. The social environment includes moral assumptions, sometimes codified in law, concerning expectations about our duty to desire what we ought to desire. It is scientifically sensible to say that all behavior is in some sense caused. But a society that thinks scientific determination renders personal responsibility a chimera must consider it absurd not only to condemn depravity but also to praise nobility. Moral derangement, and vast political consequences, can flow from exaggerated notions of what science teaches, or can teach, about the biological and environmental roots of behavior.
“JE N’AI PAS EU BESOIN DE CETTE HYPOTHÈSE”
A remarkable intersection of politics and science was set in motion on what might have been the most momentous day in human history. On February 12, 1809, the day Lincoln was born, so was Charles Darwin. Lincoln, whose life’s mission was to reconnect the nation with the Founders’ thinking, became the most bra
ve, eloquent, and consequential proponent of the idea that human dignity inheres in the capacity of individuals to shape their lives’ trajectories by exercising their natural rights to make moral choices. Darwin, however, unleashed an idea that seemed to challenge humanity’s understanding of its dignity. His intellectual bravery took him to a difficult conclusion: The human race is continuous with the primordial slime from which it emerged. But Darwin, like Lincoln, presented a deeply satisfying picture of the way the world works, a picture that omits transcendence but that is congenial to what should be the conservative sensibility. Darwin’s idea of natural selection, when misapplied as social doctrine (Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner: “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be”), was abused, for a while, to question the equal worth of individuals and the equal capacities of races. But Darwin’s most lasting disruption was to religious thinking.78
Some theists ask, what is more difficult to believe—what is more improbable—that there is something providential in the human story or that primordial slime evolved randomly into, among other marvelous things, Lincoln? Tom Stoppard said that it may be slightly less improbable that a deity intended us, and planned our wayward path to existence, than that green slime began to change and gave rise, in time, to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Stoppard is a playwright, so perhaps he is sympathetic to an explanation that features a Playwright who purposely causes characters to come and go on the cosmic stage. Other creators of fictional worlds react differently. “What baffles me,” wrote novelist Peter De Vries, “is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial—or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.”79
In a poem celebrating his long marriage, Richard Wilbur said that his and his wife’s long love
…has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament80
There is a human impulse, so powerful and ubiquitous as to be properly termed natural, to postulate intentionality—mind—behind anything beautiful, including and especially the firmament. We want to think that beauty is somehow enhanced by having elements that denote a designer, having the quality of something that “was made,” as Huck Finn said. Darwin, however, had the courage to say goodbye to all that.
“Descended from the apes!” exclaimed the wife of the Church of England’s bishop of Worchester. “Let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”81 But with remarkable speed, the theory became widely known, and although it was not nearly as widely accepted, at least not at first, it immediately disturbed humanity’s peace of mind. It was neither the first nor last such disturbance by an idea, but it was the most profoundly unsettling. Darwin had an evidence-driven epiphany when he encountered the different but closely related species of finches on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin surmised, and subsequent scientists confirmed, that somehow the finches’ different beaks were adaptive, evolving through natural selection as changing climactic conditions changed the birds’ food supplies. Darwin was puzzled by the data and developed a theory to explain it. He brought science to bear on the project of putting humanity in its place. According to him, that place is on a continuum between man and lesser assemblages of protoplasm. Which raised this question: Just how much lesser are other creatures? And Darwin raised the possibility that, given the continuum, humanity might not be nature’s final word.
Darwin’s rejection of a premeditated design helped to validate an analogous political philosophy. Darwin believed that the existence of order in nature does not require us to postulate a divine Orderer. Similarly, the existence of a social order does not presuppose a government giving comprehensive and minute direction to the social order. Granted, government is necessary for maintaining society. So, government cannot be expelled from our understanding of society in the way that Darwin expelled God from our understanding of nature. But Darwinism opened minds to the fecundity of undirected, organic social cooperation of the sort that does most of the creating and allocating of wealth and opportunity in open societies. This is the largely spontaneous order celebrated by various thinkers from Edmund Burke to Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, the order produced by lightly governed individuals consenting to arrangements of their devising.
Darwinian postulates, when wielded by thinkers less subtle and judicious than Darwin, could become, or could seem to validate, a worldview that simultaneously encourages both fatalism and optimism. Fatalism because it postulated an autonomous process in which randomness can play a large role, and in which human agency is diminished, if not largely nullified. But also optimism because this process is said to produce progress. To such optimists, progress must be whatever is churned out by the processes of history, be they natural or social. Against the evidence of “design & beneficence,” Darwin saw “too much misery.”82 Too much misery that seemed gratuitous, as with cats that delight in torturing mice. Or that wasp, which we shall meet anon.
It is possible for people to be religious and to believe in evolution. Many do. It is not, however, as simple as some think. And Darwin himself did not manage this mental accommodation. David Quammen in his perfectly titled book The Reluctant Mr. Darwin describes Darwin in 1838, already at age twenty-nine wrestling with the question of how humanity was related to natural selection:
“It wasn’t just a matter of mockingbirds, rabbits, and skinks. It was the whole natural world. ‘But Man—wonderful Man,’ he wrote, trying out ideas on this most dangerous point, ‘is an exception.’ Then again, he added, man is clearly a mammal. He is not a deity. He possesses some of the same instincts and feelings as animals. Three lines below the first statement about man, Darwin negated it, concluding firmly that, no, ‘he is no exception.’ From that terrible insight, despite pressures and implications, Charles Darwin would never retreat.” Nor would he take refuge in the intellectual fudge that has come to be called “intelligent design.” When Darwin read a book postulating that “an Overruling Intelligence” surely directed the process of evolution, he was having none of it. Quammen says that Darwin recognized that natural selection was meaningless if some transcendent Intelligence “overruled the haphazardness of the variations, directing them toward foreordained purposes. In the margins of his copy [of Alfred Wallace’s article], Darwin scratched ‘No!!!’”83
Religion’s intellectual sheet-anchor in the nineteenth century was natural theology, which taught that if you seek proof of God’s existence and kindliness, look around at nature’s marvelous combination of complexity and predictability. Darwin’s theory of natural selection cut the anchor rope. There is, he argued, an explanation of nature’s awesome orderliness that did not need to postulate a divinity’s intentions. The Marquis de Laplace, the French mathematician and astronomer, presented a copy of his Mecanique Celeste to Napoleon who, after reading it, pointedly noted to Laplace, “You have written a large book about the universe without once mentioning the author of the universe.” Laplace replied, “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse”—“I have no need of that hypothesis.”84 Darwin’s theory displaced the hypothesis that anchored natural theology, the theory that God’s existence was written in nature’s complexity and comprehensibility. Darwin did not set out to displace the postulated God who gave the world a design and a destination. But Darwin did displace Him.
Before Darwin, many people believed that no living thing could become extinct because extinction would suggest that there had been imperfection in God’s original plan. Darwin himself said it is not illogical for religious people to try to accommodate theology and biology by postulating that God is the Great Initiator who set in motion natural selection in the hope or expectation—but not the certainty—that it would result in a world agreeable to His purposes. If, however, natural selection is to be natural rather than supernatural, God cannot have been certain about th
e outcome: God’s involvement in natural selection ends the instant it begins. But this is just another flavor of deism, and like all the others it is too watery to summon anything as robust as religious faith that compels sometimes arduous and uncomfortable behaviors.
William James defined religious faith as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”85 Just so. Reasonable atheism asserts the absence of convincing evidence—evidence that can be seen, sifted, tested—of such an order. Therefore, atheists—those without a theism—embark on the project of finding other reasons for adjusting, and adjusting to, moral rules and social norms that enable us to live in harmony with our natures and with others. Virtues are acquired human qualities that enable the individual who possesses them to achieve certain good outcomes, and the absence of which impedes such achievement. Qualities are acquired by habituation—by emulation, instruction, and, especially, immersion in social practices. This, then, is the crux of the conservative project: to advocate those practices—political, economic, and cultural—that are conducive to flourishing, understood as living virtuously.
The Conservative Sensibility Page 58