updated 28.08
Andrew Brown, in the Guardian, on Robert Trivers:
"Of course the idea that we have moral sentiments because they are useful and profitable seems to many people to misunderstand or deny the nature of morality. The whole point of altruistic behaviour is that we do it without thought of reward - sometimes, without any thought at all, as when rescuing people from drowning, or pulling them back from an oncoming car. There are less dramatic examples, however, which include sharing food, helping the sick, the very young, and the old, even when we are not related to them, and sharing tools and knowledge. All these are nearly universal human habits; in fact we describe societies where they don't happen as inhuman."-
The genetic basis of "reciprocal altruism" seems indisputable to me - the genetic basis of pretty much everything we recognize as human makes sense.
But what genes are in most people's minds is just chemistry - linked-up molecules doing the inevitable. So that the picture is of a really complex chemical reaction, nothing more. But that doesn't seem complete.
The looming possibility of laboratory-created life, from protein strings to animated behavior - in experiments performed by disinterested and amoral(in the sense there's no ethical context other than the pursuit and attainment of knowledge) scientists - makes that picture appear even more accurate.
There's nothing down there but inanimate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Life is dead.
It took a long time for people to get ahold of the complexities of interdependence and the possibility of speaking of health and unhealth in what we now call eco-systems.
Until really recently individual species were seen as entirely separate from each other, and consequently removable and replaceable, the larger web they lived and moved in being nothing more than landscape, a growth medium.
We also thought that the sky and the sea were so vast and empty that they could hold whatever poisons we dumped into them.
That blindness was a result of our awareness of things starting from the zero of the self and moving outward, solely advancing by the provable and demonstrable.
The inability of people with other ways of seeing things, other consciousnesses - other cultures whose regard for the world around them was rooted in that interdependence and reverent of it - to withstand the onslaught of those whose view of the natural world was antagonistic, meant that their ways of being were discounted and ridiculed as primitive. Yet what science itself has taught us is that in some crucial ways they were right.
They lost the struggle against a superior physical power, therefore their spiritual power was inconsequential. We won the struggle, therefore our spiritual power, or the power of our denial of the existence of anything that could be called spiritual, is superior.
But the world's on fire.
There was something back there that warned of this, and we shoved it aside.
The explanations Trivers presents make sense, but again we're learning about things starting from the self, from not knowing. We didn't know, then we learned, now we know more. It's a linear expansion that begins at the point of the self. The assumed point of the self.
The assumption, the conceit, is that nothing can be said to exist until its existence is proven. This puts the processing intelligence at the center of everything. It's the apotheosis of selfishness. Traditionally, that's the Satanic position.
Saying there are spirits in the forest who will be angered and grieving if the trees are cut down is ridiculed by the same culture that allows ungoverned - or self-governed, which is the same thing - and indiscriminate tinkering with anything, including the source-code of life itself.
At the same time that culture allows the folktales of creationism and the unprovable metaphysic of Intelligent Design an equal place at the table with rational scepticism. No tree worship, but lots of monotheism.
I could easily be criticized for saying that we should abandon science altogether and live in the woods and worship trees. I'm not saying anything like that.
What I'm saying is the backwash of our mistakes is no longer trivial enough to be accounted as the price of doing business, and there were voices that spoke to that that were silenced.
Along with the explanations of our behavior as genetically driven comes an unacknowledged ignorance of what those genes are, beyond their chemistry. And that's too close to the ignorance that allowed us to do all this damage to the world that was supporting us so well for so long.
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