A Scream and a Theory: Natural Selection and the Higher Moral Order
Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything available in the religions that human beings then, and into our own time, tenaciously claim to be the only source and grounding for morality.
First, a little family history: Charles Darwin’s family was passionately involved in the abolition movement. Darwin’s grandfather, the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood—of Wedgwood china fame—bankrolled Thomas Clarkson, the great British abolitionist. Britain, due in great part to the work of Clarkson, outlawed slavery in the dominions in 1807 and the colonies in 1833.
(A bit of historical trivia: One of the chemists working in the Wedgwood factory was Joseph Priestly, discoverer of oxygen, and a Unitarian minister. )
Charles Darwin’s father, hoping to tone down the radical reputation of the family, had Charles baptized into the Church of England. But it is an interesting fact of history that the father of the theory of natural selection . . . married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a Unitarian, and considerably more radical, at least publicly, than Charles.
The fact remains that when the 22 Charles boarded HMS Beagle in 1831, he was a conventional Christian considering going to seminary and becoming a priest in the Church of England.
What changed?
For the full story, read Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. When we look at Darwin’s life from the perspective of the slavery question, it looks almost inevitable that he should call religion’s bluff concerning its monopoly on morality and show a way toward a higher morality.
In 1845 Darwin wrote,
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. … And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
Darwin knew very well that the appeal to religion as a basis for moral behavior would be one of the first objections to the theory of natural selection. Yes, I think he would have pursued his theory, even if it had meant that human beings had no moral guidepost. But I suspect that Darwin knew that the implications of natural selection point in exactly the opposite direction.
Consider how Darwin framed the discussion:
His first proposal, published in 1859 but written in 1837, was this:
Living things are all one: they are “netted together.” (Darwin avoided the question of the “crown of creation,” human beings, as best he could in his first book.)
Then, in 1871, Darwin dropped the bigger bombshell:
Humanity is all one.
And therefore, we must strive toward a higher morality than that which we have developed thus far. Darwin wrote, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Darwin was a naturalist. He observed the “facts on the ground.” He heard the cries of a slave being beaten. He knew that slavery persisted in the United States and many parts of the world. The conclusion was plain: Religion is not sufficient to make individuals or governments behave in moral or ethical ways.
Darwin knew that, despite pretensions, Christianity—and the other human religions— more often underwrite and condone the prejudices of societies than point in the direction of a higher morality, a more good and just society. You don’t have to be Darwin in the mid-Nineteenth Century to see that!
I’m not an extremist concerning the effects of religion because, frankly, I think people will be people, no matter what the religious or political overlay . . . on an individual level, that is. The evidence is all around us: The vast majority of human beings are basically “good,” meaning most of us don’t hurt others all that often. Most of us don’t steal things . . . all that often. Most of us behave in ways that add up to going along to get along.
Most of us aren’t Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, but we’re not Stalin or John Wayne Gacy either. Most people—Christian, Muslim, or atheist—go along to get along.
That’s on an individual level. Religions get dangerous in the aggregate—when those systems begin to say who can enslave whom; who can subjugate whom; who can kill whom for what set of reasons.
Consider again what Darwin said about slavery and the treatment of slaves:
And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
It is the aggregate that creates the evil, by “palliating”—by underwriting and condoning—the evil deeds.
But in the face of this fact Darwin saw, as perhaps no other human being had ever yet seen, that adaptations are adaptations, brain cells are brain cells. In humans. In primates. In animals. “We are all netted together,” Darwin wrote.
We are still on the frontier of this way of thinking. William Shakespeare long ago said, “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” It took Charles Darwin to tell us just how true this is. And we still don’t comprehend it: We are all netted together.
Where, then, is the uniqueness of human beings?
Consciousness. Not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether the sun is shining; not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether it is good or bad to sleep with particular people. The sort of consciousness that allows us to think about the thoughts of others—other people; other animals. This is the most complex form or consciousness. It is moral conscience.
Before Darwin the answer to the question, “why does consciousness exist?” was, “Poof! It’s magic! Set off by the divine spark . . .” After Darwin, the answer is not so neat and tidy. But the answer we have points the way toward a higher morality. Darwin put it this way: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Charles Darwin
This is the profundity of the theory of natural selection: far from making us mere animals, as the religious often claim, natural selection calls us to see beyond the limitations of our time and place. Natural selection posits a mode of being beyond the mere going along to get along. Natural selections tells us to control our basic impulses. Not because those are animal impulses—all our impulses are animal impulses—but because the sort of animal we are can see beyond our selves.
Flying Over the Squares (for small farmers)
The little towns in their squares
light up, as do the scattered
lights of farmyards in the tilting,
fuzzy squares they’re locked in.
I balance a Chilian red
on a bumpy flight out to
one of those squares.
The West is red too,
after we bump to a
cruising altitude through
clouds threatening snow.
I’ve been here before,
but not in this sundown;
in these clouds;
drinking this wine;
in the lines of this poem.
Somewhere out there
I’ve been on the last
cool ride in the back
of a truck at evening,
watching a huge moon rise
and knowing this, too,
would be a last.
We knew that time would pass;
we knew we, too, would pass;
we knew that the land
would not forget us
because it never heard
our cries anyway.
We knew it, but
the terrible wrench
of knowing it
again and again—
the land proved careful
about showing us that,
or perhaps even we
might have rebelled.
Perhaps even we
might have blown out
our little lights
in the squares
and called it a night
with no tomorrow.
Land, what would you
have done without
our fierce burning?
What would we have done,
without our fierce burning?
For now, there is the red.
Then, the darkness,
but for the burning.
Epiphany (Continues)
[More king cakes than you can imagine and only two weeks into Epiphany, I am still tugging on the promise of this season, even as I find myself tugging on clothes that seem strangely tighter…]
Kathleen Norris notes the irony that King Herod “appears in the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read on the Epiphany, a feast of light…Because of his fear, [Herod] can only pretend to see the light that the Magi have offered him” (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 1998).
Perhaps because of our fear, we can only pretend to see the light Universalism offers us. Here is our epiphany. We are loved, each and every one of us, every single atom and molecule. We are loved – not for what we do or believe, but for the divine light that shines in each of us.
We are all children of the same star dust and no distinctions we create can defile our original blessing. In a culture built on hierarchy and scarcity, it is a faithful act indeed to trust that everyone is held equitably in a compassionate heart of love. The scarcity of divine love is a dangerous myth, a tool to control and coerce.
Our work in this world, beloveds, is to proclaim the message of epiphany. We are loved, not for who we are, but because we are. We do not have to prove ourselves worthy of love any more than we should need to prove ourselves worthy of water. Just as we need water to be healthy human beings, so too do we need the knowledge that we – every single one of us, no exceptions, not even the most evil creature you can think of, every single one of us is held with compassion greater than we can imagine. It is a grace we cannot earn and we cannot lose.
Our faith has long valued acts over beliefs, and as a social justice organizer, I often celebrate this fact. But there is one belief that I pray will soak into the marrow of our bones, into our synapse and our blood. No one is left out of the mystery, no one is denied a strand of the interdependent web of all existence. We are all beloved.
May this season bring you sweetness – and the courage to live as a beloved among beloveds.
A Gift, A Letter, and a Drowning Man: The Legacy of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
There’s an old Zen story that does like this:
Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat.
This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he allowed his opponent to make the first move, then exploited that move and always won the day.
Despite the concern of his students, the old warrior consented to join in combat with the young man.
On the day of the battle, the young man walked up to the old warrior and spat in his face. The old man did not move. Then the young man began to hurl insults. This had no affect either. Then the young warrior began to throw dirt and stones at the old warrior. The old warrior stood, impassive.
Finally, exhausted by all his effort, the young warrior bowed to the old warrior, admitting defeat.
After the young man had left, the disciples of the old warrior gathered around him. “Teacher! I would have split that young man’s skull open! How could you allow him to hurl such insults at you?”
The old warrior replied, “Consider this: if someone offers a gift and you will not receive it, to whom does that gift belong?”
Nonviolent resistance embraces the techniques of both the old and the young Zen warrior. Like the old teacher, nonviolence does not accept the gift of violence or insults. Like the young warrior, nonviolence provokes a first response, then watches the opponent to see what the first move will be.
On April 12th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for parading without a license. There wasn’t a great deal of reading material in the jail, but one of the people arrested with King had been allowed to keep a newspaper he had in his pocket. That newspaper contained an editorial written by eight Euro-American Alabama clergy titled “A Call for Unity.”
The editorial began with the premise that, yes, African Americans deserved equality, but—that said—that said equality should be allowed to happen slowly—in the fullness, shall we say, of time. Without hubbub and marches.
King had heard this argument many times—just calm down and let the South change, slowly but surely. He had heard it from Euro-American centrists; he had heard it from within the African American leadership itself.
King began writing a response immediately. He used the bottom of his shoe for a desk. He wrote first on the margins of the newspaper; then on toilet paper; then on scraps provided for him by an African American trusty in the jail.
What he wrote is one of the great documents in US history, up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. What he wrote is an argument based on the Unitarian thought of Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, “Civil Disobedience.”
MLK knew that violence was the nature of racism. But it is also a basic human response to threat. In his letter King says this:
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:
collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;
negotiation;
self purification;
and direct action.
We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.
Besides the moral high ground of nonviolence, King also knew that his cause itself stood for a higher order of morality. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had asserted, “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”
King was asking for that plank back. He saw the higher moral order, as did Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi before him. Rather than getting the plank back, the Civil Rights movement got a small concession: I’ll let you hold onto my plank once in a a while, when you’re going down for the third time.
This is the unfinished business of what King started. And the continuing challenge to those who strive for a higher moral order. Still, today, I must restore the plank that I wrestled from a drowning human being. And there are many, many of those.
King’s letter is there still to remind us: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
And,
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
What A Miracle Is
Once I crossed the Sierra Madres
with a bus driver named Arturo
who had one arm
and a stick-shift bus.
Sometimes between the
the shift and wheel Arturo’s
good right arm would
pause to make the sign
of the cross toward a portrait
of the Virgin that banged
the windshield from a string.
The lesson here is that
never is a miracle more than
beating the percentages.
Perhaps Arturo still is
waving down the
twisted camino
at each shrine
along the way.
“What’s your hurry?”
always he will ask—
“Do you think you
don’t have time to
find your grave?”
http://seanmcgirr.blogspot.com/2012/10/mexican-buses.html
Sometimes It Takes A Lie
Sometimes it takes a lie
to keep a religion. “It’s
merely a game,” they
told the priests–“how
we fast for days, then
cut a tall pole to climb.
How we costume and
dance. It means nothing,
how we chant in circles
and bleed chickens.
How we climb and fly
round and around in air.
Come, watch–it’s only
a game that gives us joy.”
(And, they didn’t say,
aloud, keeps the earth
going well, returned
to its right turning again.)
“Merely a game we play,
round and around in
thirteen and thirteen turns.
It’s a game–come watch,
priests. Be amazed” (how
sometimes it takes a lie
to keep your religion.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danza_de_los_Voladores
The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All
December 10, 2013
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” – so begins the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.
Today marks the 65th Anniversary of this visionary document, created shortly after the end of World War II. In the aftermath of massive global violence, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.
The decades since have been filled with violence and atrocities.
And.
And the arc of the universe has bent toward justice.
For at least there is now an international promise of how we know we are called to be together, a First Principle
guideline leading to a Sixth Principle vision.
To paraphrase the G.I. Joe cartoon of my childhood, “Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.”
May this knowing lead to loving, compassionate doing in the next 65 years.
“As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, let us intensify our efforts to fulfill our collective responsibility to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all people everywhere.” ~UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Nelson Mandela
The great Nelson Mandela has died. Peacefully, after a long illness, surrounded by the love of his family, his nation, the world. To lose a hero is always an enormous grief, and yet Mandela was one hero who got to see his work through. This time we got the whole inspiring story – not just a man who stood up for his people and who suffered for his rebellion, but also a man who emerged from his long years in prison with a whole heart, with his capacity for love intact. Who was able to lead his country in the path of truth and reconciliation; who was able to walk a long ways down that road toward the land of freedom and justice.
What a gift. Too often we have the stories of the martyrs, the heroes cut down in their prime who live on in our memory and our aspiration, but who never got to step into the Promised Land. Of course South Africa is not a perfected Land of Milk and Honey. This is the real world and grave problems are never simply erased. But Mandela got to see his people choose justice over revenge. He got to see his country tear down barricades, reach across chasms that seemed like they could never be crossed.
In Mandela we had the story of a great man who suffered for his cause, but this time the suffering was the middle of the story, not the end. And as much as we owe to the martyrs, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Victor Jara and Megar Evers and all the rest, we owe still more to the people who live out decade after decade of speaking truth in the spirit of love, who never stop pushing the world toward justice.
Of course, most of these people we never hear about. So today, I will remember the tremendous legacy of Nelson Mandela. But I will also remember people like Molly Piontkowski, who came to this country as a young woman and never stopped working to make it meet up with her hopes of what she would find here. Who was already in her 80s when I got to know her, and was still pushing on the city of Chicago for fair housing, for services for seniors, for shelter for abused women. Who I remember not for the saintly gentleness we expect of elderly women, but rather for her cranky determination that the world simply needed to be a better place than it was.
Molly, like Mandela, is gone now. But we still have Bill Moyers and Wendell Berry—and thousands, maybe millions of you who keep on doing the work of justice and love and truth and peace because it is there to be done. The need won’t go away. I give thanks daily for the people who won’t go away either.
Deep South
Planned Parenthood of Louisiana hosted a screening of deepsouth last night in honor of World AIDS Day. Filmmaker Lisa Biagiotti joined the panel after the screening and shared that it was the startling statistics of HIV/AIDS in the south, combined with the SILENCE about this reality – in stark contrast to the national story that HIV/AIDS is “under control” – that drew her to create deepsouth. As Elizabeth Pandolfi writes in her review of the film:
Unlike the rest of the nation, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the South has not been controlled and conquered. Instead, it’s rampant and largely invisible. Deaths from HIV/AIDS are 50 percent higher than in the rest of the country. The South also has the highest rate of incarceration, the highest number of uninsured people, the highest rate of STD infection, the highest rate of poverty — and the list goes on. Those Southerners who are HIV positive are still mired in many of the same problems that patients faced during the early years of the disease, from discrimination to lack of access to care.
Born and raised in the southland, I often respond to news like this with a Gina Forsyth song:
Oh, I love it and I hate it
Every now and then berate it
Oh, the sweet and sunny south where I was born
And yet I know the South is simply the identified patient in the United States – where every place is suffering from an illness greater than HIV/AIDS, an illness endemic to the structure of this nation from its creation. The dis-ease of racism.
Panelist Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision,went directly to the soul of the matter when asked what can be done to address HIV/AIDS in the South. Address racism. Address poverty. Address homelessness. Address food access and healthcare access and daycare options. Address the internalized racial inferiority and internalized racial superiority that destroys lives.
Beloveds, in this interdependent web of all existence, nothing exists outside of relationship.
Let us shine the light of our faith on these connections. Let us address the root illnesses of our nation – structural racism, sexism, heterosexism – every –ism that privileges anyone and demeans another for the superiority of a few. If we spend our lives addressing only the symptoms, the next generation will suffer even more from this dis-ease.
Let the SILENCE be broken by a multitude of voices rising up with truths, with stories that remind us we are all in this together – and together, we can heal. Only together can we heal.
Tornados, Typhoons, and Straw Dogs: Giving Thanks With Some Thinking
Thanksgiving American style. The day declared a national holiday for the purpose of giving thanks. Despite the best efforts of those of a theocratic bent, who or what to thank remains open to interpretation.
My thanks goes to the universe that just keeps cranking out good things. As the fifth chapter of the Daodejing puts it,
The space between
sky and earth is empty,
like a bellows, moving
and moving, and
out comes more.
That’s something to be thankful for. Yet problems begin when all of that “more” between earth and sky begins to get divvied up. And, Thanksgiving being a national holiday, I can’t help thinking of the portion of the universe’s “more” taken by this particular nation and how that “more” is divvied up within our borders. It its harsh realism the Daodejing says,
The universe is neither
“good” nor “evil” outside
of human standards.
The universe treats all things
like so many straw dogs.
Recent survivors of various weather-related calamities might agree with that. Then there are these next lines:
Earthly rulers treat people
like so many straw dogs.
Well, maybe in the China of 400 BCE rulers treated people like so many straw dogs, but here in the US . . . Oh, wait. There was that government shutdown. There is that sequestration. There is that surveillance. Those drones. Oh, and then there’s work on Thanksgiving. And Black Friday. Rising poverty. Rising hunger. Straw dogs.
For Daoists, the answer is clear: the universe itself has no morality—it is neither good nor evil, and governments almost inevitably act in self-interest without regard to the greater good. It’s not what we learn in school, but evidence indicates another story.
I lost my childhood faith for the “big guy in the sky” when I began to suspect the moral calculus of the universe. When I began to suspect that “good” and “evil” are thoughts only in the human mind.
Does “god,” or does “god” not, decide who gets the cookies? And what is the basis for that judgement? Nation of birth? Social class? Skin tone? Religious affiliation?
Is it a moral act to thank such of deity for choosing me? Or my nation? My social class? My skin tone?
It’s not that I’m not thankful. But I’m not thankful to a deity that would put one child in Switzerland and another in Somalia. Such a deity does not deserve thanks, however mysterious “his” ways might be. And a deity that merely reflects the workings of the bellows of the universe? What’s the point?
Government? Yes, I grew up with those cardboard Pilgrims with their very white faces taped to the classroom windows. I understand what I was supposed to take away. Am I thankful to a government that protects the rapacious while ignoring the basic humanity of most of its citizens? Not so much.
Where might the thanks go? To luck? To fortune? To randomness? To that bellows that just keeps pumping?
Perhaps, finally, all we can do is watch and try as hard as we may to resist cynicism and complicity with the powers of what we human beings view as evil.
Here’s the advice to the Daoist:
Take care of what
is within yourself;
the outside will never
stop moving
and moving.
Thankfulness in the face of what we human beings call good and evil must serve as a reminder to think through who and what is dividing up the blessings. Yes, tornados and typhoons sweep away both the good and the bad. The universe treats us all like so many straw dogs. We find ourselves enmeshed in systems of oppression. Our choice is our work against those systems, and how we treat each other.
