[THS] !!!! Karen Armstrong: The Selfish Delusion

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

The Selfish Delusion


Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson

Karen Armstrong hails a profound and timely argument against the positivist world
view

Karen Armstrong

The Guardian, Saturday 3 July 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/03/absence-mind-marilynne-robinson-review


At the same time as the western scientific revolution empowered human beings,
opened new worlds and broadened their horizons, it progressively punctured their
self-esteem. Increasingly, luminaries of modern thought have told us that our minds
are not to be trusted: that even though we thought we were standing on a static
Earth, our planet was moving very fast indeed; that we could never be sure that our
ideas corresponded to objective reality outside our own heads; that some of our
noblest ideals were simply the product of repressed sexuality; and that, finally, we
are deluded if we imagine that we "think", "reason," "learn" or "choose". Our minds
are simply a passive conduit for an unknown, indifferent force.

In this published version of the Terry lectures, delivered at Yale University last year,
the novelist Marilynne Robinson argues that positivism, the belief that science is the
only reliable means to truth, has adopted a "systematically reductionist" view of
human nature. Since Huxley, for example, Darwinians have found altruism
problematic, as evolution would necessarily select against benevolence to another at
cost to oneself. Altruism can only occur because of the "selfishness" of a gene. Thus
for EO Wilson, a "soft-core altruist" expects reciprocation from either society or
family; his byzantine calculations are characterised by "lying, pretence and deceit,
including self-deceit, because the actor is more convincing who believes that his
performance is real". Every apparently compassionate action is, therefore, simply a
matter of quid pro quo.

In the same way, because it transfers useful information to somebody else and
requires an expenditure of time and energy, language seems essentially altruistic.
But, says the evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller, "evolution cannot favour altruistic
information-sharing", so the complexities of language probably evolved simply for
verbal courtship, "providing a sexual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and
female".

"Oh, to have been a fly on the wall!" Robinson comments wryly, when our "proto-
verbal ancestors found mates through eloquent proto-speech". In the same way, art
may appear to be "an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of
communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand," but
according to some neo-Darwinians, it too is simply a means of attracting sexual
partners. "Leonardo and Rembrandt may have thought they were competent
inquirers in their own right, but we moderns know better."

This disdainful "hermeneutics of condescension" cannot function outside of a narrow
definition of relative data. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the positivist
critique of religion. Daniel Dennett, for example, defines religion as "social systems
whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is
to be sought". He deliberately avoids the contemplative side of faith explored by
William James, as if, Robinson says, "religion were only what could be observed using
the methods of anthropology or of sociology, without reference to the deeply pensive
solitudes that bring individuals into congregations". Bypassing Donne, Bach, the Sufi
poets and Socrates, Dennett, Dawkins and others are free to reduce the multifarious
religious experience of humanity "to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful
thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of
death".

Robinson takes the science-versus-religion debate a stage further. More significant
than this jejune attack on faith, she argues, is the disturbing fact that "the mind, as
felt experience, has been excluded from important fields of modern thought" and as
a result "our conception of humanity has shrunk". Robinson's argument is prophetic,
profound, eloquent, succinct, powerful and timely. It is not an easy read, but one of
her objectives is to help readers appreciate the complexity of these issues. To adopt
such a "closed ontology", she insists, is to ignore "the beauty and the strangeness" of
the individual mind as it exists in time. Subjectivity "is the ancient haunt of piety and
reverence and long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things
refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into
principle and method."

In the past, the voices that say "there is something more" have always been right.
The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture,
history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson's
contention that "it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature,
first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to
liberate its best impulses."

I wish she had developed this crucial insight, because it is urgently needed at this
moment of crisis in human history. If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish
gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish – individually and
collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings? We
saw during the 20th century (not to mention the first decade of the 21st) what can
happen when the "me-first" mentality is given free rein. But this was also the century
of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, who revealed the
potential for altruism in humanity. The tens of thousands of people who flock to hear
the Dalai Lama seem to recognise that this too is an essential part of human nature.
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
(Terry Lectures)
by Marilynne Robinson
176pp,
Yale University Press,
£16.99