The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture. John C. Madden
Like It, Act II, Scene 7
– Let’s get going. I was a bit disappointed last week when you informed me that humans are likely to continue to indulge in a variety of disparate religions for some time to come. I hope you have some better news for me this week!
Davey’s words broke in on my thoughts about the possibility of a winter holiday to find respite from Vancouver’s gloomy rain storms.
It was my turn to be enigmatic.
– Maybe so, maybe not.
It is a reasonable assumption that human interest in creation myths and religion more generally was motivated by a belief that knowledge of our origins will assist us and our family groups to lead secure and happy lives. In ancient times, this largely seems to have meant knowing who the powerful gods were, whom they liked and disliked, and what one had to do to keep them happy and constructively engaged in your welfare, while bestowing famine and pestilence on your enemies.
Although many of us no longer believe in deities who control our destiny, we modern humans are no less anxious to acquire knowledge that will help us to lead happier lives. We want to know what new theories our scientists have deduced and how those theories have withstood challenges from others proposing alternative theories. We also look to our literature to shed light on our own inner natures, as well as those of others in our society. Some humans still look to their religions for the answers to the most challenging and difficult questions. Others choose to search more widely for the answers they seek.
For example, let me read you what the American anthropologist and poet Ruth Benedict once wrote:
The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers. There’s the answer of Christ and of Buddha, of Thomas à Kempis and of Elbert Hubbard, of Browning, Keats and of Spinoza, of Thoreau and of Walt Whitman, of Kant and of Theodore Roosevelt. By turn their answers fit my needs. And yet, because I am not any one of them, they can none of them be completely mine.[3]
This quotation helps to illuminate her feelings, as well as our state of knowledge about ourselves in her lifetime, which spanned 1887–1948. Today, I am inclined to rephrase Benedict as follows:
The wonder of life is that all that we can observe in many fields of science, in literature and philosophy as well as in the study of religion, points to a singular and fascinating path of development of the human body and the human mind. By turns the path is lit by Newton, Einstein and Shakespeare, by Darwin and by religious scripture, by Benedict, Tinbergen and Lorenz, by Watson and Crick, Woese and Ramachandran, as well as by those leading today’s studies of subjective well-being. And yet, we still do not have all the answers but rather an emerging, still somewhat blurry picture of how we came about and what we need to do to be happy.
The creation story I believe in is not a simple narrative. It has been written by many bright and thoughtful people working independently in many different fields of study. In a way, it is a surprise that such disparate work in such large quantities, should all fit together so nicely, but then again, if it is true that there is but one course of history leading to our existence, it is not so surprising. Everything should fit together.
At this point I told Davey that I planned to introduce him to my personal choice of the key ideas and the key progenitors of those ideas that I believed would give him the foundation he needed to understand us. I went on to warn him that some of the selections I made would have been on almost everyone’s list of key ideas and would likely therefore not be new to him. Others would be unapologetically idiosyncratic.
I waited for a comment. Eventually he said:
– What you propose is interesting, but I can’t help noticing that you, as well as all the others I am conversing with, seem to claim that many of the most revered humans lived in a time I have been led to believe was well before people understood much about their environment or even about themselves. For instance, you just mentioned Newton, Shakespeare and Darwin. Is this what some seem to call “ancestor worship?” How long has this been going on, and will it continue?
Davey went on to comment that amongst all the animals only humans seemed to take the trouble to develop a philosophy of life at all. The rest simply lived out their lives. Why was it useful for humans when other life forms seemed to find it unnecessary?
My reply was that it is not necessary to develop a personal philosophy but that I believe my chances of leading a satisfactory and happy life are enhanced because I have devoted the effort to develop such a framework for living. I illustrated my point with an analogy that I was not sure he would be able to grasp.
– Many people drive cars without much, if any, understanding of how they work. But if you are one of those people, and you hear a strange noise near the back axle, how do you know if it is something trivial like a stone stuck in the tread of the tire, or something more serious like a brake problem or a worn wheel bearing? And if the car won’t start, how might you know if it is a problem of engine flooding, a malfunctioning solenoid associated with the starter, a faulty battery or an intermittent electrical connection?
In a human lifetime, a person may suddenly find that he or she has fallen in love, or someone he or she doesn’t particularly care for may have fallen in love with her. A person may feel a strong urge to buy a house, to divulge a secret, to change jobs, to show off, to start an argument or to procrastinate. One may wonder if satisfying those urges will or will not contribute to long-term happiness. Understanding oneself better may not resolve a particular conundrum, but it certainly won’t hurt. Furthermore, by understanding more about oneself, it is easier to understand others, and thus, hopefully, to be in a position to enjoy happier and more constructive relationships with them.
As you suggested, Davey, the strongest counter-argument to this position is that we are, after all, just animals like all the rest of them, and most of us strongly doubt that any other animals attempt to define a philosophical framework to guide their lives. As far as we know an ant performs most, if not all, its actions instinctively, with narrowly defined options, such as “fight or flee” determined by inherited genes. Even chimpanzees, which are generally thought to be the closest animal to humans both genetically and in terms of intelligence, appear to be driven primarily by innate behaviour, though with much greater room for behaviour modification through assessment of real-world circumstances than ants have. So, why should we be different? If chimps have not studied philosophy, why do we need to?
I looked earnestly to where Davey’s voice seemed to originate (a habit I found hard to shake), sensed no response and continued.
– You will discover that I am amongst those who believe that an important part of the reason that we need to better understand ourselves lies in the fact that although our lives bear little resemblance to those of our prehistoric ancestors, we are nonetheless still bound by essentially the same set of instincts that they evolved to survive while living a tribal “prehistoric” existence.[4] Many of our inherited behaviour patterns are no longer appropriate to our long-term happiness or even to our survival, and get in the way of the very large, well-ordered civil societies that have done so much to enhance our standard of living and our happiness. In a very real sense we are intensely tribal animals for whom the rewards of living in meta-tribal civilizations are so attractive that we suppress a lot of instinctual behaviour, though each of us, in a very real sense, still lives and reacts primarily with his or her own “tribe” of relatives, friends and acquaintances.
To take a simple example, it is rare these days that we have to make a fight-or-flee decision, yet such decisions are central, largely instinctive reactions in most animals. Indeed, a substantial fraction of military training is devoted to shaping our fight-or-flee instincts in favour of fighting, even when our instinct is crying, “Flee!”
More important, democracy has a very different practical meaning in a society of less than several hundred people than in a society with millions of individuals. In a tribal society, everybody knows everyone else quite well and therefore knows a lot about the personal qualities and viewpoints of other members of the tribe. In large societies we rely on second-hand (or worse) information that notoriously can be “spun” to mislead us about personalities