Orgel's second law - "Evolution is smarter than you are" - raises up
an ironized Providence: the natural world exhibits a design of which
human intelligence is not capable, but the "designer" turns out to be
a massively parallel (and pathologically short-sighted, amnesiac and
irresponsible) biological supercomputer. The idealised
market-as-information-system of Hayek and his followers bathes in a
similar kind of sublime effulgence. Its ways also must be justified to
men: neoliberal apologetics is a displaced theodicy.
Richard Dawkins' ethical message is that when it comes to determining
the Good, human beings are way smarter than evolution: genes may be
"selfish", but we are not, or not exclusively, and our genetic
inheritance equips us with both the ability (given adequate nurture)
to care about ethical values and the ability to do something about
them. We are creatures of a blind process that we have only very
recently begun to understand; the better we understand it, the better
we will be able to contest it. Witness against the beast!
The eugenicists would sometimes speak of wanting to assist
"evolution", to direct it or protext it from subversion: whether by
cultural "softness", the decadent toleration of weakness that was a
regrettable by-product of affluence, or a kind of in-built
degenerative tendency, a death-drive installed in the evolutionary
mechanism (comparisons might be ventured with neo-liberal
triumphalism, and its attendant anxieties about Welfarism and Market
Failure). The utter moral bleakness, or rather blankness, of the
neo-Darwinians' account of our evolutionary history ought to
discourage fantasies of this kind. There is nothing inherently
admirable about being even more stupendously badass than your
forebears.
I find the evolutionary narrative salutary, a corrective for both
addle-pated bleatings about "natural harmony" and sinister
fulminations about racial purity. It relays an inexhaustible burden of
contingent responsibility: there are no inevitable moral victories in
this story, no revolutions or revelations due Real Soon Now. What I
value about the Christian faith is the way that it encapsulates in
myth the violence and arbitrariness of (human) nature, but affirms the
non-finality of death and wickedness: while death may be (is,
certainly) the last thing that happens to any of us individually, it
is not the last word in the story that we inhabit, which is a love
story. Love is strong as death - well, one might at least
understandably prefer to think so.
Dominic
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