By Richard Kirk on 4.23.07 @ 12:07AM
Theoretical hindsight cannot divine purpose.
David Brooks's column on the status of Darwinism in Western
culture appeared in my local paper the day after Cho Seung-Hui
murdered thirty-two human beings in Blacksburg, Virginia -- a
record for campus slaughter that surpassed the mark set by Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in
1966. In his piece Brooks touts the prevailing biological orthodoxy
that "human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for
passing along genetic code" and that we "are driven primarily by a
desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species."
Brooks then says that the "logic of evolution explains why
people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their
young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a
purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then
it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not
expend energy on things that don't enhance the chance of
survival."
Like many columnists (including secular soulmate, George Will)
Brooks occasionally dabbles in academic topics. But the above
remarks illustrate his philosophical naivete. A committed
evolutionist and Academic Dean at a prominent La Jolla prep school
once gratuitously announced at a faculty meeting, "Evolution is
ateleological" -- a statement that means the process has "no
purpose." (The Dean proceeded to suggest, incomprehensibly, that
evolution's lack of direction should serve as an educational
model.)
In addition to lacking "purpose," nature, for biological
professionals, is constantly expending energy on things that don't
"enhance the chance of survival." When, however, its random
products don't survive, evolutionary theory declares them "unfit."
Dinosaurs, for example, were "fit" for a while; then nature
"selected" against them. Put otherwise, the species died out.
Strictly speaking, "fitness" and "currently existing" are virtual
synonyms for real, as opposed to romantic, evolutionists.
The "purpose" that Brooks mentions in his column is really a
product of theoretical hindsight -- not of intention. One must slip
a personifying image of Mother Nature through an intellectual back
door to make the term mean what Brooks implies in his
paean-of-sorts to Richard Dawkins' "Blind Watchmaker."
These analytical comments bring me back to Virginia Tech and
mass murder. I don't think Brooks would be willing to employ even
his prettified Darwinism to explain the "purpose" of that
slaughter. (Keep in mind that all "benefits" of "trait(s), like
emotion," that "can cause big problems" must refer to the
propagation of genes.) Certainly, the cosmic purposelessness
espoused by Dawkins would be a word untimely spoken at last
Tuesday's memorial convocation.
On the topic of emotion I add my own quizzical lines to those of
the Hokies' poet in residence:
How understand sweet love
beneath this meta-Physical model?
A means of species propagation?
A lucky hit?
Are tears to be reduced to adaptations
in the pointless quest for life?
In short, the language of sociobiology doesn't comprehend what
humans consider most important -- like the heroism of Holocaust
survivor and Professor Liviu Librescu, who gave his life that others
might live. To reduce the poignant irony of Librescu's sacrificial
act to a function of genetic compulsion is to embrace a blindness
as great as the blindness that confuses being alive with the
purpose of living.
Brooks declares that Darwin has replaced Freud, Marx, and
earlier, the Bible, as a unifying Western cosmology. Like Marx and
Freud, however, Darwin has no language that takes seriously
individual acts of good and evil. Instead, good and evil become
epiphenomena generated by impersonal forces that lie beyond good
and evil. This fatal flaw trivializes, and continues to spawn, acts
of horror in Brooks's "postmodern" West.
topics:
Education, Books, Law, Energy
