I recently participated in a conversation with thought leaders at the Great Transition Initiative on how to shift our society’s foundational ethical framework for the deep transformation of civilization that is needed.
Here’s my contribution, “Embracing Interconnectedness,” which features ideas that will be part of my upcoming book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (to be published in Spring 2021).
I BELIEVE IT IS of the utmost importance to establish the right framework of values for the deep transformation of civilization that is needed. As I have laid out in The Patterning Instinct, different cultures have constructed vastly different systems of values, and those values have shaped history. Similarly, the values we choose today as a society will shape our future. The stakes for getting it right could hardly be higher.[1]
In recent decades, neoliberalism has established a dominant pseudo-ethical regime based on a flawed notion of untrammeled, market-based individual freedom. Our overriding task is to substitute this with an ethic of shared responsibility and interdependence. We need a solid, rigorous foundation for this ethic. Where do we find it?
Too much of the conversation on ethics focuses on binaries—materialism vs. spirituality, reason vs. emotions. But binaries simply encourage different camps to put up barricades against each other. We must move beyond binaries to a truly integrated ethical framework—one that incorporates the rational and intuitive, the scientific and the spiritual.
Fortunately, in recent decades, the combination of complexity science, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and systems thinking has given us a platform for the kind of integration we need. Recognizing an evolutionary basis for values does not mean falling prey to the reductionist determinism of outmoded theorists such as Richard Dawkins, whose “selfish gene” myth has been superseded by modern evolutionary biology. [2]
The major evolutionary transitions of life on Earth have, in fact, been characterized by increases in cooperation, the most recent of which was the emergence of hominids. Facing perilous savannah conditions, our ancestors discovered that, through collaboration, they could protect and feed themselves far more effectively. They evolved moral emotions, such as a sense of fairness, cooperation, and altruism, which enabled them—in what has been called a “reverse dominance hierarchy”—to collaboratively restrain the occasional dangerously aggressive male driven by the atavistic impulse for domination that we see in other primates.[3]
These moral emotions formed the basis of the morality that characterizes our species. Sophisticated tests have shown that, faced with a choice, our initial impulse is to cooperate, and only after time to reflect do selfish behaviors emerge. In various experiments, prelinguistic infants show a rudimentary sense of fairness, justice, empathy, compassion, and generosity, along with a clear ability to distinguish between kind and cruel actions. Morality is intrinsic to the human condition.[4]
So why do we live in a world filled with endless examples of outrageous immorality, where dangerous aggressive males still wield power? With the rise of agriculture and sedentism, the power balance shifted to those who succeeded in establishing hierarchical dominance, leading eventually to the rise of patriarchal societies that rewarded machismo and violence—what Riane Eisler has termed “domination systems.”[5]
The world history of the past millennia mostly chronicles conflicts between different domination systems, one of which—European civilization—eventually became globally dominant in the past few centuries, forcing its unique dualistic cosmology on those it conquered. This is the worldview that most people now take for granted—one based on separation and domination, seeing humans as selfish, rational competitors, defined by their individuality, utterly separate from a desacralized nonhuman nature that has been relegated to a mere mechanistic resource without intrinsic value.
This worldview is a far cry from the shared ethical basis of cross-cultural traditions throughout history, and has been comprehensively invalidated by modern scientific findings. Instead, systems science confirms the insights shared by wisdom teachings across the ages: that we are all intrinsically interconnected. The deep interpenetration of all aspects of reality—what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing”—must be at the heart of an ethical framework for political and cultural transformation.
Our expression of morality is, to a very large extent, a function of our identity. If you see yourself as an isolated individual, your values will accordingly lead you to the pursuit of your own happiness at the expense of others. If you identify with your community, your values will emphasize the welfare of the group. When you recognize yourself as part of nature, you will automatically feel drawn to nurture and protect the natural world.
Over the past several centuries, even as European imperialism ravaged the rest of the world, there was also a gradual expansion of identity, from the parochial to a broader vision of shared humanity, which has led to what Martin Luther King famously referred to as the “moral arc” bending toward justice. This has inspired concepts such as inalienable human rights and led to ever-widening attempts to legislate moral justice into national and international codes of conduct. The Earth Charter stands as an exemplary model of this kind of expansive moral vision.
However, in our current predicament, facing impending ecological catastrophe and the potential of civilizational collapse, we must ask whether this moral expansion is a case of too little, too late. What can be done to catalyze it and redirect our terrifying trajectory? Is it possible to develop a cross-cultural global moral vision for humanity that extends to all life on Earth, and could inspire a comprehensive transition toward economic justice and ecological regeneration?
While those of us enculturated in the West have had to rediscover our interconnectedness, traditional cultures have maintained the deeply embedded principles that characterized core human morality from earliest times. Comanche social activist LaDonna Harris has identified four central values known as the four R’s that are shared by indigenous peoples around the world, which together affirm the interconnectedness of all aspects of creation: Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Redistribution. They each pertain to different types of obligation that inform a person’s life. Relationship is a kinship obligation, recognizing value not just in family but in “all our relations” including animals, plants, and the living Earth. Responsibility is the community obligation, identifying the imperative to nurture and care for those relations. Reciprocity is a cyclical obligation to balance what is given and taken; and Redistribution is the obligation to share what one possesses—not just material wealth, but one’s skills, time, and energy.[6]
Other sources of wisdom, such as Taoism, Buddhism, or Confucianism, each offer unique teachings into the ethical implications of the fundamental unity of all life. “Everything from…husband, wife, and friends, to mountains, rivers…birds, beasts, and plants, all should be truly loved in order that the unity may be reached,” declared Neo-Confucian sage Wang Yangming.
Our crucial task is to incorporate these principles of traditional wisdom into an integrated system of values that can redirect humanity away from catastrophe, and toward a flourishing future. One where our shared identity expands beyond parochial boundaries to include, not just all humanity, but all sentient beings, and the vibrancy of the entire living Earth. Ultimately, it is our values that guide our actions—and will shape our future.
Click to read the entire conversation
[1] Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2017).
[2] “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives,” Royal Society | Interface Focus Theme Issue, 7, 5, October 6 (2017). [3] Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [4] Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2013). [5] Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). [6] La Donna Harris and Jacqueline Wasilewski, “Indigeneity, an Alternative Worldview: Four R’s (Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, Redistribution) Vs. Two P’s (Power and Profit). Sharing the Journey Towards Conscious Evolution,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 21 (2004): 489–503.
Our egalitarian hunter-gatherer ancestors developed sophisticated social technologies for keeping upstarts in check. What can the popular resistance movement learn from them in confronting the worst excesses of Donald Trump?
The recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere suggest that the tide may be turning away from the egregious behavior exhibited by Donald Trump, and back toward a sense of decency in American politics. How can we keep that momentum going over the next three years?
In researching my book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, I realized that a greater understanding of hunter-gatherer values and practices offers a valuable perspective on our own social and political interactions, including some hints on how our contemporary industrialized society can rein in the behavior of a rogue leader such as Donald Trump.
Nomadic hunter-gatherers do things very differently from modern societies, yet their way of life was the ubiquitous human experience until approximately the past ten thousand years when agriculture emerged. During that time, humans evolved some of the key characteristics that make us unique among primates: a sense of fair play, shared intentions, and community-based ethics.
Hunter-gatherers used sophisticated social technologies to keep upstarts in place
Hunter-gatherer communities were invariably egalitarian. There was no “big chief” who lorded it over everyone else. Yet they had to work hard to maintain their egalitarian values in the face of upstarts who demonstrated bullying, arrogance, and narcissism. In doing so, they developed a set of sophisticated and powerful group dynamics. Is there anything we can learn from their playbook that can apply to the popular resistance movement confronting those same characteristics that Donald Trump exudes on a daily basis?
Consider the story of anthropologist Richard Lee, who gave the tribe of !Kung foragers, with whom he’d been living, the best Christmas gift he could procure: a fat, meaty ox for their feast. But instead of gratitude, he received nothing but insults: it was the skinniest “sack of guts and bones,” they told him, that they had ever seen. Even while they spent two days feasting on it, they kept complaining: “It gives us pain to be served such a scrawny thing.”
Only later did Lee discover that this was the !Kung’s normal response to a hunter who returns with a big kill. Instead of praising him, the group ridicules his achievements and speaks of his meat as worthless, even while they’re enjoying it. This way, Lee discovered, they prevent a hunter from swelling up with pride and thinking of himself as a “big man” or a chief.
Around the world, hunter-gatherer bands viewed Trump-like attributes as a serious threat to the smooth functioning of their communities, and they worked hard to keep them in check before they got out of control. As a !Kung elder explained to Richard Lee, “When a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
Another common practice was for hunters to exchange their uniquely identifiable arrows with each other before a hunt. After a kill, the person who portioned out the meat to the band—thus temporarily holding power in the group—was the one whose arrow killed the prey, not the one who shot it. Through this ingenious method, power remained dispersed and randomized instead of becoming concentrated with the most skillful hunter.
Hunters would frequently exchange uniquely identifiable arrows before the hunt
How different from today’s society with its mega-billionaires and celebrity worship! But even among hunter-gatherers, dominant upstarts (almost invariably men) would sometimes get out of hand. Here are five methods they used, in order of increasing severity, to keep them from taking over.
Ridicule. The first response would be for community members to ridicule his behavior among themselves. This was a valuable indirect way of signaling to others that his arrogance wouldn’t be tolerated, without resorting to direct confrontation. It was also a powerful way to build group consensus against him, in case further resistance were needed. We see an updated version of this response to Trump every day, in the late-night comic offerings of shows such as Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Direct criticism. If the upstart didn’t respond to the subtler message of ridicule, the next step would be to confront him directly. This might take courage, and would best be done as a group. It would be most effective if the criticism came from those who were friends rather than those already known to disagree with him. This is why a critique of Trump from prominent Republicans such as John McCain, Bob Corker, or Jeff Flake has far more impact than the daily barrage of criticism from Democrats.
Group disobedience. If the upstart continued his wayward behavior, the group might then resort to disobedience. The arrogant hunter might, for example, set out in one direction, but the other hunters would refuse to follow him. In modern society, with strict rules guiding permissible behavior, group disobedience looks different. The Women’s March, the spontaneous demonstrations at airports in response to Trump’s initial racist rulings, and court injunctions against his directives, are all examples of people stepping up in moral outrage to violations of norms in an attempt to prevent some of the worst excesses.
Ostracism. If all these responses failed to have their desired effect, in rare cases a band might ostracize the miscreant. A milder form of this would be to withhold the norms of social etiquette, with more severe forms such as expulsion from the group applied in extreme cases. In some hunter-gatherer societies, such as Eskimos in the Arctic, this could effectively be a death sentence. We have seen important examples of ostracism occurring in the Beltway, such as when the Golden State Warriors refused to visit the White House, or when the White House Arts Committee resigned en masse to protest Trump’s defense of white nationalists following Charlottesville.
Extreme sanction. As a last resort, when every other attempt to check an upstart has failed, the group may come to a consensus decision to execute him. This would be done very rarely and with heavy hearts, because in spite of common misperceptions, hunter-gatherers generally had great fear and distaste for physical violence. In our modern society, with its strict ethical and legal restrictions, the extreme sanction applicable to Donald Trump would be impeachment—a process that has recently been energized by a multi-million-dollar campaign initiated by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.
Is there anything we can learn from the hunter-gatherer playbook? One takeaway is to reflect on how our 21st-century society is not so different from hunter-gatherer society after all. Each of the tactics employed by our nomadic ancestors is being implemented by those who share the common outrage at someone who so clearly thinks of himself as a “big man” and “the rest of us as his servants or inferiors.” Another lesson may be to recognize that each tactic of resistance is a crucial one: rather than arguing about taking one approach instead of another, it’s important to realize that all flavors of resistance are needed to counter a threat as grave as what Trump represents.
The most important lesson of all, however, may be to recognize what undergirded the hunter-gatherers’ resistance to an upstart in the first place: a shared set of values based in a deep sense of fairness and human dignity. Throughout the world and throughout history, hunter-gatherers showed a strong commitment to what has been called “altruistic punishment”: the willingness to punish those who flagrantly break social norms even at potentially significant cost to themselves.
If we are to be successful in the national resistance to the takeover of our society by authoritarianism, we need to emphasize the core values that the vast majority of us share, such as common decency, respect for human dignity, and caring for our community. When we act on the basis of our shared humanity, and when we’re willing to venture outside our comfort zone—even taking personal risks—to fight for what we know is right, we can rest assured that our struggle is in the great tradition of our hunter-gatherer past, and that our evolved human nature itself is on our side.
On Friday, August 4, I published an article in AlterNet entitled “The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins.” The response was flabbergasting. The article, which was quickly picked up by both Raw Story and Salon, has been shared on Facebook over ten thousand times in less than a week. It has also elicited a storm of over a thousand comments—mostly angry and vitriolic.
Jerry Coyne
In response to the comments, I wrote a follow-up piece, “Reflections on ‘The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins,'” which was published in the same media. Meanwhile, the distinguished biologist Jerry Coyne wrote a blog post ferociously attacking what he called my “dreadful article.”
I respect Coyne’s writings, and I admire his tenacious efforts to disseminate the scientific truths of evolution in the face of fundamentalist Christian opposition. Because of this, I was saddened to see the tone of his response to my article. I decided to try to turn this into an opportunity for a more dignified dialogue on the bigger issues that my article—and his response—bring up.
The following is an open letter to Jerry. I hope he responds in a similarly respectful manner, and that we can establish some shared ground for generative dialogue.
I admire your writings and your decades long struggle to raise awareness about evolution among the American public. I was particularly impressed by your 2012 article in Evolution, “Science, Religion, and Society: The Problem of Evolution in America,” in which you argue against the intellectual compromises of “accommodationism”: the practice of suggesting that religion and science exist in separate domains, and therefore neither should represent a threat to the other.
Perhaps because of my respect for you, I felt disappointed to read some of the vitriol in your recent blog post dismissing my critique of Dawkins’s conceptions of the “selfish gene” and “nature as machine” as “another dumb article holding Richard Dawkins responsible for all the world’s wrongs.” My respect for your own intellectual rigor was, quite frankly, called into question when you misstated my arguments in order to ridicule them, such as when you depict me as suggesting that “Dawkins is Satan or the anti-Christ” and dismiss my argument as “simply bullshit.”
Some of the more substantive arguments you made against my article are summed up and discussed in my own follow-up “Reflections on ‘The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins,” which I hope you’ve read. For example, in response to your claim that “[the selfish gene] is just a metaphor,” I’ve pointed out how core metaphors structure the ways in which a society thinks and acts. When you claim that my link to the extensive discrediting of Dawkins’s “selfish gene” theory “doesn’t go to any scientific discrediting,” I point to the bottom of the page which references works by Gould, Depew & Weber, Wilson & Wilson, Goodwin, Jablonka & Lamb, Winther, and Pigliucci. I’d be happy to share more references if you’re interested.
There are also specific statements and challenges you made in your article that require a direct response, which is what I will attempt here. A deeper question is why you—and others who hold a similar viewpoint—have responded so belligerently to my article, and what can be done to encourage a more dignified and generative dialogue. I’ll come to this topic further down, and invite a thoughtful and respectful response back from you.
In the meantime, I’ve tried to distil your criticisms into higher level questions. In each case, I’ll try to identify and respond to your assertions or challenges.
Is Dawkins’s “selfish gene” theory a valid basis for evolutionary biology?
I notice that you made a careful statement in defense of your friend’s theory: “In fact, the usefulness of the selfish-gene metaphor is alive and well, and has provided useful insights into how natural selection works.” If you rest your case on the idea that the metaphor has provided useful insights into how natural selection works, then we have no disagreement. The problem is, that’s not how Dawkins describes his theory in his own book. He makes a much bolder statement: “The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.” The rest of his book goes on to demonstrate why the gene should be seen as the sole unit of selection, and its “selfish” drive to replicate as the fundamental explanatory driver of evolution.
As you are well aware, this approach to evolutionary theory has been challenged by findings in epigenetics, as well as by theories of niche construction, evolvability, and multilevel selection, and there have been repeated calls by increasing numbers of evolutionary biologists for an “extended evolutionary synthesis” integrating these and other approaches into the gene-centric modern synthesis that Dawkins used as a basis for his arguments.
In the lucid words of distinguished biologist Robert Sapolsky in his recently published Behave, “Different circumstances bring different levels of selection to the forefront. Sometimes the most informative level is the single gene, sometimes the genome, sometimes a single phenotypic trait, sometimes the collection of all the organism’s phenotypic traits. We’ve just arrived at the reasonable idea of multilevel selection.”[1]
You have gone on record opposing these new developments, claiming that “the idea of natural selection and mathematical population genetics” are sufficient theoretical tools for explaining everything about evolution, and have expressed your irritation at what you call “Big Idea Syndrome.” As a non-biologist, I can only watch from the sidelines and I certainly don’t expect to change your mind, but it seems you are doing a disservice to your field as well as to all who care about what biology tells us, by turning a blind eye to the new, more complex model of evolution that is emerging.[2]
Is there any linkage between Dawkins’s “selfish gene” theory and justifications of modern capitalism?
You correctly point out that “people are always looking for ways for science to justify their own bad acts” and that “ideas of self-interest as underlying economics go back to Adam Smith.” I agree with you that “it’s clearly and self-evidently wrong to blame ‘laissez-faire’ capitalism on Dawkins.”
However, this is not what I’m doing. I am accusing him of a playing a leading role in propagating a faulty worldview that is frequently used to justify the exploitation of laissez-faire capitalism. This worldview can be traced at least as far back as Hobbes, who is referred to approvingly by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he writes: “self-preservation, and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals.”[3] Similarly, in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, leading robber barons frequently used flawed interpretations of Darwinism to justify their ruthless exploitation.[4]
Dawkins merely brought this unfortunate nexus of laissez-faire rationalization and pseudo-scientific views of nature up to date. Dawkins himself has made an explicit connection between biology and economics, writing: “Within any one species of animals or plants, the individuals that survive best are the ones that can exploit the other animals and plants, bacteria and fungi that are already flourishing in the environment. As Adam Smith understood long ago, an illusion of harmony and real efficiency will emerge in an economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level. A well balanced ecosystem is an economy, not an adaptation.” Here, Dawkins describes exploitation as the driver of survival, leading to a “well-balanced ecosystem” and linking this explicitly to an economy “dominated by self-interest.”[5]
You say that you’d “like to see Lent’s evidence that corporations have relied on Dawkins’s ideas to justify plundering the Earth.” Besides Dawkins’s own connection, the fact that Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling’s favorite book was The Selfish Gene (which I mentioned in “Reflections”) is only the most egregious example. Ruy Teixera describes how the timing of the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976 along with the rise of modern neo-liberal economics led to a deep conceptual linkage between the two.[6] Milton Friedman’s polemic, Free to Choose, published in 1980, argued for self-interested individuals making “rational” decisions to create the most efficient economy. It is no coincidence that the widely-quoted speech by fictional character Gordon Gekko, in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie The Wall Street, uses pseudo-evolutionary theory to justify his excesses:
The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. …
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.[7]
This linkage continues unabated into the current era. Here, for example, is an excerpt from an interview conducted in 2016 with the bestselling author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
So, when I was in college, I first read Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene. And like many people, it just blew my mind. And Darwin’s ideas are so simple. From a few principles, you can explain all the diversity of life on earth, and that was a really transformative experience for me. And then when I started reading about the history of capitalism… I had the same experience that I had reading Richard Dawkins… And so capitalism is as powerful and important as Darwinian evolution. And in fact, it’s very much the same thing… The point is everybody should learn about capitalism and evolution by the time they’re 18. And at present we don’t. And that means we have stupid discussions about policy.[8]
As I mentioned in “Reflections,” I appreciate that Dawkins himself has a more humane political outlook, and I expect he may be horrified to find his ideas used by countless neo-liberal zealots. Nevertheless, the underlying linkage seems irrefutable.
How do ethics relate to the “selfish gene” hypothesis?
You, along with many others, have pointed out that Dawkins clearly disavows a simple equivalency between “selfish genes” and selfish humans, stating that “Dawkins’s genetic reductionism does not come with any ethical implications.” Quite right. However, as I discussed in “Reflections,” Dawkins’s logic leads to an antediluvian model of a divided human where morality arises from our reason overcoming the selfish drives of our genes. “Our brains,” he writes, “have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes.” This split conception of humanity can be traced back to Plato and, ironically, is inherent to Christian soul/body dualism.
In fact, many evolutionary biologists have shown that a sense of fairness and compassion is an evolved human trait—something that is readily explained by multi-level selection theory.[9] We don’t need to overcome our inherent drives in order to develop these faculties. This is important because it leads to different modalities for enhancing compassionate behavior within society. Sapolsky does an outstanding job of summarizing decades of findings across sub-disciplines, focusing on the crucial distinction between in-group and out-group evolved moral predispositions, leading to different ways to develop skillful responses depending on the context. This is the kind of valuable interplay between biology and morality that Dawkins’s simplistic “selfish gene” model misses.[10]
What are the ontological implications of Dawkins’s reductionism?
You attempt to ridicule my critique of the implications of Dawkins’s reductionism by paraphrasing me as saying that “Dawkins’s reductionism and naturalism have taken the joy out of life” and that “people have actually become… depressive nihilists who have no meaning in their lives, because of what Richard Dawkins has written.” You continue: “I challenge Lent, or anyone, to find where in Dawkins’s work he’s said anything even remotely like this.” In fact, as you put it, “Dawkins has repeatedly argued that embracing reality and science rather than numinous illusions makes the world more enjoyable and meaningful.”
Ironically, Dawkins has himself given examples of precisely this kind of reaction to his ideas in his introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene. Among other readers disturbed by what they saw as his “cold, bleak message,” he quotes an Australian reader:
Fascinating, but at times I wish I could unread it… On one level, I can share in the sense of wonder Dawkins so evidently sees in the workings-out of such complex processes… But at the same time, I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade… Never sure of my spiritual outlook on life, but trying to find something deeper—trying to believe, but not quite being able to—I found that this book just about blew away any vague ideas I had along these lines, and prevented them from coalescing any further. This created quite a strong personal crisis for me some years ago.
Dawkins’s response to this is: “If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.”
This is the classic reductionist refrain, as stated succinctly by Stephen Weinberg’s aphorism: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” The follow-on, as you, Dawkins, Weinberg, and others contend, is that we must create our own sense of meaning, and that the sheer wonder of observing the complexity of the universe should offer enough joy for anyone.
Your proposed path to joy, however, is one that doesn’t suffice for many. This is what I call the “cruel myth” that reductionists foist on thinking people everywhere: that reductionism is the only explanatory alternative to theism in making sense of the universe. While reductionism has proven to be a superbly powerful methodology for scientific investigation, it is a leap of faith to use it to make ontological claims about the universe.
Your own statement about reductionism in your rebuttal of my article shows some confusion that perhaps I can use as a starting point for clarification:
Scientific naturalism happens to be true, and everything comes down to the laws of physics, although we also see higher-order phenomena that are “emergent” in the sense that while we don’t know enough to predict them from the laws of physics, they must be consistent with the laws of physics. That is what reductionism means, and there is no “holism” completely independent of reductionism.
Here, you conflate scientific naturalism with reductionism, but I believe that is mistaken. Scientific naturalism holds that everything in the universe is part of nature and is in principle subject to scientific inquiry. This is a viewpoint I share with you, and is in contrast to transcendental claims of another “spiritual” dimension to the universe. I also agree with your statement that emergent phenomena must be “consistent with the laws of physics.” However, that is not what “reductionism means” in its common usage. Reductionism is the belief that everything in nature can ultimately be understood only by reducing it to its simplest components.
Biological reductionism is exemplified by Dawkins’s “selfish gene” hypothesis. The general statement of this view is summed up well by Francis Crick:
You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.[11]
The findings of systems theory show this view to be misguided. In self-organized systems, which includes all living systems, the complex interaction of many connected elements causes emergent behavior that could never be predicted by a study of each part alone, no matter how detailed. The reductionist view of “nothing but” is analogous to someone observing that Shakespeare’s entire opus is nothing but an assembly of twenty-six letters repeated in different configurations. Whether we are evaluating Shakespeare or life itself, the patterns that connect the parts frequently contain far more valuable information than the parts themselves.[12]
That is the starting point for my investigation of meaning through my Liology framework, which you peremptorily dismiss as “wooish,” saying you have “little idea of what this means except that it extols interconnectedness and holism.” I invite you to explore my description of key principles that Liology shares with dynamical systems theory, if you are interested in understanding it further.
You may be surprised by how much we agree with each other. In your article, “Science, Religion, and Society,” you contrast the scientific method with religious dogma:
Science’ s method of finding truth, which relies on reason, empirical investigation, criticism, doubt, predictive power, and repeatability of observations by different investigators, is incompatible with religion’s methods for understanding the universe—methods based on dogma, authority, and revelation. Scientific truth changes in response to new findings about the world, while religious “truth” … changes rarely, and most often in response to scientific advances… In science faith is a vice, in religion it is a virtue.
While not a scientist by profession, I am in full agreement with every aspect of your description of the scientific method, and I try to adhere to it in all my research and writings. As you say well, “scientific truth changes in response to new findings about the world.” I ask you to consider whether new findings in recent decades in the areas of systems biology and complexity theory could possibly have expanded our scientific conception of the universe from a dogmatic reductionism.
I believe we share a commitment to a world where policy decisions are based on ethical and scientifically valid findings. In my view, a recognition of our intrinsic connectedness with others and with the natural world is both scientifically valid and a solid foundation for an ethical and political framework that could promote sustainable flourishing into the future.
Jerry, I greatly admire your decades of work battling against faith-based dogmatism and the obfuscations of proponents of “intelligent design” and other manipulations designed to undermine true scientific investigation. I wonder, however, if your continuous battle against superstition has made it more difficult for you to discern when there are scientifically valid reasons for questioning previously held positions?
I invite you to share your reflections back in a respectful and dignified manner. Perhaps we could better identify areas of agreement and difference, and use this as an opportunity to initiate a more generative discourse on the possibilities of making sense of the universe through scientific naturalism?
Respectfully yours,
Jeremy Lent
FOOTNOTES
[1] Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Publishing Group, p. 362.
[7] Cited by Turchin, Peter. “Selfish Genes Made Me Do It! (Part I).”Social Evolution Forum website. December 4, 2013. Note: Turchin adds “I in no way blame Richard Dawkins for the fall of Enron or for the broader cultural shift that resulted in the proliferation of corporate malfeasance.” I don’t blame him either, but am merely pointing out the part his ideas played in this process.
[11] Crick, F. (1994). The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Touchstone, 3.
[12] Capra, Fritjof and Luisi, P.L.. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 19–59; Kauffman, S. (2008). Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 15; Noble, D. (2006). The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 77; Sperry, R. W. (1980). “Mind-Brain Interaction: Mentalism, Yes; Dualism, No.” Neuroscience, 5(1980), 195-206; Woese, C. R. (2004, June). “A New Biology for a New Century.” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 173-186; Lewontin, R. C. (1992). “The Dream of the Human Genome.” The New York Review of Books, 39(10).
Patterns of Meaning 