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“The hundred-odd years spent absorbing and improving on Darwin’s empirical story have, I suspect and hope, unfitted us for listening to transcendental stories.” (Richard Rorty, 1994) He acknowledged that we sometimes try to “stick with Kant” and “insist … that transcendental stories have precedence over empirical stories.” Sometimes we try like Aldo Leopold to “think like a mountain” in the hope that transcendence is green. Or, we try as some Christians do to think that God is yet knowable through evolution in the hope that we will be redeemed. Or, we try as critical realists do to think, in spite of Darwin’s evidence to the contrary, that we are knowing ourselves and our world through science and philosophy because we tell ourselves without correspondence of our beliefs with Reality or Truth we have no hope at all. Rorty suspected we would not be able to sustain such efforts and hoped that we would not.
Rorty believed that since Darwin “we have gradually substituted the making of a better future for ourselves, constructing a utopian, democratic society, for the attempt to see ourselves form outside of time and history.” He believed our new hope is more useful than the old hope. Rorty believed the old hope impeded the new hope.
Eliade beautifully described the old way of hope in The Myth of the Eternal Return. Through ritual and other religious (or philosophical) ways ancestors escaped what he called “the terror of history.” Through religion and philosophy our ancestors could see themselves “outside of time and history” (in Rorty’s words.)
I do think we have chosen the path Rorty described, but I don’t think we have as much confidence as Rorty had that this path does lead to utopia. It is tough to sustain Rorty’s confidence in the face of the terror of history.
Could we possibly escape the terror of history by finding our way back into the green world from which we came? Is that not as Darwinian as is the pragmatism of Rorty? Is that not as Darwinian as it is religious?
Darwin wrote, “if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it perishes and dies.” In context, he was writing about mistletoe growing on apple trees. It was part of his explanation of the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species, Chapter 3.
In the next paragraph he wrote, “Every being … must suffer destruction during some period of its life…, otherwise, on the principle of geometric increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product.” A few pages later he wrote about what checks the increase.
One thing that checks increase is competition for food among the member of a species and with other species. More significant than that, however, is that we are prey to other species seeking food. Darwin wrote, “very frequently it is not the obtaining food, but serving as prey to other animals” that limits the population of a species. As we struggle for food with members of our own species and with members of others, we are prey to creatures larger than us, and smaller.
Among the most powerful checks on increase is climate, which acts indirectly on population by “favouring other species.” When climate warms, our food supply will shrink. As competition for food among us builds, other species will prosper. In the paragraph after he wrote about climate, Darwin wrote about epidemics that occur “when a species, owing to highly favourable circumstances, increases inordinately in a small tract.” Imagine this Darwinian future: As we struggle with each other for food on the small tract that is earth, small creatures will devour us.
We are like mistletoe overloading a tree. We hope the tree will survive if we switch to fluorescent bulbs and build enough solar panels and windmills. A “sustainable future,” we call it.
It is a ridiculous hope, of course, if Darwin is right. I think he is.
Even if human caused increases in carbon do not adversely change the climate, we are overloading the tree. Our food needs are too great. Too many of us are attached to the same tree, crowding a small green tract, and we continue to increase.
From an old observatory on the side of Cowles Mountain, waiting for the sun to rise on the day before the winter solstice, my mind was taken up imagining the sentience of things not human – of animals, trees, rocks, mountains, oceans and the earth itself.
If not for the clouds on the horizon when the sun rose this day, a small peak in the distance would have divided the sun into two lights – one north and one south – an appearance created by the tilt and turn of the earth. To see the daylight come on such days is to witness the emergence of a different solar system. To see it, one must climb the mountain in darkness to a certain place on the mountain side to wait for the light to come. The cosmogenesis lasts only a few seconds. Then the two lights arc and merge into one.
Some say that reality is ongoing cosmogenesis. Heraclites said something like that: we cannot step twice into the same river. Still, when one sees the two suns arc and merge, it is not hard to imagine that the cosmosgenesis is brief and that in a few celestial seconds all will merge into one, and, just as Parmenides said, in spite of appearance, all is one, even now – not just the sun, but animals, trees, rocks, mountains, oceans and the earth.
The merging of the suns, the tilt and turn of the earth, the cosmogenetic arc that binds us all in life, and the dreams of one waiting in darkness on Cowles Mountain: there is one sentience.
My wife and I climbed Cowles Mountain to watch the sun go down over the Pacific a few days ago.
We were not alone there. Others had come to the top of the mountain to watch the sun go down. Everyone acted nonchalant, but nervousness evident in the motions of their bodies and eyes revealed that each had come for a reason, if one can call it a reason. Each came to touch the stone at the top of the mountain. Each came to watch the sun leave. Many come every day. Others come early in the morning to watch the sun return. Each gazes over the land and to the ocean beyond and into the sky above. Each touches the stone.
The layer of fog along the coast was so thick that the sun faded from view before it descended to the horizon. It happens that way sometimes. The evening wind was cold, even though the time is August. The sky was gray and starless. We descended the mountain by flashlight. The night haze blurred the rocks and contours of the trail. The side of the mountain was quiet except for the sound of our careful feet. The others had left by other paths. Each wandered back into the city that surrounds the base of the mountain.
What happens on Cowles Mountain is resistance to time. What happens in the city is evolution. What happens on Cowles is a returning and a starting over.
Emotional appeals and argument mean nothing to natural selection.
Darwin lamented and praised the indifference of Nature. And yet, Darwin also wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends. It is a strange attentiveness, or a strange indifference.
This paradox of Nature is the same as the divine paradox. We petition God. Scriptures, traditions and many who confess faith today tell us God is moved by our feelings and arguments. And yet, in the end (as at death) we know, or we discover, that God is not moved by our pleas for life, nor by our best bargains. The way of life and death is fixed; it is part of the impervious order that is the cosmos. It is fixed, unless it is changed in eternity, in another life.
Whether born of Nature, or God, or both, we are, ourselves, impervious. Perhaps it is a mercy given by a strange attentiveness. It is a kind of immunity, even though it is only partial.
In No Place for You, My Love, Eudora Welty described the dance between a man and a woman as “imperviousness in motion.” She wrote, “Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost….They were what their separate hearts desired that day, for themselves and each other.”
Darwin wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends. Nature, selection, good, tending: all are metaphors. Nature is evolution personified. She selects and tends. Her work is good.
A hundred years earlier, the great naturalist Comte de Buffon had written that Nature is “attentive … to the preservation of each species.” The metaphors are the same.
Darwin also associated the metaphor “survival of the fittest” with the workings of evolution. It is a metaphor for indifference, one Darwin learned from Herbert Spencer. Nature is not present, or at least, away at a great distance, in this metaphor – the beings struggle to survive on their own, they are not tended by Nature.
It is the metaphor of indifference, survival of the fittest, that one most often hears associated with Darwin, and yet, in Chapter 4 of Origin of the Species, Darwin also associated natural selection with another metaphor – one he called the “preservation principle.” In this other metaphor, Nature tends for the good of each being. This metaphor is the one that Buffon used.
I think it is Darwin’s preservation metaphor that Aldo Leopold appropriated in his land ethic. Darwin contrasted Nature, who selects for the good of each being that she tends, with humanity, who selects for the good of humanity. Leopold tried to change human selection to follow the way of Nature rather than the way of survival of the fittest. It is a religious effort – to try to live by the ways of gods, of Nature.
The cosmos, the order of life and the universe, is a great paradox. It appears both terrifyingly indifferent to life and yet benevolently attentive to life. It is susceptible to investigation by naturalists, and yet it is ultimately knowable only in metaphors.
The Origin of the Species is “myth,” in the way Mircea Eliade uses the word myth – a story that tells how “a reality came into existence.”
Eliade wrote: “To tell how things came into existence is to explain them and at the same time indirectly to answer another question: Why did they come into existence? Eliade explains: “The why is always implied in the how — for the simple reason that to tell how a thing was born is to reveal an irruption of the sacred into the world, and the sacred is the ultimate cause of all real existence.”
The Origin of the Species is, in this sense, a religious story. Although Darwin’s intention was to tell a story that did not involve God, it makes us think of God, not just because it reminds us of Genesis, but because its genre is myth.
In the story told in The Origin of the Species, the species have emerged through a long struggle for survival. The struggle theme is also found in the ancient near eastern myths in which the cosmos emerged from a struggle between a god and a great sea monster, the god representing order and the sea monster representing chaos. Through the course of history, that myth became part of the western mosaic of myths and became a paradigm that has guided our attitudes and actions, which is what Eliade said myths do. The Origin of the Species is the latest retelling of that myth, but in the retelling the paradigm has changed.
In the new myth, order is not imposed on chaos by a god, but by the organisms of life themselves. The organisms have fought the battle themselves. This is the paradigm that guides our attitudes and actions in modernity.
The ancient myth explained the existence of an agrarian world ruled by kings and queens and emperors. The myth retold in The Origin of the Species explains an industrial world ruled by democracies and free markets. In the retold myth, we do not fight sea monsters, but each other and the world is not one given to us by a god, but one we have won or made for ourselves.
Does beauty reduce to necessity? The Darwinian answer is “yes.”
Donald Culross Peattie wrote, “You may pretend so if you like, but it is not demonstrable.”
He wrote those words in An Almanac for Moderns in 1935. A nature writer could write such things in 1935, but today I think it is harder for one to say this.
The possibility that the struggle for existence is not sufficient to explain beauty worried Darwin. He worried that it is not demonstrable.
It is a pity that the view of evolution named Darwinian today does not reflect the full careful thought and wisdom of the man whose name it bears.
I think Peattie is right – we pretend that we believe beauty reduces to necessity. I wonder why we pretend so? It may be that through science we have learned to overcome the great power of chance and necessity, but if beauty is something else, something free, then its power must be awfully great, just as poets say. It may never yield its secret, its freedom, to us.
In “The Holy Earth” (1915) Bailey wrote about evolution: “This is the philosophy of the oneness in nature and unity in living things.”
About the morality or immorality of the struggle for existence that is the instrument of natural selection, Bailey wrote: “If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition.”
It is, in Bailey’s estimation, morally significant that natural selection is not driven by ambition or purpose. By the expression “process of adjustment” I doubt that Bailey meant to offer an alternative teleology for the struggle. I think he understood that evolution, as understood in science, has no purpose, no meaning in a teleological way. If one removes the idea that life has purpose, then the character of morality must change, if it is to remain significant at all.
For Bailey, I think his expression “The Brotherhood Relation” defines morality, if the word morality even applies. I think the word eschatology applies here more than the word morality. The Brotherhood Relation is something that comes after the era of natural selection, after the era in which survival, the adjustment process, is tied to the instinct to kill. He wrote: “It is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place.” That is an eschatological belief, rather than a moral belief. It is a vision of a new era. It is eschatological in the way Isaiah wrote – the wolf shall dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6-9.) It is a vision of Zion, of God’s holy hill, of “The Holy Earth.”
Eschatology and evolution merge to form ecology in the writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey. In ecology, evolution sings the song of Zion.
John Burroughs wrote: “Natural selection is just as good a god as any other. No matter what we call it, if it brought man to the head of creation and put all things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough for anybody.” That is an allusion to Genesis 1:26 and Psalm 8:6.
Can stoicism overcome the nihilism associated with Darwin’s view, overcome what Burroughs called “the cosmic chill.” I think Burroughs believed stoicism would warm us. He wrote that “most persons feel homeless and orphaned in a universe where no suggestion of sympathy and interest akin to our own comes to us from the great void.” And then, in a sentence that alludes to Psalm 8:3-4 and to Darwin’s great work, he wrote: “A providence of impersonal forces, the broadcast, indiscriminate benefits of nature, kind deeds where no thought of kindness is, well-being as the result of immutable law – all such ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured ourselves to them.”
Inure: this is the counsel of stoics.
Burroughs wrote these lines in a work he titled stoically, “Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism” (1920.)
Thoreau had already famously written, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” They are related, I think – wildness and natural selection. Still, I am not sure Thoreau meant it that way. Although some critics have suggested that wilderness or nature was Thoreau’s god, and that a Zen theme (which is a stoical theme) can be detected in some of his writings, I think wildness was not natural selection to him – wildness was the opposite of civilization. Thoreau was engaged in resistance, not acceptance. In wildness was hope to him.
For me, stoicism fails. Resistance is my path. Resistance, and, like the psalmist and Thoreau, hope that we will find sympathy, kindness in the wildness in or beyond the moon and the stars.
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