The Evolution of Morality, Part 1: Introduction
It is time to get down to the matter at hand, the reason I write. Raging at the obvious hypocrisy of the day was merely a warm-up, the speedbag of a pugnacious mind. There is a particle of grit in my craw (or my shell —I’ll let you decide if I am cawing at the dawn or producing pearl), and it won’t let me be. The grating infantilism of what passes for everyday thought (especially, but far from exclusively, in this particular place and time) is a constant irritant.
Perhaps the location of the sand is not in the gut at all, but under the eyelid, scratching away until the little red squiggles of veins turn to worms, twisting in a scarlet miasma. Real understanding is the only thing that provides temporary relief from the itching.
I am far from the first to suggest that morality is a living, breathing thing. Nietzsche said as much — after the syphilis had kicked in, but before it robbed him of coherence (which only throws the arbitrary cruelty of consciousness and time into stark relief — had he been born 30 years later, he might have been cured with penicillin rather than poisoned with mercury, and he might have written some polite editorials calling Hitler a dangerous demagogue instead of prattling on about how Zarathustra spake).
Where he and I disagree is the engine of change. Where he saw morals as the product of a fight between classes of nobility and slaves, I see it as something more visceral. Where he deigned to appoint himself judge of the usefulness of one or another set of values, I grant that role to a higher power. No, not god, but physical reality.
This is the central tenet, the long pole of my tent:
A set of values is either conducive to the survival of a species, a culture, or an individual or it dooms its holder to decline and death, usually — our species being what it is — at the hands of a competing set of human values.
People perpetually misunderstand evolution. They think things evolve for a purpose, as if the oxygen-rich air screamed, “How sweet would it be to breathe me?” and some organism swimming in the primordial sea obliged by growing a lung. That’s not how things work. Things simply grow as if out of nowhere. If they prove useful in the fight against the violent world around them, they endure. If they don’t, they die out.
So, too, concepts and values, though not quite out of nowhere.
Humans have, in theory, developed the ability to respond and adapt purposefully, but that ability itself is a non-deterministic development, a gene far from guaranteed to be present in most examples of the kind. Behavior today still bears the telltale traces of impulses that served a useful function then, but are useless now. Like an appendix or a tonsil, they weren’t actively deleterious to the cause of human survival for a millennia or two, but now that we’re right down to it…they are inflamed and set to rupture. The gene we require instantiates itself far too infrequently for the predicament of our own making we find ourselves in.
This construct makes me humbler than Friedrich, which should be a relief to anyone who worries my missives might gain momentum. Nietzsche’s writings were egregiously misinterpreted as a paean to cruelty and violence. I can only imagine how frustrated he would have been, if he had had to watch the dull farce of the Nazis’ rendition of what it means to be an ubermensch (I guess they missed the part where he said all anti-Semites were to be shot dead). His language implied that the morality of the noble classes was “better.”
I will make no such judgments. In fact, to the extent I provide a blueprint for a “better human,” it will in no way be mistaken for a pretense to build a clerical state organizing the dull extermination of any part of the human race. If that’s where anyone goes with it, that’s on them, not me.
Life is a rare thing, worthy of protecting (not in its fetal peanut theoretical form, but in its elemental, aggregate and actual form). As I type this, I am hurtling through the vacuum of space at 490,000 miles per hour, wrapped in a thin blanket of oxygen and other gases protecting me from the poisonous radiation of space. Five miles up, I asphyxiate and freeze. Five miles down, my lungs collapse and burn. I am also watching a sweet song bird in my yard viciously excavate and annihilate an innocent earthworm. What else is a robin to do? They must eat.
And so must I, but where the robin finds its nourishment in wriggling protein, I find it in the calming presence of unsettling truth. I want to chart the course of how we got here and where it leads. Spoiler alert: nowhere good. We need a new archetype, if we are to escape to something better.
Follow along with me, while there is still time.
