The New Fusionism

Although Timothy Sandefur generally praises Darwinian Conservatism, he criticizes me for "absurdly suggesting that libertarianism is a variety of conservatism, which it emphatically is not." He claims that my Darwinian account of human nature supports libertarianism but not traditionalist conservatism. (His review can be found here.)

Sandefur correctly surmises that I assume a "fusionist" view of conservatism as combining libertarianism and traditionalism, a view most clearly stated in the 1960s by Frank Meyer. In April, I will be speaking at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society as part of a debate with John West. For that occasion, I will be writing a paper on "Darwinian Conservatism as the New Fusionism." Here I will only briefly indicate a few of the ideas that I will elaborate in that paper.

Darwinian science supports the conservative understanding of ordered liberty as conforming to a realist view of human nature as imperfectible, which is the common ground between libertarian conservatism and traditionalist conservatism.

In Darwinian Conservatism, I identify the core ideas of conservatism as manifested in the political thought of five conservative thinkers--Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Q. Wilson. While libertarians look to Smith, and traditionalists look to Burke, Burke's praise for Smith's two books--The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations--shows their fundamental agreement. Although Hayek and Kirk often criticized one another, their points of agreement were deeper than they were willing to admit. After all, both praised Burke and stressed the importance of cultural tradition in sustaining social order. Wilson might be seen as a traditionalist conservative insofar as he emphasizes the importance of moral character for social order. But he might also be seen as a libertarian conservative insofar as he shows how moral character is best nurtured through the spontaneous order of civil society. Moreover, Wilson indicates how the very possibility of moral order rests on the natural propensity of the human animal for developing a moral sense--a natural propensity that manifests human biological nature as shaped by Darwinian evolution.

In contrast to the utopian vision of human perfectibility that runs through the tradition of leftist thought, conservatives see human beings as naturally imperfect in their knowledge and their virtue. And yet conservatives believe that human beings do have a natural moral sense that supports ordered liberty as secured by the social order of family life, the economic order of private property, and the political order of limited government. A Darwinian science of human nature shows how these conditions for ordered liberty conform to the natural desires of the human species as shaped by evolutionary history. This broad vision of ordered liberty is shared by libertarians and traditionists, and it is sustained by Darwinian science.

Traditionalist conservatives sometimes criticize libertarians for promoting an atomistic individualism that is morally corrupting in dissolving any sense of communal order. But libertarians actually recognize the natural sociality of human beings and the need for character formation through social life in civil society. As David Boaz indicates (in chap. 7 of Libertarianism: A Primer), libertarians see that human beings have natural desires "for connectedness, for love and friendship and community," and those social desires are best satisfied in the natural and voluntary associations of civil society--in families, in churches, in schools, in fraternal societies, and in various commercial associations. Moral character formation is achieved better through such natural and voluntary associations than through the coercive association of the state. The coercive power of the state can secure the conditions for ordered liberty by enforcing the rule of law, securing domestic peace, protecting against foreign attack, and providing some of the institutional structures necessary for a free society. But when the state exercises unlimited power in coercively managing the daily affairs of life, it "undermines the moral character necessary to both civil society and liberty under law."

Like Boaz, Hayek agreed with Burke in stressing the importance of morality and character formation for a free society. "It is indeed a truth, which all the great apostles of freedom outside the rationalistic school have never tired of emphasizing, that freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs and that coercion can be reduced to a minimum only where individuals can be expected as a rule to conform voluntarily to certain principles" (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 62, 435-36).

Darwin explains how such moral order and character formation arises from the complex interaction of moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments that manifest the evolved desires of the human animal.

And yet traditionalist conservatives often charge that libertarians subvert morality by failing to promote the religious beliefs that are essential to moral life. Sandefur seems to confirm that charge by claiming that libertarians affirm reason rather than faith--that they deny "the assumption that we need a special magic spark to give us moral significance." Moreover, he insists that Darwinian science is on the side of reason against faith, and so he criticizes me for "seeming to appease religion."

But as I argue in Darwinian Conservatism, I don't believe that Darwinian science is on the side of reason against faith. When we ask for the ultimate explanation for why nature is the way it is, we cannot by reason alone either deny or affirm the existence of some supernatural ground of explanation.

Religious conservatives like Kirk look to God's eternal order as providing a transcendent purpose for morality and politics. Skeptical conservatives like Hayek look to the natural order of life as providing a purely natural purpose for morality and politics. Skeptical conservatives will be satisfied with Hayek's thought that "life has no purpose but itself."

Darwinian conservatism cannot resolve such transcendent questions of ultimate explanation. But at least it can provide a scientific account of the moral and political nature of human beings that sustains the conservative commitments to private property, family life, traditional morality, and limited government. And in a free society, individuals will be free to associate with one another in social groups--in families, in religious communities, and other natural and voluntary associations--in which people can freely explore the ultimate questions of human existence and organize their lives around religious or philosophical answers to those questions.

Libertarians like Sandefur accuse traditionalist conservatives like Kirk of being "theocratic." But if "theocratic" means using the coercive power of a centralized state to enforce theological doctrines contrary to the social order of civil society, then I cannot see that those like Kirk were "theocratic." Even the most fervent of the religious conservatives in the United States respect the Western tradition of religious liberty.

And in this they follow the New Testament teaching of Christianity about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. After all, the Christians in the New Testament formed churches as voluntary associations of believers, and they never sought the coercive power of the state to enforce their religion. Paul stated a libertarian principle by which the Christians should enforce their religious norms on those who belong to their churches, but should not act coercively against those outside the church. "For what is it to me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside" (I Corinthians 5:12-13).

On this point, conservatives--both libertarians and traditionists--follow a tradition of religious liberty that stretches from the early Christians to Roger Williams to Adam Smith to James Madison. The need for religious liberty follows from the conservative realist view of the imperfectibility of human nature. No human being can be trusted with the power to coercively enforce religious doctrine, because no one has sufficient knowledge or virtue to rightly claim to interpret God's will.

Here conservatives follow Lord Acton's famous maxim: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In fact, the context of this quotation from Acton's correspondence with Mandell Creighton indicates that it has a special application to theocratic, papal authority: "I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historical responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

Darwinian science can confirm the importance of religious belief as satisfying a natural desire for religious understanding. It can also confirm the social utility of religious communities in enforcing cooperative norms. And yet it also supports the need for religious liberty and the danger of theocratic power, because Darwinism recognizes that no human being can be trusted to exercise a presumed divine authority over other human beings.

But while judging such practical truths of religious belief and religious authority, Darwinian science can neither confirm nor deny the theological truth of religious doctrines.

Eugene Heath's Review

Eugene Heath, a philosophy professor at SUNY at New Paltz, has written a review of Darwinian Conservatism for the journal European Legacy, vol. 12, no. 1 (2007).

Heath generally praises the book: "Arnhart takes up these important issues in a judicious and informed manner, and his delivery is intelligent, careful, and devoid of posturing or special pleading."

But he also raises some questions about points that remain unclear, and he complains that "the brevity of the presentation--a feature of the Societas series--precludes a full and substantive account of how Darwinian ideas support conservatism." That's a fair complaint, because I do bring up some deep issues that are not given the lengthy elaboration that they deserve.

Heath wonders whether my argument doesn't leave a lot of room for "diverging social norms and political standards," as long as those norms and standards are within the broad limits set by human biological nature. So even those who don't consider themselves conservatives might find support in the book for "libertarianism or some realist conception of social democracy."

Heath also thinks I dismiss too quickly Hayek's idea "that our social and moral sensibilities, forged in an era of the small group or tribe, still incline us to 'tribal emotions' of solidarity and collective purpose, tendencies that clash with the abstract and purpose-independent rules of the spontaneous order."

Heath also wonders whether my biological account of the human capacity for moral judgment fully explains the human capacity "to recognize moral truths."

And, finally, Heath suggests that the social utility of religion might depend upon people believing in the truth of religion as transcending social utility.

These are all good points, although I think my replies should be evident in the book itself. Perhaps I can say more in a future post.

More on the Beckwith Review

The full text of Frank Beckwith's review of Darwinian Conservatism for The Review of Politics can be found here. Some comments over at the Right Reason blog can be found here.

Timothy Sandefur's Review

Timothy Sandefur has written a thoughtful review of Darwinian Conservatism for the Reports of the National Center of Science Education (May-June 2006). Some of his ideas are restated in a blog posting at the Panda's Thumb, which can be found here.

Although he is generous in his praise of my book, his main criticism is that I falsely assume a "fusionist" view of conservatism as combining traditionalist conservatism (such as was promoted by Russell Kirk) and libertarian thought (such as was promoted by Friedrich Hayek). Sandefur thinks that my Darwinian view of human nature is more supportive of Hayekian libertarianism than of Kirkian traditionalism.

I hope to have a future post responding to Sandefur's intelligent comments.

Sandefur's review is now available here.

A Reply to Francis Beckwith

Francis Beckwith of Baylor University has written a review of Darwinian Conservatism for the Fall 2006 issue of The Review of Politics.

The review (with the title "Natural Law Without a Lawgiver") begins and ends with some generous praise:

"Darwinian Conservatism . . . is a work marked by clarity of purpose, prose, and argument that one rarely finds in academic writing. One may disagree with Arnhart, but one cannot help but be impressed by the author's command of the relevant literature as well as his ambitious project to ground contemporary conservatism firmly in a well-respected scientific theory."

"Darwinian Conservatism is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation between scholars in politics, philosophy, religion, and the hard sciences. Although one can criticize Arnhart on some points, as I have, his project to offer a Darwinian account of conservative political philosophy should be taken seriously. Conservative critics of Darwin ignore Arnhart at their own peril."

And yet Beckwith fundamentally disagrees with me. Against my argument for Darwinian natural right, Beckwith appeals to what he understands to be the traditional conception of natural law as based on natural teleology. "Human beings have a certain end or purpose (or good) that is intrinsic to their nature. Inhibiting the achievement of that end, whether by accident or by intent, is wrong. But this judgment is only possible because we have knowledge of certain first principles and moral precepts that we call the 'natural law.' But 'law' implies a lawgiver, and designed natures imply a designer. Therefore, the natural law and our human nature have their source in Mind."

In the light of this conception of natural law as guided by Mind, Beckwith offers two criticisms.

"(1) It seems to me that Arnhart is correct that certain sentiments (e.g., love of family, children) are consistent with a conservative understanding of community. But these sentiments themselves seem inadequate to ground moral action or to acount for certain wrongs. For example, Tony Soprano's love of kin nurtures sentiments that lead to clear injustices, e.g., rubbing out enemies, about which Tony and family do not seem particularly troubled. In that case, the wrongness of the act is located not in the sentiments of its perpetrators (or even its victims, if the victims, for some reason, were convinced that they deserved to be rubbed out) but in a judgment informed by moral norms that stand above, and are employed by free agents, to assess acts and actors apart from their sentiments."

"(2) As I have already noted, Arnhart's account of morality is, at best, descriptive, for it does not provde the reason why I ought to follow it. Granted, it may very well provide us with an accurate description of what behaviors in general were instrumental in helping the human species survive. For that reason, it may very well explain why each of us may have certain moral feelings on occasion. But it cannot say why citizen X ought to perform (or not perform) act Y in circumstance Z. For example, it may be that the trditional family, as Arnhart argues, best protects and preserves the human species if it is widely practiced. But what do we say to the eighty-year-old Hugh Hefner, who would rather shack up with five twenty-something buxom blondes with which he engages in carnal delights with the assistance of state-of-the-art pharmaceuticals? Mr. Hefner is no doubt grateful that his ancestors engaged in practices (e.g., the traditional family) that made his existence and lifestyle possible. But whey should he emulate only those practices that many people today (e.g., Arnhart and I) say are 'good'? After all, some of our ancestors were Hefnerian in their sensibilities. . . . Because we have always had in our population Hugh Hefners of one sort or another, it is not clear to me how Arnhart can distinguish between good and bad practices if both sorts may have played a part in the survival of the human race, unless there is a morality by which we assess the morality of evolution. But this would seem to lead us back to the old natural law, the one that has its source in Mind and that is not subject to the unstable flux of Darwinian evolution."

Finally, Beckwith objects to one sentence in my book about religion. Beckwith writes: "In one place he writes: 'God intervenes in history to communicate his redemptive message to human beings, but he does not need to intervene to form irreducibly complex mechanisms that could not be formed by natural means'(90). I do not know how Arnhart knows this. . . . he needs more than stipulation to show why anyone else should think he is right about the limits of God's activity."

Since Beckwith does not summarize the arguments of my book, his readers cannot imagine how I would respond to his objections. But those who have read Darwinian Conservatism can easily understand how I would reply.

First, the quotation about God's intervention in history is taken out of a paragraph about the Bible. I write: "Notice that in the Bible, once God has created the universe in the first chapters of Genesis, God's later interventions into nature are all part of salvation history. God intervenes in history to communicate his redemptive message to human beings, but he does not need to intervene to form irreducibly complex mechanisms that could not be formed by natural means. The Bible suggests that God created the world at the beginning so that everything we see in nature today could emerge by natural law without any need for later miracles of creation" (90). If we look to the Bible as a divinely inspired record of God's activity, we would have to conclude that God is primarily concerned with salvational history, and that He does not need to constantly create bacterial flagella and other irreducibly complex mechanisms of life. Does Beckwith have another reading of the Bible?

My response to the Tony Soprano example should be obvious. Murder is condemned in every society throughout history because there is a natural human sentiment of indignation against unjust killing. No society could survive if the moral sentiment against murder were not strong. So when the God of the Bible commands the people of Israel to kill all the people in captured towns--even innocent women and children--we know that this cannot be correct (Deuteronomy 20:10-20).

My response to the Hugh Hefner example should also be obvious. Although there is a natural desire for sexual mating, there are also natural desires for conjugal love, parental care, familial bonding, and enduring friendship. Mr. Hefner might satisfy his desire for promiscuous mating, but his pleasure will be shallow and momentary. Marriage and family life promote our fullest happiness over a whole life. And that's why the image of an 80-year-old Hefner surrounded by his bunnies evokes both disgust and pity among mature people. We know that such a life is deeply unsatisfying in its shallowness and thus bad because it's undesirable for any sensible human being.

What would Beckwith say to Hefner? Mr. Hefner, don't you realize that your life of sexual promiscuity violates the commands of Mind? To which Hefner might respond: Mind? Are you suggesting some kind of Cosmic Mind? Would you please explain what that could possibly mean? And why should I obey the commands of such a Cosmic Mind? How would I know that the commands of this Cosmic Mind are good? Wouldn't I need to have some standard of goodness to judge this? But if I already have a standard of goodness independent of the commands, why do I need these commands of the Cosmic Mind? Is something good because the Cosmic Mind commands it? Or does the Cosmic Mind command it because it is good?

Whenever a moral philosopher like Beckwith tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, Why? And ultimately the only final answer to that question is, Because it's desirable for you as something that will fulfill you, make you happy, and allow you to flourish as a human being. And if I am right about my list of 20 desires as rooted in human nature, then this would constitute a universal standard for what is generally good for human beings, although prudence is required to judge what is good for particular individuals in particular circumstances.

I have elaborated these and related points in my writing about "Darwinian natural law". and the Bible.

Neuhaus on the Bible and Slavery

John West, Carson Holloway, and other critics of Darwinian conservatism often criticize my claim that morality can be rooted in a natural moral sense of human biological nature, because they insist that Biblical religion is the only reliable source of moral norms. I agree that Biblical religion can often reinforce our natural moral sense. But I suggest that the Bible commonly lacks the moral clarity and reliability that we need. And consequently, we have to filter the Bible through our natural moral experience to arrive at the proper moral conclusions.

To illustrate this, I have noted that the Bible does not clearly condemn slavery as immoral. In fact, all of the specific references to slavery in the Bible seem to sanction it. So in the antebellum debate over the morality of slavery in the United States, the Christian defenders of slavery could plausibly argue that slavery was Biblically supported. The history of this debate has recently been surveyed in Mark Noll's book--The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

Charles Darwin was a life-long opponent of slavery who saw it as a violation of the natural moral sense and the moral principle of reciprocity. Opponents of slavery like Abraham Lincoln invoked this principle of reciprocity in condemning slavery as a violation or reciprocal fairness: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." "This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave." Such a natural moral reasoning does not depend on the Bible. On the contrary, it is only such reasoning that allows us to correct the Bible so that we can read it as condemning slavery. (I have elaborated the Darwinian grounds for condemning slavery in Chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right.)

In Noll's book, he writes (p. 50): "With debate over the Bible and slavery at such a pass, and especially with the success of the proslavery biblical argument manifestly (if also uncomfortably) convincing to most Southerners and many in the North, difficulties abounded. The country had a problem because its most trusted religious authority, the Bible, was sounding an uncertain note. The evangelical Protestant churches had a problem because the mere fact of trusting implicitly in the Bible was not solving disagreements about what the Bible taught concerning slavery. The country and the churches were both in trouble because the remedy that finally sovled the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms. The supreme crisis over the Bible was that there existed no apparent biblical resolution to the crisis. As I have written elsewhere, it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant."

In the December issue of First Things (p. 70), Father Richard John Neuhaus quotes this passage and then observes: "All the answers may very well be in the Bible, if only we could agree on its interpretation. Noll's very serious point . . . is that the Civil War played a large part in shaking the confidence of a Protestant and Bible-believing nation in the capacity of religion to resolve disputes of great public moment. Catholics never believed that the Bible, unmediated by interpretative authority, could play that role. Which does not mean that there could not have been a Civil War if this had been a predominantly Catholic country. It does mean that all cultures, philosophies, and belief systems, religious or not, are subject to being taken captive by disordered passions that overwelm a necessity humility in the face of historical dynamics that we neither understand nor control."

Neuhaus's position is hard to understand. While suggesting that the Bible could be our final guide to moral judgment, he also suggests that it cannot do this without mediation by the "interpretative authority" of the Catholic Church. But then he admits that it is not clear that the authority of the Catholic Church could have avoided the Civil War by correctly interpreting the Bible as condemning slavery. Ultimately, it seems that Neuhaus is left with a historicist relativism in which we must humbly submit to "historical dynamics that we neither understand nor control."

Against such historicist relativism, Darwinian conservatism, with its rooting of morality in a natural moral sense of human biological nature, is a far more reliable ground for moral judgment.

A Reply to John West, Part 2

Continuing my reply to John West's new book Darwin's Conservatives, I will respond briefly to his last two chapters--Chapter 6 ("Is Darwinism Compatible with Religion?") and Chapter 7 ("Has Darwinism Refuted Intelligent Design?").


(6) Religion

That Darwinism denies religious belief is clear to West because "a dominant majority of leading defenders of Darwinism seem to be either avowed atheists or agnostics" (65). I don't know whether it's a "dominant majority" or not. But it is surely true that many of those who accept Darwinian science are either atheists or agnostics. But then, of course, the same could be said about every field of natural science. Many of those who accept modern physics and chemistry are either atheists or agnostics. But it does not follow that religious believers should therefore see modern physics and chemistry as a threat to their faith.

I argue that Darwinian science--like all natural science--leaves open the question of ultimate explanation. All explanation assumes ultimately an uncaused cause that cannot itself be explained. Why is there anything at all? And why are things ordered the way they are? Some people will appeal to nature as the ultimate ground. Others will appeal to nature's God as the ultimate ground. As far as I can see, natural science generally, including Darwinian science, cannot deny the possibility that nature depends on God as the First Cause.

To which West responds: "But this 'first cause' allowable by Darwinism seems incompatible with the God of the Bible. It cannot be a God who actively supervises or directs the development of life. The most it could do is to set up the interplay between chance and necessity, and then watch to see what the interplay produces. Such an absentee God is hard to reconcile with any traditional Judeo-Christian conception of a God who actively directs and cares for His creation. In the end, the effort to reconcile Darwinism with traditional Judeo-Christian theism remains unpersuasive" (71).

Darwin begins The Origin of Species by quoting Francis Bacon speaking about God revealing himself through "two books"--the Bible and nature. In the last sentence of The Origin of Species, Darwin leaves his reader with a vivid image of nature's God: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

To me this indicates how Darwinian evolution could be compatible with a religious belief in God as the original source of nature's powers. Michael Behe agrees with me. In his book Darwin's Black Box, he indicates that evolutionary science is "quite compatible" with such religious belief (239).

But this is not enough for West, who insists that God as the First Cause of nature is still not "the God of the Bible." Does he mean to suggest, then, that intelligent design theory does lead us to "the God of the Bible"? Well, no. Because West says that intelligent design reasoning does not prove the existence of a supernatural creator (90-91).

In fact, Ken Ham (of "Answers in Genesis") and other Christian creationists complain that intelligent design theory is not compatible with "the God of the Bible," because the intelligent designer has none of the distinctive traits of God as presented in the Bible. For creationists like Ham, Darwinian evolution and intelligent design theory are both incompatible with Biblical religion.

Darwinian evolution and intelligent design theory are in the same boat here. They are both open to the possibility that nature depends on some supernatural First Cause. But whether this is the "God of the Bible" is a matter of faith beyond any rational study of nature. As West admits, the proponents of intelligent design cannot determine "whether the intelligent cause is the Judeo-Christian God" (87).


(7) Intelligent Design

In his last chapter, West tries to defend intelligent design theory against my criticisms. In response, I will make only a few points.

I have cited Kenneth Miller's explanation for how natural selection could have built the bacterial flagellum, which Behe and others have argued is "irreducibly complex." West counters this by citing a paper by Scott Minnich and Stephen Meyer, which can be found here.

West does not acknowledge, however, that there are some serious errors in the Minnich and Meyer paper. The errors are set out in a recent article: M.J. Pallen & N.J. Matzke, "From The Origin of Species to the Origin of Bacterial Flagella," Nature Reviews Microbiology, 4 (10), 784-790. Minnich and Meyer state that "the other thirty proteins in the flagellar motor (that are not present in the TTSS) are unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system." Pallen and Matzke have shown that the number of indispensable proteins that are "unique" is no more than 2. Mistakes like this are typically detected through the process of scientific peer review.

I claim that intelligent design is mostly a negative argument from ignorance with little positive content. That is to say, the proponents of ID attack Darwinian science for not satisying the highest standards of proof, and then they conclude that if the Darwinian arguments fall short of absolute proof, then ID wins by default. The sophistry here is that the proponents of ID set up standards of proof for Darwinian science that they themselves could never satisfy if they had to make a positive case for ID.

I say that for ID to have some positive content, its proponents would have to explain exactly where, when, and how a disembodied intelligence designed "irreducibly complex" structures like the bacterial flagellum. West responds by saying that the proponents of ID don't have to do this. They can infer that there is an intelligent designer without explaining exactly where, when, or how the designer works. But that confirms my point! The proponents of ID cannot do what they demand that the Darwinists must do--provide detailed, step-by-step explanations of exactly how these "irreducibly complex" mechanisms are constructed.

For example, in Darwin's Black Box, Behe acknowledges that evolutionary theorists can develop scenarios of how evolution could have constructed "irreducibly complex" mechanisms. But this is insufficient, he complains. "Although they might think of possible evolutionary routes other people overlook, they also tend to ignore details and roadblocks that would trip up their scenarios. Science, however, cannot ultimately ignore relevant details, and at the molecular level all the 'details' become critical" (65).

After offering an example of an evolutionary scenario, Behe comments: "Intriguing as this scenario may sound, though, critical details are overlooked. The question we must ask of this indirect scenario is one for which many evolutionary biologists have little patience: but how exactly?" (66)

Ok, Behe, I might say, let's apply to you the standards of proof that you apply to Darwinism. Intriguing as your scenario for intelligent design may sound, critical details are overlooked. The question we must ask of your intelligent design scenario is one for which many proponents of intelligent design have little patience: but how exactly?

An Article by John West

John West has written an article for Human Events, which is composed of a few selections from his book Darwin's Conservatives. It can be found here.

A Reply to John West, Part 1

The Discovery Institute Press has just published a new book by John West--Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. West is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, the leading conservative group in promoting "intelligent design theory" and criticizing Darwinian science. His book is an incisive and intelligent attack on the argument of my Darwinian Conservatism. Here he elaborates criticisms that he first stated in a conference paper for a panel that we were on at the 2006 convention of the American Political Science Association. The panel was sponsored by the Claremont Institute.

He analyzes my book as presenting seven main arguments: "(1) Darwinism supports traditional morality, (2) Darwinism supports the traditional view of family life and sexuality; (3) Darwinism is compatible with free will and personal responsibility; (4) Darwinism supports economic liberty; (5) Darwinism supports 'non-utopian limited government'; (6)Darwinism is compatible with religion; and (7) Darwinism has not been refuted by intelligent design" (10-11). He organizes the seven chapters of his book around those seven arguments.

In this post, I will respond briefly to his first five chapters. I will leave the topics of religion and intelligent design for a second post to come later.

Here is how West summarizes his arguments against me: "Darwin's theory manifestly does not reinforce the teachings of conservatism. It promotes moral relativism rather than traditional morality. It fosters utopianism rther than limited government. It is corrosive, rather than supportive, of both free will and religious belief. Finally, and most importantly, Darwinian evolution is in tension with the scientific evidence, and conservatism cannot hope to strengthen itself by relying on Darwinism's increasingly shaky empirical foundations" (11).

I would stress, however, that, like Carson Holloway, West agrees with me that the biological science of human nature does support conservative thought on many points (13, 31-32, 36). He disagrees with me about the ultimate causes of human biological nature. I explain those ultimate causes through evolutionary biology. He rejects evolutionary science as totally false, and he explains the ultimate causes of human biology as the work of an intelligent designer. This suggests that there is some ground of compromise. Even if we can't agree on "Darwinian conservatism," we might agree on "biological conservatism." Because we might agree that the observable biological nature of human beings supports conservative thinking, even if we disagree about the ultimate causes of that nature.


(1) Traditional Morality

In criticizing my argument that the Darwinian understanding of the natural moral sense supports traditional morality, West is vague about the ground of his support for traditional morality. Occasionally, he speaks of a "transcendent standard of morality" (21), a "permanent foundation for ethics" (22), or "moral truth" (40), but without explaining exactly what he has in mind.

West sometimes refers to "traditional Judeo-Christian morality" (21). He doesn't explain this, although he does suggest a couple of times that he is refering to Biblical morality--the moral teaching of the Old and New Testaments--which would include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (69-71, 143). He sometimes suggests that he is refering specifically to the Biblical teaching "that human beings are created as the result of God's specific plan" (143). But in his entire book, he refers to only two Biblical verses (69-70)--the Old Testament declaration that "the heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalms 19:1) and the New Testament declaration of Paul that God's creation manifests his invisible attributes (Romans 1:20).

So how exactly does the Bible provide a clear and reliable moral teaching contrary to the Darwinian moral sense? West rejects Darwin's account of how the social instincts of human beings might have evolved because cooperating for the good of the group favored the group's survival and reproductive fitness in competition with other groups (20). But something similar is said in the Bible. Whenever Moses wants to give an ultimate reason for obeying his laws, he warns the people of Israel that obeying these laws is the only way for them to survive and propagate themselves (Deuteronomy 4:1-8, 4:40, 30:15-20). And just as Darwin recounts the ancient history of group against group conflict, the Bible repeatedly shows how the people of Israel had to put a "curse of destruction" on their enemies, so that all of those they conquered--including innocent women and children--would have to be slaughtered (Numbers 31:1-20; Deuteronomy 20:10-20). Is this "traditional Judeo-Christian morality"?

West is disturbed by Darwin's account of infanticide in primitive tribes, but West does not comment on the Biblical passages where infanticide seems to be endorsed (Genesis 22; Numbers 31; Deuteronomy 21:18-21; Judges 11:29-40).

The Bible endorses slavery. In fact, the Biblical basis for slavery is so explicit that the proslavery Christians in the American South were adamant in defending slavery as Biblically justified. This split the Protestant denominations before the Civil War into Northern and Southern schisms. Doesn't this illustrate how the Bible does not always provide clear and reliable moral guidance? Doesn't it show that to get a proper moral teaching from the Bible, we have to pass the Bible through our natural moral sense?

West writes: ". . . I am not quarreling with Arnhart's attempt to enlist biology to support traditonal morality. I actually agree with him that showing a biological basis for certain moral desires could conceivably reinforce traditional morality--
but only if we have reason to assume that those biological desires are somehow normative. . . . If one believes that natural desires have been implanted in human beings by intelligent design, or even that they represent irreducible and unchanging truths inherent in the universe, it would be rational to accept those desires as a grounding for a universal code of morality. . . ." (22-23).

Does West really mean this--that we are morally obligated to follow all of our natural desires if we believe they are the product of intelligent design or an unchanging nature? How exactly would that work?


(2) The Traditional Family

Darwin noted that in human history polygamy was common. West scorns this as contrary to "the Judeo-Christian conception of marriage as an institution ordained from the inception of humanity" (26-26). But polygamy is endorsed in the Old Testament and in the Islamic tradition, which follows the Old Testament teaching. Thomas Aquinas justified polygamy as "partly natural," although it was also "partly unnatural," because of the conflicts from the sexual jealousy of the co-wives. Darwinian biologists can see the same problem: although polygyny--multiple wives--has been common in history, it is disruptive because of the jealousy within the household.

There is a long Christian tradition of trying to abolish the family. In Darwinian Natural Right, I comment on the history of "Bible communism" in the Oneida Community, where Christians tried to abolish marriage and the family as a step to Christian perfection. Would West say that this is a misinterpretation of the Bible? If so, how exactly do we ensure correct interpretations of Biblical morality?


(3) Free Will

West claims that Darwinian biology must reject the idea of free will as the ground of personal responsibility. But if by "free will" West means "uncaused cause," then I would say--along with Jonathan Edwards and others--that only God has "free will" in this sense, because only God is an "uncaused cause." But if "free will" means acting on our natural desires in the light of our deliberate choices, then I would accept this as compatible with Darwinian science. Darwin's comments on the importance of practical deliberation--acting in the light of past experience and future expectations--show this kind of moral freedom.

I speak of human moral freedom as an "emergent" product of the evolution of the human brain. West rejects this as contrary to "the traditional Judeo-Christian belief in an immaterial soul" (38). But doesn't the New Testament teaching about the resurrection of the body suggest that the resurrected soul depends on a resurrected body (I Corinthians 15)? The dualism of immortal soul separated from mortal body seems more characteristic of pagan philosophy than Biblical teaching.


(4) Economic Liberty

I argue that Hayek's conception of "spontaneous order" is a point of contact between Darwinism and conservatism. West rejects this by saying that the spontaneous order of an economy or a society arises not through genetic evolution but through cultural evolution. But this ignores my point--stressed in Darwinian Conservatism--that we need three sources of social order: genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and deliberate reasoning. Genetic evolution and cultural evolution show spontaneous order. Deliberate reasoning shows intelligent design. I draw this trichotomy from Darwin who often emphasizes the importance of cultural learning along with reasoning as interacting to create moral norms. As an example of this, I show how the history of property moves through three levels--natural property, customary property, and formal property.


(5) Limited Government

West is right that the utopian eugenicists and the American progressives identified themselves as Darwinians in arguing for the expansion of governmental power for utopian ends. But, as I indicated in my chapter on Social Darwinism, these "social Darwinists" were not really acting out of a clear and accurate understanding of Darwinian science. One might as well say that Christianity was responsible for Hitler's anti-Semitism because Martin Luther's anti-Semitism was often cited by the Nazis.

Moreover, on the matter of eugenics, I think Darwin was reasonably clear. For example, he thought that the laws prohibiting incestuous marriages should be based on accurate studies of the effects of inbreeding, so that cousin marriages should be permitted if they did not pose any great risks of increased physical or mental harm to the offspring of such marriages. The same kind of reasoning would justify the work of Ashkenazi Jews in discouraging the marriage of those who are carriers for Tay Sachs disease. This illustrates the "good eugenics" that almost all of us would support--as opposed to the "bad eugenics" of the Nazis.


I will have more to say in response to John West's book in a future post.

An Electoral Victory for Libertarian Conservatives

The U.S. election results would seem to be a victory for libertarian conservatives and a defeat for social conservatives and neoconservatives.

The defeat of Rick Santorum--the leading social conservative in the Senate, a proponent of "intelligent design theory," and a critic of Darwinism--is dramatic. Consider also the defeat of the aborton ban in South Dakota, the victory of the stem-cell research referendum in Missouri, the victory of the ban on affirmative action in Michigan, the passing of state referenda protecting private property against unreasonable uses of "eminent domain" powers, the resounding rejection of Bush's neoconservative war in Iraq--all of this suggests that conservative voters are unhappy with the agenda of social conservatism and neoconservatism and supportive of limited government securing ordered liberty.

This creates an opportunity for libertarian conservatives to revive the tradition of limited government conservatism and to find support for this in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The Utopian Folly of the Iraq War

Conservatism is founded on a realistic vision of human nature as imperfectible--of human beings as limited in their knowledge and virtue and of the human tendency to factional conflict driven by ambition, avarice, and fanaticism. By contrast, the Left is founded on a utopian vision of human nature as perfectible through rational social planning. Darwinian science supports conservatism by sustaining its realistic view of human nature.

The American war in Iraq violates such conservatism by assuming a utopian view of human nature. That explains why many American conservatives now realize that the neoconservative idealism of Bush's war in Iraq is not really rooted in conservative thought.

The American war in Iraq is foolishly utopian in at least two respects. First, it is utopian in the assumption that the institutions of ordered liberty can be nourished around the globe in every society by imperialistic wars. In his Second Inaugural Address, Bush self-consciously imitated Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Bush proclaimed "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world" by using military force to overthrow tyrants and thus liberate all of mankind. "We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul." This is utopian because it ignores the fact that the achievement of ordered liberty requires more than just the longing of the soul for liberty. It requires customary traditions that evolve gradually and unpredictably in ways that cannot be managed by military rulers.

Bush actually acknowledges this in one passage of his speech: "Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own."

It should be evident by now that the "customs and traditions" of Iraq do not support national unity under the rule of law and limited government. The traditions of Islamic sharia and sectarian factionalism will not permit free institutions to develop anytime soon.

The other utopian element of the American war in Iraq is that this has been a Presidential war. Bush's Second Inaugural is a glorious speech. But that's just the problem! The American constitutional framers understood that the President would be tempted to go to war to satisfy his ambition and love of glory. That's why they designed a constitutional system based on a balance of powers that would have ambition checking ambition. (This is the subject of my chapter on limited government in DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM.) The President's glory-seeking ambition as Commander in Chief would be checked by the powers of Congress for declaring war, for regulating and financing the military, and for impeachment. Regretably, however, the Congress of the United States has largely given up its war powers to the President. Rather than insisting on a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution, the Congress passed an Iraq Resolution in October of 2002 that essentially gave unlimited discretion to the President to launch a war as he wished.

To assume that a politically ambitious man like the President can be trusted to exercise such discretionary and arbitrary power assumes a perfection of wisdom and virtue in the President that is nothing more than a utopian fantasy. A more realistic, and therefore conservative, view of presidential power and glory was stated by James Madison in his fourth Helvidius paper:

"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man; not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

"Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war; hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence."

Darwinian conservatives will agree with President Bush that there is a natural desire for liberty. But they will insist that one fundamental condition for satisfying that natural desire is a system of limited government in which chief executives do not have the discretionary power to initiate imperialistic wars in the name of liberty.

John Derbyshire and God

In the history of the United States, there have been periods of intense religious enthusiasm. Historians speak of the First Great Awakening in the middle of the 18th century and the Second Great Awakening early in the 19th century. It might be that the post-World War II era was another Great Awakening when evangelical Christianity stirred unusual enthusiasm across the country. But this seems to be cyclical. And it seems that the latest Great Awakening is now waning.

I have seen this in my university students. In the early 1980s, I noticed that many of my students were "born-again Christians" whose faith dominated their lives. This was surprising, because when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was told by many of my professors that religion would soon disappear as part of the "modernization process." They were wrong. In fact, some of those professors are now talking about the importance of religious belief in shaping political life. After all, the "clash of civilizations" that we now see in world politics turns on religious cleavages between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Although I don't think religious belief will ever disappear, because I think it is rooted in a natural human desire, I do see a weakening of the emotional enthusiasm that I once saw in my students. I have heard that many evangelical leaders are beginning to worry because they also see a dramatic drop in the number of young people attending evangelical churches.

This change is reflected in the American conservative movement. After a few decades in which the religious right has dominated much of the conservative politics of the United States, it now seems that many conservatives are questioning the assumption that conservatism must coincide with Christian evangelical orthodoxy. And some of this questioning arises from a move to Darwinian conservatism.

For example, John Derbyshire, an editor at National Review has just written a column on his lack of Christian faith.

Like me, he argues that there is still room to believe in something like God to account for the two fundamental mysteries--the mystery of the origin of the universe and the mystery of the individual human consciousness. But this "mysterian" openness to the divine is far from any orthodox religious tradition.

Derbyshire gives many reasons why he gave up his Anglican Christianity. The biggest reason, he says, was biology. As he studied biological ideas of human nature, he found it hard to see human beings as created in God's Image. That's why the Creationists hate Darwinian biology.

I would say, however, that the very mysteries of the origin of the universe and the human consciousness remain mysteries within Darwinian biology, which leave a big opening for religious belief.

Derbyshire asks the question of whether an irreligious person can be a conservative. He answers as I would. Yes, he can, because he can believe in "limited government power, respect for traditional values, patriotism, and strong national defense." Of course, "traditional values" might include religious belief. But some of the best minds of the Western cultural tradition have not been religious believers. Still, the conservative must respect religious belief, even if he does not accept it as strictly true, because he must recognize that it expresses some of the deepest longings of human nature.

"Conservatism," Derbyshire rightly observes, "has at its core an acceptance of, a respect for, human nature. We conservatives are the people who see humanity plain, or strive to, and who wish to keep our society in harmony with what we see. Paul Johnson has noted how leftists always used to talk about building socialism. Capitalism doesn't require building. It's just what happens if you leave people alone. It arises, in short, from human nature, and only needs harmonizing under some mild, reasonable, laws and customary restraints. You don't have to build it by forging a New Capitalist Man, or anything like that."

That's what I call "Darwinian conservatism"--a conservatism rooted in a realistic vision of human nature that is confirmed by Darwinian science.

Sherlock Detects Strauss's Secret

In defending "Darwinian natural right" and "Darwinian conservatism," I show the influence of Leo Strauss and his students. But my effort to ground "natural right" in a scientific understanding of human nature is scorned by most Straussian scholars.

This points to the fundamental ambiguity in the legacy of Strauss. On the one hand, the powerful appeal of Strauss came from his warning that modern relativism and nihilism had created a crisis for the West by denying natural right or natural law as the ground for any natural standards for the true and the good. On the other hand, Strauss and his students have not offered any explanation for how exactly natural right or natural law can be defended in the modern world.

In a recent issue of Modern Age (Summer 2006), Richard Sherlock reflects on this ambiguity as manifesting "The Secret of Straussianism." Strauss's Natural Right and History is a profound account how how the premodern conception of natural right was subverted by modern relativism and nihilism. But then, as Sherlock indicates, the reader is left at the end of the book waiting for a philosophic grounding of natural right that will withstand the attack from modern traditions of thought. Strauss's silent refusal to satisfy this expectation indicates the true secret of Straussianism.

Contrary to the common assumption that Strauss was arguing for a return to classic natural right, Strauss was actually teaching--even if only by his silence--that a grounding of natural right is impossible. Consequently, Sherlock suggests, Strauss's appeal to premodern natural right was more rhetorical than philosophic. He thought it was morally and politically salutary to attack modern relativism and nihilism as inferior to classic natural right. But even as he did this, he left clear indications to his careful readers that there really was no ground in nature for natural right.

Sherlock rightly points to the most popular Straussian book--Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind--as conveying the secret teaching. Bloom scorns the debilitating effects of modern nihilism, and yet he praises Nietzsche as Socratic in his skepticism. Bloom's passionate devotion to philosophy as perpetual openness manifests the very nihilism that he supposedly rejects. (As I have indicated in some previous postings, Harvey Mansfield shows a similar skepticism about natural right, in his book on manliness, when he asserts "manly nihilism.")

Sherlock concludes, "the secret of Strauss's teaching is that there is no philosophic answer to the fundamental problems of human existence: What is the good? How shall I know it? How shall I live in its light?"

What could Strauss have done to ground natural right? Sherlock suggests that he should have followed the path taken by one of his fellow German Jews--Simone Weil--and turned toward faith or theology as the ultimate ground of moral and political judgment. I agree that such an alternative must be taken seriously, because it satisfies the natural human desire for religious understanding by moving beyond nature to nature's God as the uncaused cause of the cosmos, including the moral order of the whole.

But Sherlock also recognizes other possibilities. Strauss could have tried "to ground natural right in the scientific study of human nature, as some of his extended followers, such as Roger Masters and Larry Arnhart, have done."

As Strauss and many of his students have suggested, the problem of natural right could be solved only if we could defend a teleological conception of nature against the apparent denial of teleology in modern natural science. Natural right seems to require a cosmic teleology so that that the order of the whole universe supports human goodness.

But I would argue that natural right could be grounded in a biological teleology that does not require a cosmic teleology of the whole universe. Strauss points to this possibility in Natural Right and History: "For, however indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions" (p. 94).

While Bloom seemed to endorse the idea of natural teleology as rooted in human biology, he also suggested that such natural teleology is only an illusion., even if a noble illusion. "I mean by teleology," Bloom wrote, "nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process" (pp. 110, 130-31). The qualifying phrase--"which may be only illusory"--allowed him to simultaneously deny and affirm the truth of natural teleology, which creates a strangely ambiguous position that one can find among many of Strauss's students, wanting to root Aristotelian natural right in a science of human nature, but also wanting to adopt a Kantian dualism that separates nonhuman nature and human culture.

One reason for this Straussian ambiguity is that Bloom and others think that the teleology required for natural right is a cosmic teleology that has been rendered implausible by modern science. But as I have argued, Aristotelian natural right requires only an immanent teleology--the observable goal-directed character of living beings--that is supported by Darwinian biology. Here I agree with Leon Kass that a crucial part of a "more natural science" would be a Darwinian understanding of teleology as rooted in "the internal and immanent purposiveness of individual organisms" (Towards a More Natural Science, pp. 249-75).

Antony Flew's Review

Antony Flew, emeritus professor of philosophy at Reading University in the U.K., has written a review of Darwinian Conservatism in the October-November issue of Right Now!, a British conservative journal.

Flew is famous as a philosopher who has written some of the classic philosophic texts arguing for atheism. He was an active participant in C. S. Lewis's Socratic Club. But while he was impressed by Lewis's thoughtful and fair-minded defense of theism, he was not persuaded.

So when he began a few years ago to suggest that the argument for "intelligent design" had led him to change his mind and question his atheism, this became an international news story. The history of Flew's thinking can be found in various places, including this Wikipedia article. It seems, however, that even if Flew is no longer a strict atheist, he has moved more towards deism rather than theism. He wonders whether the complex order of the universe doesn't point to God as First Cause. But he doesn't see this God as having the personal attributes of the Biblical God, and he doesn't believe in an afterlife.

This resembles my position, which is that the quest for ultimate explanations--the search for an uncaused cause--leads us to a fundamental choice between Nature or Nature's God as the unexplainable ground of all explanation.

Since Flew's review is not available online, I will quote it in its entirety here:

"The author of the present book is an American with, primarily, American readers in mind. He therefore, when thinking about Darwin's theory of the origin of species, cannot fail to be reminded that when, early in the 20th century that theory began to be taught in public schools, William Jennings Bryan supported legislation in the State of Tennessee prohibiting any teaching of evolution as denying the Biblical teaching that human beings were directly created by God. Today's well financed campaign to establish that the universe itself is the product of intelligent design points to the fabulous integrated complexity of the world of living creatures as itself the strongest evidence of intelligent design.

"Larry Arnhart's thesis in this book, which I think he proves abundantly, is that the constraints of our biological nature explode the most persistent delusion of the Left: 'that man is so malleable that he can be reshaped or transformed through political actions.' Consequently, a Darwinian politics is a largely conservative politics.

"When Harvard University biologist Edward Wilson argued that sociobiology should study the biological roots of human nature, he was attacked by those on the Left. What bothered the Leftists, Wilson explained, was 'the threat perceived to the core concept of their belief system--namely, that there is no human nature, that human behaviour and human social institutions are entirely the product of economic forces and culture; in other words, that human beings can be shaped by imposing an ideal social order.'

"Larry Arnhart is to be commended for producing an excellent book about conservative thought."

Peter Lawler and the Conservatism of Manly Nihilism

Many conservatives reject Darwinian science not because they believe that it's false, but because they fear that it's true.

In The Use and Abuse of History, Friedrich Nietzsche declared: "If the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines that I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people."

Unlike other animals, Nietzsche believed, human beings cannot live without giving their lives meaning and importance--the meaning and importance that come from creating transcendent values as artistic illusions that elevate human life by giving it cosmic significance. In support of this tragic view of mythic art as necessary to create value and conceal the meaningless chaos of the world, Nietzsche criticized "scientific Socratism" for seeking pure knowledge through science and philosophy, which fails to see the need for artistic illusion to make human life meaningful and important.

Many conservatives have implicitly adopted this Nietzschean position in warning against Darwinian science as a "deadly truth." This is evident in a recent article by Peter Augustine Lawler--"Real Men Prove Darwin Wrong (Again)"--in the fall, 2006, issue of The Intellercollegiate Review. Identifying Harvey Mansfield and Tom Wolfe as "America's two most astute social commentators," Lawler praises them for their manly rejection of Darwinian science.

In a lecture on "The Human Beast," which can be found here, Wolfe argues that what separates human beings from other animals is the human capacity for speech. He writes: "The Book of John in the New Testament says cryptically: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' This has baffled Biblical scholars, but I interpret it a follows: Until there was speech, the human beast could have no religion, and consequently no God. In the beginning was the Word. Speech gave the beast its first ability to ask questions, and undoubtedly one of the first expressed his sudden but insatiable anxiety as to how he got here and what the agonizing struggle called life is all about. To this day, the beast needs, can't live without, some explanation as the basis of whatever status he may think he possesses. For that reason, extraordinary individuals have been able to change history with their words alone."

So to Wolfe it seems that human beings yearn for a transcendent meaning to life that is created by the words of "extraordinary individuals." Darwinian science threatens that human creation of values by explaining human beings as mere beasts and nothing more. Lawler and other conservatives agree.

Lawler also likes Mansfield's defense of "manliness" against Darwinian thought. While Mansfield opens and closes his book on manliness by apparently endorsing the teaching of Plato and Aristotle that "manly virtue" is rooted in nature, the central chapter of his book (Chapter 4) is devoted to the "manly nihilism" of Teddy Roosevelt and Friedrich Nietzshe. He thus leaves his reader suspecting that the secret teaching of the book is the truth of "manly nihilism."

"The most dramatic statement of nihilism," Mansfield asserts, "would be the one where the man is the source of all meaning." Nietzsche is "the philosopher of manliness in modern times." Teddy Roosevelt is the best political expression of manly nihilism, particularly in the "assertiveness of executive power." Mansfield is famous for his Machiavellian defense of executive prerogative outside the rule of law, which includes some recent articles defending President Bush's displays of the "assertiveness of executive power."

Although the underlying intent of Lawler's article is hard to discern, his praise of Wolfe and Mansfield as the alternative to Darwin suggests something like Nietzsche's position. And just as Nietzsche warned against "scientific Socratism," Lawler warns against Darwinian Socratism. He writes: "There is, after all, something Socratic in evolutionism's and neuroscience's denial of the pretensions of the individual about his soul and his identity, its denial of the very existence of 'the self' that distinguishes you from me, and us from all the other animals."

Against Nietzshce and Lawler, I would suggest that Darwinian science can be true without being deadly. Darwin often asserted (in The Descent of Man, that the mental capacities of human beings and other animals differ immensely in degree but not in kind. Conservatives like Lawler worry that this denies the freedom and dignity of human beings as uniquely spiritual animals with transcendent longings.

But Darwin sometimes spoke of the human difference as a difference in kind and not just in degree. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity." He also identified "the habitual use of articulate language" as "peculiar to man." And he observed that "no animal is self-conscious," if this means "that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth."

So here Darwin would agree with Lawler that human beings are unique in their capacities for reflecting on the meaning of life and death, for self-conscious moral choice, and for articulate language, which make human beings different in kind from other animals.

How does one explain the origin of that human difference? In Chapter 8 of Darwinian Conservatism, I explain it as the human soul arising through the emergent evolution of the primate brain. With the increasing size and complexity of the frontal lobes of the primate neocortex, novel mental capacities appear at higher levels that could not be predicted from the lower levels. Even if we see this as the work of God in creating human beings in His Image, we can't deny the possibility that He exercised his creative power through a natural evolutionary process.

My point, then, is that conservatives like Lawler have no reason to fear a Darwinian science of human life as promoting a reductionistic materialism that denies human freedom and dignity. A Darwinian conservatism can explain the unique capacities of human beings for deliberate thought and action as arising from the emergent evolution of the soul in the brain.

So What's Wrong with Incest?

"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?"

That's the way Jonathan Haidt began an article on the psychology of moral judgment. He reported that most people immediately condemn what Julie and Mark did as wrong, but they struggle to give reasons for this judgment. I have had the same reaction from students in my classes when I present this story. They react with disgust. But it's hard for them to give reasons to justify their disgust.

Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, argues that this illustrates the primacy of emotion in moral judgment. Against the tendency to explain morality as caused by moral reasoning, he suggests that moral reasoning usually comes after we have already made a moral judgment from our emotional reaction. He also claims that such a view of moral judgment as initially caused by emotional intuition is confirmed by biological psychology.

I agree. In fact, I think the incest taboo is one of the clearest illustrations of how a moral rule can be explained by a Darwinian view of human biological nature. In The Descent of Man, Darwin acknowledged that "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important," and explaining the uniqueness of human moral experience created the "greatest difficulty" for his theory of evolution.

Proponents of the "theory of special creation" would say that that the human moral sense or conscience shows that human beings have been specially created in God's image, so that He has implanted a conscience in them. God's specific commands against incest are found in the Old Testament, in the 18th chapter of Leviticus, which was long adopted in Western legal codes as a set of rules for forbidden marriages.

But Darwin rejected the belief "that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience." He saw the rules for forbidden incestuous marriages as a subject for scientific investigation. During his lifetime, there was an intense debate in England over whether the marriage of first cousins should be prohibited as incest. Darwin had a personal stake in this, since he had married his first cousin (Emma). He proposed that Parliament should authorize a study of cousin marriages to see if their offspring suffered from inherited defects. Although his proposal was rejected, his son George did a study that concluded that the risk for the offspring of cousin marriages was often low.

In his book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin has a chapter "On the Good Effects of Crossing, and On the Evil Effects of Inbreeding." He surveys the experience of animal breeders in discovering the bad effects of inbreeding. And he wonders whether natural selection could have shaped a natural aversion to incest among human beings. "Although there seems to be no strong inherited feeling in mankind against incest, it seems possible that men during primeval times may have been more excited by strange females than by those with whom they habitually lived. . . . If any such feeling formerly existed in man, this would have led to a preference for marriages beyond the nearest kin, and might have been strengthened by the offspring of such marriages surviving in greater numbers."

In Xenophon's Memorabilia (IV.iv.19-23), Socrates identifies the "unwritten laws" legislated by the gods as laws that could not be disobeyed without natural penalties. He speaks of the incest taboo as one of those "unwritten laws," because those committing incest tend to produce defective offspring. Darwin's evolutionary explanation of this would illustrate, then, how Darwinian science might support the traditional idea of "natural law" or "natural right." (I have argued this in a book chapter: "The Incest Taboo as Darwinian Natural Right," in Arthur Wolf and William Durham, eds., Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century [Stanford University Press, 2005].)

Edward Westermarck elaborated Darwin's reasoning for the biological evolution of the incest taboo in his book The History of Human Marriage (first published in 1889). Westermarck's theory can be summarized in three propositions. First, inbreeding tends to produce physical and mental deficiencies that lower Darwinian fitness. Second, as a consequence, natural selection has favored an emotional disposition to feel a sexual aversion to those with whom one has been raised in early childhood. Third, this natural aversion to incest creates moral disapproval that is expressed as an incest taboo.

This put Westermarck in conflict with Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory of human psychology and culture, because Freud insisted that the inclincation to incest was natural to human beings, and that the taboo against incest arose as a purely cultural construction that human beings created to repress their natural desires for incest, this cultural repression of human nature being necessary for civilization. So morality, as Freud understood it, required a conquest of human nature by human culture. By contrast, Westermarck believed that morality was a cultivation of natural human emotions, so that the incest taboo was a cultural expression of a natural human disposition shaped in human evolutionary history.

Over the past century, the evidence for Westermarck against Freud has grown. Arthur Wolf's study of "minor marriages" in China is one line of evidence. A traditional form of Chinese marriage was for parents to give their infant daughter to another family to be raised with the family's infant son, so that when the boy and girl reached maturity, they would be married. Wolf showed that these marriages were generally unsuccessful, because children raised together as siblings developed a sexual aversion to one another.

Another line of evidence came from the experience of the Israeli kibbutzim. In the attempt to create a fully socialist community, the kibbutz would have infant children taken from their families and put in the "children's house," where they would be raised together communally. When they reached sexual maturity, the children were encouraged to find marriage partners among those with whom they had been raised. But the children resisted this, because even though they were not biological relatives, they felt as if they were siblings and thus felt revulsion at the thought of sexual mating with one another.

So it seems that these children in China and in the kibbutzim were manifesting the "Westermarck effect": as a result of an innate disposition shaped by evolutionary history, they developed a sexual aversion to the children with whom they had been raised, even though they were not actually biological siblings.

Another kind of evidence for Westermarck's theory is that it now seems that many primates show incest avoidance. While Freud thought that incest was common among nonhuman animals, we now know that this is not true. For most primate species, males leave their native troop when they reach sexual maturity, which seems to be a mechanism for avoiding excessive inbreeding. For chimpanzees, the females leave at maturity to join another troop. This means that chimp mothers will be in the same troop with their sons. And their sons often do attempt to mount their mothers and sisters, but when the males reach sexual maturity, their mothers and sisters generally push them away. This is what Westermarck's theory would predict. The human incest taboo is humanly unique as a legal and moral norm, but it expresses a natural emotional disposition that can be found in primate evolutionary history.

Freud may have been fooled by his psychoanalytic experience, because in his Vienna, many of his patients had been raised by nurses rather than their parents, and in these conditions, the "Westermarck effect" would not kick in. After all, Oedipus himself was separated from his mother shortly after birth, and so again the sexual aversion to mating with immediate family members would not have been acquired by the Westermarck mechanism.

This Darwinian theory of the incest taboo goes a long way to explaining marriage law. In the United States today, all states prohibit people from marrying their parents, their children, or their siblings. But there is disagreement over cousin marriages. Early in the nineteenth century, all states permitted cousin marriages (as is the case today in Europe). But now cousin marriages are prohibited in 31 states, while being permitted in 19 states. (The debate over cousin marriage is surveyed in Martin Ottenheimer's book Forbidden Relatives [University of Illinois Press, 1996].) There is a good argument for permitting cousin marriage, because we now know that the genetic risk from deleterious recessive genes is often low for cousins, but high for those more closely related. Further, Westermarck's theory would predict that except in cases where cousins are reared together, there will not be a strong moral emotion against cousins mating.

There is great variation in the incest taboos across cultures depending upon the cultural definition of kinship categories.  But the variable boundaries of the incest taboos are extensions of an invariant core centered on the nuclear family.  The emotional reaction is strongest against incest with one's parents, siblings, and children.  The intensity of this emotional reaction fades as one moves away from the nuclear family.

Of course, incest does occur. But the pattern of incestuous behavior follows the predictions of Darwinian theory. Men are more likely to be the perpetrators of incest than are women, because men, unfortunately, are more indiscriminate in their sexual promiscuity.  The most common form of incest is actually child abuse--fathers abusing their daughters.  And this is more likely to occur if the fathers did not participate in the early rearing of the daughters.

Some people might not feel any moral inhibition against incest because they suffer from a psychopathic poverty of moral emotions. But still, the natural aversion to incest among most human beings is so strong that we formulate moral and legal norms against incest and enforce them as expressions of our natural emotional dispositions.

We can see how reason comes into play here. We might, for example, call on our knowledge of the genetics of inbreeding to rationalize our abhorrence of incest. But this is only a rationalization of a moral abhorrence that causes our moral condemnation of incest as an expression of moral emotion.

For more posts on the laws and moral psychology of incest, go here, here, here, here. here, here, here,  here., and here.  I have written about the flaws in Haidt's use of the "Julie and Mark incest story."

Michael Shermer's Darwinian Conservatism

The October issue of Scientific American has a short column by Michael Shermer on why Christian conservatives should accept Darwinian evolution. A longer statement of Shermer's arguments can be found in Chapter 8 of his new book Why Darwin Matters.

I agree with Shermer. In fact, much of what he says conforms with what I have written in Darwinian Conservatism and elsewhere. But in some ways, Shermer makes his points more clearly and concisely than I have.

As Shermer indicates, many American Christians accept evolution, and this includes those Catholics who follow the lead of Popes such as John Paul II who have endorsed the theory of evolution as true and as compatible with Christianity. And yet opinion surveys indicate that many American evangelical Christians and many conservative Republicans do not recognize the truth of evolution.

In the attempt to persuade these Christian conservatives to accept evolutionary science, Shermer makes seven kinds of arguments. I will summarize each of his arguments in my own words and adding a few points along the way.

His first argument is that Christians should accept evolution for the same reason that they accept any scientific theory--because it is true. The Bible says that God ordered the sun to "stand still" for a day to help Joshua win a battle (Joshua 10:10-15). This was cited by the Catholic church authorities who condemned Galileo's heliocentric theory as contrary to the Bible, which speaks of the sun as moving around the earth. But, of course, now all Christians see this as a misinterpretation of the Bible, because they accept the truth of the Copernican/Galilean theory of the solar system. So why shouldn't this apply to Darwin's theory as well?

His second argument is that the magnificence of God's creation does not depend on exactly how He exercised his creative activity. If He chose to act through natural evolutionary means, His work is still glorious. Darwin himself made this point when He spoke of the grandeur of God in creating one or few forms of life at the beginning and then impressing His laws onto matter so that the formative powers of nature could unfold by evolution.

Shermer's third argument is that Intelligent Design Theory and creationism present a demeaning view of God by conceiving of Him as being like us, but just more powerful and more intelligent. God is reduced to working like a human artisan who must employ whatever materials are available to make his product, just as a watchmaker makes a watch.

Shermer's fourth argument is that the Darwinian account of human morality supports traditional morality by showing how the human dispositions to cooperation, sympathy, reciprocity, and social bonding generally could have become part of evolved human nature. Far from subverting healthy morality, Darwinian science shows how it can be rooted in human nature.

Of course, human beings are naturally bad as well as naturally good, competitive as well as cooperative. Christians would explain this as a result of the Fall and original sin. But as his fifth argument, Shermer suggests that evolutionary theory can explain the negative side of our evolved nature as well as the positive side. Our species has evolved to be both altruistic and selfish, and much of our moral experience has to do with finding ways to overcome the conflicts this creates. Darwin speaks of the moral experience of regret or remorse: we follow some selfish impulse of the moment, only to discover later that this contradicts our social nature, and we regret what we have done, which gives rise to guilt and conscience.

Shermer goes on, as a sixth argument, to indicate how evolutionary theory explains the need for moral and religious codes to manage the conflicts in our evolved natures. We evolved in small bands in which the members had to cooperate with and trust one another in order to compete with those outside the band. Moral emotions, such as love, guilt, and shame evolved to enforce cooperation with one's family and friends. But this cooperative behavior did not extend beyond the band or tribe. We are naturally inclined to cooperate with our in-group but not with out-groups. This is manifest in the Old Testament, which teaches trust and cooperation within the community of Israelites, while also teaching brutal attacks on those outside the community. Gradually, the advantages of extended exchange and cooperation in ever wider circles allowed human beings to live in larger communities. The Christian morality of the New Testament promotes principles such as the Golden Rule to sustain such extended cooperation. But even Christian morality shows in-group/out-group distinctions--as in the depiction of the extermination of the forces of evil in apocalyptic war in the book of Revelation.

We have evolved for monogamous mating. But we have also evolved to have inclinations to opportunistic promiscuity. In the long run, infidelity is harmful because it promotes distrust and conflict. This explains why religious morality gives so much attention to condemning and punishing infidelity and adultery.

Of course, some people think they can cheat without being punished because they think they can lie successfully. But, Shermer notes, if we have evolved to be good liars, we have also evolved to be good lie detectors. And so the best way to persuade others that we are moral people is actually to be moral people!

Not only does Darwinian evolutionary theory support the moral and religious positions of Christian conservatism, Shermer indicates in his final argument, it also supports the economic and political thinking of conservatism. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection parallels Adam Smith's account of economic order as arising spontaneously from competitive markets. Like Darwin, Smith thought that human beings were both cooperative and competitive. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith laid out his account of the moral sentiments as rooted in the natural capacity for sympathy or fellow-feeling by which we share in the experiences of others. Darwin adopted this thinking for his account of the evolution of the moral sense. And yet Darwin also saw the selfish side of human nature, and this would support the Smithian idea of channelling the selfish motives of economic agents through free competition. Moreover, the very idea of economic order as arising spontaneously from free exchange without design by central planners follows the same logic as evolution by natural selection without design. Friedrich Hayek saw this parallel between Darwin and Smith. In fact, he believed that Darwin's insight into evolution by natural selection was simply an application to the biological world of what Darwin had learned from the Scottish moral philosophers about the spontaneous order of social evolution.

I would reinforce this last point by saying that a Darwinian view of human evolution supports a realist view of human beings as limited in both knowledge and virtue, which contrasts with the utopian view of human beings as perfectible. The belief in human perfectibility runs through the history of the Left from the French Revolution to the present. The belief in human imperfectibility runs through the history of conservatism from Adam Smith and Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk.

So there you have it--seven reasons why Christian conservatives should be Darwinians.

Shermer's column can be found here.

Adam Smith and the Neurology of Sympathy

In 1996, some Italian scientists studying the neural activity of macaque monkeys reported a remarkable discovery. They had been recording the neural activity in the premotor cortex of these monkeys whenever they engaged in a manual behavior such as picking up a raisin with their hands. Then one day, one of the scientists casually picked up a raisin with his own hand, and he was startled to notice that electrodes in the brain of the monkey were showing the same neural activity that appeared when the monkey picked up raisins. This scientific report claimed that there were "mirror neurons" in the brains of these monkeys--neurons that would fire when the monkey performed an action or when the monkey observed the same action performed by some other agent. Ever since then, research has confirmed the apparent existence of such neurons in various parts of the primate brain that suggest a neural basis for imitative learning and social understanding.

Research using brain imaging technology has shown that similar mechanisms exist in the human brain. Recent studies have uncovered a mirror system in the human brain that is more extensive and more complex than that found in other primates. Some areas of our brain become active both in response to our own actions and in response to sensory information about the same actions performed by others. This includes hearing actions or hearing language that resports such actions. If I hear someone eating candy, my brain will show activity in the same area that would be active if I were eating candy. Or if I hear a report of someone eating candy, the same brain area becomes active.

It has been suggested that these mirror systems might explain the capacity for empathy. And, indeed, it has been reported that people who score high on tests for empathy show a stronger activation of these mirror systems than people who scored low for empathy.

It seems possible, then, that our human capacity for "putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or mind)" is literally just that. We rehearse mentally what another person is doing or experiencing by going through the same mental activity that we would have if we were ourselves doing or experiencing this.

This is what Adam Smith called "sympathy," or "fellow-feeling with any passion whatever," in the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Darwinian Conservatism, I show how this underlies Smith's account of the moral sentiments, and how Charles Darwin adopted this in his biological acccount of morality. Our natural sociality, our natural capacity for imaginatively putting ourselves in the place of others, and our concern for judging how people appear to us as well as how we appear to others provide the natural basis for human morality and culture.

Now, if the research on "mirror neurons" is confirmed and deepened, this would sustain my argument about how morality and culture are rooted in human biological nature, because this would uncover the neural basis for such moral experience. Moreover, this could suggest an evolutionary pathway for human morality--the evolution of mirror systems in the primate brain could have brought about the emergence of human morality in the human brain.

Aristotle declared that human beings are by nature more political than the other political animals because by nature they have capacities for language and reason that allow them to organize communal life around shared conceptions of expediency and justice. Now we are seeing confirmation of Aristotle's biology of political animals by seeing how this political biology arises in the human brain's capacity to imaginatively project itself into the brains of others.

Darwinian Conservatism and Divine Command Theory

In the The American Conservative, Heather Mac Donald has expressed the frustrations of a "skeptical conservative" who cannot understand why so many American conservatives assume that morality and good citizenship require religious belief. Catholic conservative Michael Novak has written a response. This opens up a fundamental issue for conservatives.

In defense of Darwinian conservatism, I have argued that although religious belief can be helpful in reinforcing morality, it is not absolutely necessary, because ultimately our morality depends on a natural moral sense rooted in our evolved human nature. Religious conservatives like Carson Holloway and Peter Augustine Lawler have criticized me for not seeing how morality depends on religious belief.

I have defended my position as a Darwinian version of traditional natural law reasoning. Human moral experience is natural insofar as it arises from those natural inclinations that we can know by reason alone. Of course, that natural moral law can be taught by religion, but it can stand on its own natural ground even without religion. Darwin shows how that natural moral law could have arisen by natural evolution.

Michael Novak seems to agree with my view of natural law when he says it is "the law discovered by reason alone, without revelation," although revelation provides a helpful "short cut" to this natural law. Here then would seem to be common ground for all conservatives: morality can be known by natural experience alone because it is rooted in the natural moral sense, but religion can reinforce this moral law for believers.

And yet there is still a strong inclination among religious conservatives to a divine command theory of morality that drives much of the criticism of my Darwinian conservatism. The assumption of divine command reasoning is that moral obligation must be grounded in the commands of a good and loving God. If God did not exist, there could be no moral obligations.

One of the best statements of this divine command theory of morality is C. Stephen Evans' book Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2004). (A paperback edition of this book is being published this month.). Evans has a chapter criticizing my reasoning in Darwinian Natural Right as an example of "evolutionary naturalism." Evans endorses what he takes to be Kierkegaard's divine command morality as founded on the command of Jesus to love our neighbors, understood as a universal and disinterested love of all human beings equally. Evans then criticizes my reasoning as flawed insofar as I don't acknowledge that all morality must be rooted in such a divine command.

Darwin sees a natural tribalism in human morality. We are inclined to be more cooperative with those close to us--relatives, friends, and fellow citizens--than to those far away. Human beings are naturally inclined to cooperate within groups so as to compete successfully with other groups. Darwin thinks a universal sympathy for humanity is possible, but only as an extension of social emotions cultivated first in small groups. He assumes that as we expand our social sympathies to embrace all of humanity, these sympathies become weaker as we move farther away from our inner circle of family, friends, and fellow citizens. And yet this extension of sympathy to embrace all of humanity is strong enough to support the Golden Rule as the foundation of morality. Still, the tribalism of morality can never be eliminated. Charity starts at home. And in war, we properly celebrate the virtuous courage of soldiers in killing the enemy.

Although Evans does not draw out the full implications of his view of universal love as a divine command, he suggests that this requires absolutely disinterested love for all human beings equally, which would require absolute pacifism (see pp. 319, 328 in his book). To favor our friends, relatives, and fellow citizens over strangers would violate this universal love commandment. To use violence against evil individuals would violate it. And to fight in war would certainly violate it. Such universal love might even require the abolition of private property and family life. Some kind of pacifist socialism would seem to be required. It is hard to see that many human beings could embrace this as morally acceptable.

Evans finds Gods commands in the Bible. But it is not clear that the Bible provides the clear moral teaching of universal love that Evans wants. God commanded Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Evans says that while God might have commanded human sacrifice in the past, we know that God cannot command that "today." He seems to assume that the love command of Jesus in the New Testament overrides the bloody commands of the God of the Old Testament. (The brutal commands of the Old Testament God include orders to slaughter innocent women and children as part of God's conquest of Canaan.) But even the New Testament concludes with the bloodiest book of the Bible--the Bible of Revelation with its vision of the apocalyptic battle of the saints against Satan at the end of history.

Evans criticizes my Darwinian arguments for the abolition of slavery and insists that the immorality of slavery arises only from its violating God's love command. But Evans says nothing about the fact that all the passages in the Bible on slavery endorse it, and thus the antebellum Christians in the American South were justified in believing that slavery was biblically sanctioned. (The recent book by Mark Noll on the theological debates surrounding the civil war tells this story well.)

As I have argued previously on this blog, the Bible lacks the authority, clarity, and reliability necessary for being a source of moral guidance. If the Bible reinforces morality, it is only because we pass it through our natural moral sense. We know that the biblical account of God ordering Abraham to kill his son must be somehow mistaken, because we know by natural moral experience that this is wrong. We know that the Bible's endorsement of slavery is mistaken, because, again, our natural moral sense condemns it. If we elevate the Golden Rule over other teachings in the Bible, its because we have arrived at the rule through natural experience. That experience also teaches us, however, that disinterested, universal love cannot be absolutely observed because we must favor family, friends, and fellow citizens over strangers. The Christian tradition of "just war" reasoning shows how our natural moral sense corrects the dangerous utopianism of a universal love ethic.

Biblical Darwinism

Biblical believers (like Carson Holloway and John West) often criticize Darwin for promoting a materialist view of morality that is morally corrupting. They argue that healthy morality requires biblical religion.

But I would say that in The Descent of Man, Darwin lays out a moral psychology that coincides with what one finds in the Bible.

Darwin sees moral progress in human history as a product of the complex interaction of innate sociality, cultural learning, rational reflection, and religious belief. "Ultimately, our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (Penguin Classics edition, p. 157).

In the primeval history of human beings, Darwin sees morality emerging through tribal conflict. Those tribes with more cooperative and courageous members would tend to prevail over those tribes that were less cooperative and courageous. Biblical believers criticize this as endorsing a crude morality of tribal brutality.

But the Old Testament confirms Darwin's history. Moses commands the people of Israel that in conquering the land of Canaan, they must put every town under "the curse of destruction"--every living thing must be killed (Deuteronomy 20:10-20). They must do this if they want to be successful in their conquest. They must cooperate among themselves to compete with enemy tribes with whom they cannot cooperate without being destroyed. Whenever Moses gives the reasons for obeying his laws, he explains that obeying these laws is the condition for the survival and reproduction of the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).

Of course, biblical believers might remind us that in the New Testament, Jesus offers a new moral law surpassing the Mosaic law. He teaches the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Matthew 7:12).

But Darwin quotes this verse from the Sermon on the Mount and endorses the Golden Rule as "the foundation of morality" (p. 151). He sees this as a moral conception that human beings had to learn over a long history of moral experience by which they learned to extend their humanitarian sympathy to ever wider communities. "As man advances in civlization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (p. 147).

This quotation from Darwin is the epigram for Robert Wright's book Nonzero. Wright argues that the moral and political history of human civilization is a history of cultural evolution in which human beings discover ways of expanding the range of tit-for-tat reciprocity to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" problems. Learning how to cooperate with those who are trustworthy while punishing those who are not trustworthy will be favored by both natural selection and cultural evolution.

Of course, Jesus' commands to "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" would seem to subvert the moral logic of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which requires that cheaters be punished by retaliation. But generally Christians have read this non-resistance teaching as a teaching of perfection that is not attainable in earthly life, because most Christians understand the reasonableness of the Darwinian claim that the success of morality depends on punishing the immoral.

So it seems that in some respects, the moral teaching of the Bible is Darwinian.