In the current issue of Salvo Magazine, Cameron Wybrow has an article arguing that the story of the X-men--as portrayed in Marvel comics and in films--exposes the weaknesses in my evolutionary conception of ethics.
In the debate between Charles Xavier and Magneto over whether or not the mutants should rule over the normal humans as natural slaves, Wybrow claims, Magneto's assertion of mutant superiority and dominance over the humans conforms to the "pure logic of Darwinism." If evolution is all about "survival of the fittest," where the stronger species exterminates or rules over the weaker, then Xavier's policy of protecting the humans (Homo sapiens) from attack by the mutants (Homo superior) is incoherent because it assumes a "secularized Christianity" that is not supported by Darwinian science.
That the strong should protect the weak is a "Christian sentiment" rooted in the Christian belief that we have ethical obligations based upon an intelligently designed cosmic teleology. "If human beings are to have natural ends, and natural obligations," Wybrow claims, "then any 'evolutionary' process that may have occurred must have been end-directed, producing human beings not as a transient phenomenon but as a goal; and such human beings will have a genuine essence in the classical sense, from which ethical and political obligations can be derived."
Since I reject such a cosmic teleology in arguing for a naturalistic ethics rooted in evolved human nature, Wybrow explains, I contradict myself by appealing to moral sentiments that cannot be sustained without a cosmic teleology directed to human beings as the intelligently designed goal of the cosmos.
In his reply to this article, Michael Mills makes two good points. First, Magneto is wrong in separating mutants and humans as distinct species: "the mutants are simply remarkable outliers of the species Homo sapiens." I agree. In fact, the very term "X-men" indicates this: the mutants are human beings with some "X-tra" powers. Moreover, throughout the X-men stories, we see that the mutants have most if not all of the twenty natural desires that I have identified as distinctive to human beings.
Mills's second point is that this common human nature includes a shared need for cooperation and care for others. Despite their special powers, the mutants are dependent on one another and on the ordinary human beings in their pursuit of a happy flourishing life.
Furthermore, I would point out that Magneto must argue that he is leading a just war of self-defense against the aggressive threat of the normal humans. Xavier's position depends on the truth of his claim that the ordinary humans will not try to oppress the mutants, and therefore that peaceful cooperation is best for both mutants and ordinary humans.
In the X-men comics, there is a "Days of Future Past" storyline in which the ordinary humans set out to persecute the mutants just as the Nazis did the Jews. If something like that were to come true, then Xavier would have to join Magneto in fighting against the humans, just as it would have been justified for the Jews to fight against the Nazis. This would express their natural desires for self-preservation and for justice as reciprocity. Would Wybrow disagree? Would he say that the mutants are morally obligated by a cosmic teleology aimed at human beings to passively submit to oppression?
If Homo sapiens is the goal or end of the whole cosmic process, as Wybrow suggests, does that imply that Christian human beings would be justified in exterminating the mutants as deviations from nature's end? If so, then the human acceptance of this Christian cosmic teleology would justify Magneto's claim that the mutants are in a fight to the death with the normal humans.
Wybrow might respond by insisting that Christianity teaches universal peace and love. But this ignores the bloody violence of the Old Testament and the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament, in which the few chosen people of God triumph in battle, and all others are condemned to eternal punishment. These Biblical themes run through much of the violence of the X-men stories. (Consider, for example, the parallels with Moses and the Book of Revelation in the character of Apocalypse and the alternative reality of the "Age of Apocalypse.")
As I have indicated in a previous post, the sort of argument that Wybrow makes against Darwinism was originally made by Friedrich Nietzsche, and my response to Nietzsche could also apply here. In another post, I respond to the common idea that Darwinism means "might makes right."
Various responses to Wybrow's points about cosmic teleology, the eternity of species as essences, and the concern for the "ought" can be found here, here, and here.
What I really want to know is, since when did Professor Arnhart reading X-men comics? How was I a graduate student under him for 3 years without ever learning this?
ReplyDeleteWhich leads me to the question -- could I have written my dissertation on comic books?
Also, just for the record, I want to say that I think Professor Arnhart would have made a much better Xavier than Patrick Stewart.
A dissertation on the biopolitical theory of the X-men comics would be good.
ReplyDeleteWe also need some work on Iron Man, which will be part of my course next semester on "Politics and the Life Sciences."
It would be hard to replace Patrick Stewart as Professor X, but I'm available.
Dear Dr. Arnhart:
ReplyDeleteI thank you for your response to my article.
Regarding the criticism of Michael Mills, see my response to him at the Salvo site.
Regarding your own remarks, I would make the following points:
1. Magneto's argument for the need to conquer or exterminate normal human beings is not based exclusively on the need for mutants to defend themselves. As I pointed out in the article (5th paragraph), he also argues from a presumed "natural right" of the superior to supplant the inferior. It is the latter argument which is Darwinian, as I show later on in the article.
2. You write: "If something like that were to come true, then Xavier would have to join Magneto in fighting against the humans.... Would he say that the mutants are morally obligated by a cosmic teleology aimed at human beings to passively submit to oppression?" To the first remark, I answer: "Yes, obviously, but so what?" To the final question I answer "No", for two reasons. First, within the fictional world of the X-Men, there is no cosmic teleology, because it is a Darwinian world; and second, even if in the real world there *is* a cosmic teleology, I don't see why a cosmic teleology would require allowing oneself to be slaughtered or enslaved by an aggressor. (Unless one's cosmic teleology is Quaker or Jaina or something of the sort.)
3. You write: "If Homo sapiens is the goal or end of the whole cosmic process, as Wybrow suggests ..." I did not argue dogmatically that Homo sapiens is the goal or end of the process. What I argued is that if Homo sapiens is *not* the goal or end of the process, then there appears to be no ground of moral obligation between the mutated man with superior power and the normal Homo sapiens who lacks that power. If there is such a ground, I would like to know what it is.
4. You write: "If Homo sapiens is the goal or end of the whole cosmic process, as Wybrow suggests, does that imply that Christian human beings would be justified in exterminating the mutants as deviations from nature's end?" I would think that mutants, if understood as deviations, would have to be treated like other deviations. Do Christians normally terminate the lives of babies born blind, for example? If not, then why would mutants be in danger from Christians?
5. You write: "Wybrow might respond ..." But I didn't. So your remarks about the Bible are an answer to a claim that I never made.
Dr. Arnhart, I tried to make my article focused and coherent. By contrast, I am finding your objections to my article rather scattershot. I would have preferred a couple of flowing paragraphs addressing the main theoretical question that my article raises, which is: what is the ground of moral obligation within a Darwinian conception of evolution? Related questions would include: Where does the "ought" come from, in expressions like "the superior ought to help the inferior"? Why shouldn't the superior rule over the inferior? Or exterminate the inferior, if the inferior is superfluous and cramps his style?
That is what happens, indirectly, in Darwinian evolution: the superior animal (in a given environment) causes the eventual extinction of the inferior one by competing with it and driving it out of existence. Why shouldn't human beings use their intellects to speed up this process, if and when they get the opportunity? Why don't they owe as much, or more, to the potential greatness of their own evolutionary future as they owe to the transient community of individuals they happen to have been born into, a community that was produced by the evolutionary activity of the past? I urge you to reread my argument in a more relaxed frame of mind. I do not think you have dealt with the full force of it.
You don't think I have dealt with "the full force" of your argument.
ReplyDeleteHave you had a chance to look at any of the blog posts to which I provide links at the end of this post?
Having written so much about the points you raise, both in my blog writing and in my various books and articles, I'm not inclined to repeat that writing here, unless you have some specific objections to what I have written.
It would also be helpful if you could offer your alternative explanation of ethics based on cosmic teleology.
Dr. Arnhart:
ReplyDeleteI have now read the columns you indicated. The most interesting to me was the one on Darwin and Nietzsche. Unfortunately, I agree with Nietzsche's criticism of Darwin and of David Strauss, so my reading moves us further apart, not closer together.
Darwin, as you say, tries to ground the evolution of morality in the social instincts. I don't find such arguments persuasive. Not only are such arguments largely hypothetical (we can learn nothing or almost nothing about the social instincts of a hominid species for which our total evidence is a single million-year-old bicuspid); they do not tally with our knowledge of social instincts today.
Social instincts do not always lead to ethical behavior. They sometimes lead to the very opposite. The social instinct is to try to win the praise of one’s community, or to defer to the opinion of one’s community. But the community sometimes stands for bad things: cannibalism; human sacrifice; physical violence or social discrimination against those deemed “different”; the violent beating of women and children; imperialism; etc. If evolution drove proto-humans to care about what their fellow-hominids thought of them, it could just as easily have driven humanity into brutal conformism as into a morally healthy “natural law” teaching.
I grant you that once a society with good moral instincts comes into existence, a sense of shame and honor will reinforce the good that is already there. But on Darwin’s hypothesis, what was “already there” in the primitive hominids would have been savagery, so there would have been nothing worthy of emulation.
I will not discuss the other columns you mention, but I will say that I disagree with most of their conclusions, and do not think they contain an adequate refutation of my position. I would thus maintain my thesis that in the Darwinian perspective, a being with extra talents owes absolutely nothing to the generation in which he happens to have been born, and “owes” something only to the future, i.e., to the potential for dominance that lies in his seed. In the Darwinian world, there is no “natural right” which could restrain the conscience of such an individual. The “natural right” lies with the creatures who can better compete and thus in the long run send their contemporaries into oblivion.
You ask me to provide an alternate morality to the Darwinian, one based on a “cosmic teleology.” But the argument of my article does not require me to do this. My goal in the short article was to show that Darwinian ethics was an inadequate foundation for what the tradition calls “natural right.” I did not undertake the much more difficult task of setting forth a better foundation for natural right. Such a task would require not an article but a very long and intricately argued book. However, if I were to write such a book, it would look a lot more like the Republic or the Bible than like The Descent of Man.
I stress that I am not opposed to your project to revive Aristotelian ethical and political thought for the modern world. However, I think that it is a major conceptual and strategic error to tie that revival to Darwinian science. I will have to leave it at this for now. Thanks for your response.
Mr. Wyebrow,
ReplyDeleteYour post makes several points that confuse me. I wonder if I could ask some questions for clarification.
1. You say that we can know nothing about the origination of social instincts from a "single million-year-old bicuspid." Does this mean that you reject the entire enterprise of cultural anthropology, which tries to deduce conclusions about the lives and behaviors of hominids from fossil remains? Does it also mean that you reject the entire enterprises of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, which try to do the same with our current knowledge of the interactions of genome and behavior?
2. Sometimes you seem to understand that homonids could have evoloved cooperative instincts (as Trivers and others suggest). For example, you say, " If evolution drove proto-humans to care about what their fellow-hominids thought of them..." But other quotes make it look like you think a Darwinian explanation could only account for savagery. You say, "But on Darwin’s hypothesis, what was “already there” in the primitive hominids would have been savagery." You also say that, " a being with extra talents owes absolutely nothing to the generation in which he happens to have been born."
These statements seem to imply that you think evolution could not have bred social instincts, reciprocal altruism, etc. Does that mean that you disagree with Trivers and others?
Also, I think you over-state the degree to which Dr. Arnhart says that the natural right tradition comes out of our social instincts. He never takes those social instincts outside of the context of their individual expression in various political cultures through traditions and political expressions of laws and mores.
-Rob S.