Neo-Darwinian scientists eager to marry evolution with fine sentiments

Christian theologians have been trying for centuries to answer the most serious question: Si Deus est, unde malum? If God exists, where does evil come from? And all the answers, over time, were regarded by someone or other as inadequate. But there is also another, no less serious, question that Leibniz formulated along exactly the same lines: “Si [Deus] non est, unde bonum?” If [God] does not exist, where does goodness come from? The origins of evil and of goodness are equally obscure. But those who tried to answer the first question, from Saint Augustine to Leibniz himself, were often supreme metaphysicians; whereas answers to the second have so far been primitive, coming from the garrulous promoters of a lay morality—led by Flaubert’s Monsieur Homais—or from Neo-Darwinian scientists eager to marry evolution with fine sentiments.
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The eighteenth-century forebears of today’s secularists would often say that everything had to be traced back to matter if plausible explanations were to be found. But this operation has become increasingly baffling and impracticable, since scientists are no longer prepared to say what matter itself is. Having disposed of matter, which proved to be an expanse of quicksand, people tried (and are still stubbornly trying) to rely upon another unshakable primum: evolution.

From evolution there have been countless attempts to derive the necessity and justness of fine feelings—and above all of altruism. The good of evolution became the good of a single species, but this terminological slip did not, according to some, affect the scientific validity of the theories. Which yet had great difficulty in being articulated. Not least because the theory of evolution served, over the years—with equal readiness and equal lack of evidence—as a basis for the most brutal or most well-meaning extrapolations. Even the principles of eugenics, zealously applied in civilized Scandinavian countries as well as Hitler’s Germany, made reference to Darwin’s theories. The plan to establish a humanitarian ethic based on evolution remained, like every other attempt at founding a lay morality, at the stage of wishful thinking. It is—Baudelaire noted in Belgium—a funeral carriage perpetually followed by the “multitude of free thinkers.”

But pure secularists, lacking any religious affiliation and not much inclined toward spiritualistic fancies, cannot do without the need to feel good. Their ideal would be for some Neo-Darwinian biologist to demonstrate that society has been based, from the very beginning, on altruism and tolerance. And therefore, that being good constitutes an evolutionary advantage, the only criterion with which they can measure good. Every year, someone eagerly attempts to demonstrate it, in vain.

Roberto Calasso
Unnameable Present