Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  Randomness and predictability—contingency and necessity—long seen to be opposites on a continuum, are characteristics that vary in the amount of their respective influence and at what time their influence is greatest in the historical sequence. There is available a rich matrix of interactions between early pervasive contingencies and later local necessities, varying over time, in the model of contingent-necessity: in the development of any historical sequence the role of contingencies in the construction of necessities is accentuated in the early stages and attenuated in the later. At the beginning of a historical sequence, actions of the individual elements are chaotic, unpredictable, and have a powerful influence on the future development of that sequence. But as the sequence slowly but ineluctably evolves, and the pathways become more worn, the chaotic system self-organizes into an orderly one. The individual elements sort themselves and are sorted into their allotted positions, as dictated by what came before—the conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions. But aren’t both necessities and contingencies caused, and themselves are the causes of effects? And, if so, then isn’t all human action caused, and thus determined? We can express the problem this way:

  Necessity is omnipotent

  Contingency is omnipotent

  Humans have free will

  If human history is absolutely determined by necessitating forces of any kind, then neither contingency nor free will can exist. If contingency is all-powerful, then there can be no absolutely determining forces, and all history is reduced to just “one damn thing after another.” Since it is obvious that there are necessitating forces at work in history, and it is equally obvious that contingencies push and direct historical sequences, then how do we resolve the problem of historical causality and human freedom? Here is a helpful analogy. Atoms moving about in space, like people moving about the environment, are caused, but their collisions (atomic) and encounters (human) happen by a combination of contingencies and necessities. Contingency leads to collisions and encounters; necessity governs speed and direction. Events may occur as a result of accidental causes (a conjuncture of unplanned events), but not by accident, in the sense of being uncaused. An effect, dependent upon the activity of one or more causes, may seem to be produced by accident, but it is really the result of a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions. The words compelling and constraining imply powerful influence but not causal determinism.

  Another way to approach the problem is to think of necessities as “what had to be” and contingencies as “what might have been.” If history is a product of contingencies and necessities, then necessities (what had to be) imply determinism, while contingencies (what did not have to be) imply, in a way, a type of freedom. If things could have turned out differently because of some small but carefully placed human action, this gives us one more way around determinism. We can make a difference. Our actions matter. And in the rich panoply of causes that determine our actions, we can feel the freedom to choose to make a difference by doing the right thing to change the course of our personal histories or global history.

  The number of causes and the complexity of their interactions make the predetermination of human action pragmatically impossible. We can even put a figure on the causal net of the universe to see just how absurd it is to think we can get our minds fully around it. Tulane University theoretical physicist Frank Tipler has calculated that in order for a computer in the far future of the universe to resurrect in a virtual reality every person who ever lived or could have lived, with all causal interactions between themselves and their environment, it would need 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10123 zeros) of memory. An entity capable of this would be, for all intents and purposes, omniscient and omnipotent, and this is what Tipler calls the Omega Point, or God.34 Suffice it to say that no computer within the conceivable future will achieve this level of power; likewise no human brain even comes close. Thus, as far as we are concerned, the causal net will always be full of holes. Therefore, in the language of this model: human freedom is action taken with an ignorance of causes within a conjuncture of events that compels and is compelled to a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions.

  In other words, the enormity of this complexity leads us to feel as if we are acting freely as uncaused causers, even though we are actually causally determined. Since no set of causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete, the feeling of freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes.

  To that extent we may act as if we are free. There is much to gain, little to lose, and personal responsibility follows. I close with William Ernest Henley’s powerful poem “Invictus,” especially fitting since he wrote it when he was terminally ill and in the context of the nineteenth-century push for scientific determinism, as if to say it ain’t so:35

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds and shall find me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  II

  A SCIENCE OF PROVISIONAL ETHICS

  The aim of ethics is to render scientific—i.e., true, and as far as possible systematic—the apparent cognitions that most men have of the rightness or reasonableness of conduct, whether the conduct be considered as right in itself, or as the means to some end conceived as ultimately reasonable.

  —Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 1874

  5

  CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD? : SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND MORALITY

  The greatest part of morality is of a fixed eternal nature, and will endure when faith shall fail.

  —Bernard de Mandeville, An Inquiry Into

  the Origin of Moral Virtue, 1723

  On the morning of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, two students in black trench coats killed fourteen of their fellow classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The gunmen, Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, reportedly asked their victims, “Do you believe in God?” and allegedly snuffed out their young lives if they responded in the affirmative. The boys began their attack in the parking lot, picking off students with apparent indiscrimination, then proceeded to a ground-floor cafeteria, moved through school hallways, and ended up in a second-floor library before finally turning their weapons on themselves.

  What was the cause of this murderous rampage? By the time I tuned in to CNN that afternoon, “experts” were already proffering theories that included television and movie violence, rock music, morbidly violent computer games, gangs and cults, parental neglect, teenage angst, and revenge for peer ridicule and rejection. Months later there was still no causal consensus. Perhaps if only parents paid more attention to their children, or if school administrators tried to decrease campus racism, or if school counselors could nip student bullying in the bud, or if teachers could check anti-Christian prejudice at the classroom door, or if everyone could learn to love instead of hate. As the documentary film producer Michael Moore wondered in his Academy Award-winning film Bowling for Columbine, since the last thing the boys were doing before they went on their shooting rampage was bowling, it is surprising that no one has placed the blame there.

  Figure 20. The Massacre at Columbine High School

  Eric Harris, age eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, age seventeen, are captured on a surveillance vid
eo moving through the Columbine High School cafeteria on the morning of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, on a mission to kill as many of their fellow students as possible before killing themselves. What would cause people to commit such acts of violence? (Courtesy of Associated Press)

  When the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department released its report the following year, it contained more than 10,000 pieces of evidence that included over 4,000 leads and over 5,000 interviews. The attack, they concluded, was driven by indiscriminate hate, was intended to wipe out most of the student body of Columbine High, and was supposed to end in suicide. In Harris’s journal, which opened unequivocally with “I hate the fucking world,” he railed against everyone from the WB network and slow drivers to racists, minorities, and whites. In his rambling screed, on one page he praised Hitler’s efforts to eradicate European Jewry and on the next he obsessed about finding a date for the high school prom. His celebrated “hit list” included targets as risibly ridiculous as Tiger Woods.

  The report was a monumental disappointment to those searching for the cause of the crime, the magic bullet, the single cause that could be directly addressed through legislation or social action. “I know a lot about both of them,” said Kate Battan, the lead investigator for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. “This was not about killing jocks or killing blacks or killing Christians … . It was about killing everybody.” But why did the boys kill, she was asked? “Everybody wants a quick answer. They want an easy answer so that they can sleep at night and know this is not going to happen tomorrow at their school. And there is no such thing in this case. There’s not an easy answer. I’ve been working on this nonstop daily since April 20th and I can’t tell you why it happened.”1

  That opened the door for wannabe social commentators and ad hoc social scientists to speculate wildly and with no evidence about the deeper cause of Columbine. The violent computer game Doom, for example, was blamed, as when the New York Times reported that the boys played “popular computer games in which players stalk their opponents through dungeon-like environments and try to kill them with high-powered weapons.” The Washington Post described the online gaming world as a “dark, dangerous place.” CNN said that the boys “reportedly played computer games often, spending hours trying to kill each other with digital guns and explosive devices.” So-called Doom-sayers rallied to its defense, with such comments as this from a Web posting: “Doom has nothing to do with this. I enjoy making Doom more gruesome, I watch movies such as Evil Dead 2 and Terminator 2, and I listen to … [rocker] Rob Zombie, but I don’t even want to touch a real gun, bomb, chain saw, or anything.” Another fan correctly pointed out that if Doom were the cause of teenage violence, then “surely everyone who played Doom would be running around with guns and other instruments of violence and death.” Similarly, a gamer with the log-in name Theoddone33 skeptically observed, “Everyone is always quick to point out murderers that play violent video games, but no one ever thinks of the millions of people that play video games and aren’t murderers.”2

  One of the fundamental tenets of science is that a theory should be able to explain the exceptions to its generalizations. This is a problem for the computer-game theory of violence, as it is for the other theories. For example, physician and author Dr. Julian Whitaker blamed the use of prescription drugs: “When I first heard about the Columbine High School massacre, my initial thought was, ‘Lord help us, were they taking Prozac?’ Nine days later, it was reported that Eric Harris, one of the shooters, was taking Luvox, which, like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, belongs to the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In one out of every twenty-five children taking it, Luvox causes mania, ‘a psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur and overproduction of ideas.’”3 Whitaker’s theory, however, fails to explain why Columbine would be the only case of SSRI-induced mass murder. Another shortcoming can be found in an explanation offered by Dr. Ned Holstein, president of Fathers and Families in Boston, who claimed that fatherless homes cause teen violence: “The strongest predictor of youth violence is not poverty, not race, not inadequate gun laws, not the presence of gangs, not the wearing of camouflage clothing, not portrayals of violence in the media and not lack of midnight basketball. It is the lack of a father in the home.”4 Unfortunately for this theory, both Harris and Klebold were from intact two-parent families.

  Initially, much was made of the fact that April 20 is Adolf Hitler’s birthday, that Harris had praised Hitler for the “final solution” to the Jewish question, and that both boys had occasionally been seen wearing swastikas. Cults and gangs in general, in fact, were also targeted, such as the “Goths,” who wear black and unusual clothing, and the “Trench Coat Mafia,” because the boys were known to wear long black dusters as seen in old West photographs. When further investigations failed to turn up any additional links to Nazis, neo-Nazis, or cults of any kind, a gang unit specialist for the Denver Police, Steve Rickard, blamed emotional problems at home: “A lot of times entertainment—music, movies—is the trigger. It’s not the cause, necessarily, it’s the little push that makes them do something.”5 If not music and movies perhaps, some wondered, the push came from homosexuality. Harris and Klebold had allegedly been called “faggots” by some of the Columbine High jocks, so the rumor mill churned out stories about gays gone mad.6 The girlfriends of the boys, however, disconfirmed this thesis. Another howler was suggested by the World Socialist Web master David Walsh: “Defenders of capitalism … long for a society where profit and loss are the only means of determining the value of any activity or human being … . What would such a society, guided only by selfishness and violence, look like? The events in Jonesboro [a shooting tragedy similar to Columbine] give some indication.”7 This theory also fails to account for disconfirmatory evidence, such as teen violence in noncapitalistic countries, or capitalistic countries like Japan where violence of any type is almost unheard of, among both teens and adults.

  Ironically, some even identified insufficient violence as the cause, violence, that is, in the form of good old-fashioned parental discipline and adult authority. “I feel like the lack of discipline has led to what we are into now, total chaos and disrespect,” said Senator Frank Shurden of Henryetta, Oklahoma, who, after Columbine, proposed a bill in the Oklahoma state legislature that would encourage parents to use “ordinary force” such as spanking, paddling, or whipping to discipline their children. (The bill passed in the Senate 36—9, and in the House 96—4.) “Back when I grew up, we got our tails whipped at school, then got it again when we got home. We didn’t have shootings.” Sorry, Senator Shurden, single anecdotes do not make a science. As for adult authority, onetime presidential candidate Gary Bauer fingered teachers and administrators at Columbine High: “Why did adults in that school feel that they couldn’t grab Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] and say, ‘You know, if I see you give the Nazi salute again, if I don’t break your arm you’re going to be out of this school for the rest of this year.’”8 Of course, the parents of kids who get their arms broken by teachers and administrators are unlikely to feel that this is an appropriate form of discipline and authority.

  Because of the round-the-clock media coverage that Columbine captured, high-profile politicians could not resist tossing in their own extemporized explanations. Former House Speaker and noted conservative Newt Gingrich blamed (who else?) the liberal elite: “I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton, and I accuse you in Kosovo of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”9 The chief elite liberal of the day, President Bill Clinton, understandably focused on a different causal vector—Hollywood: “We cannot pretend that there is no impact on our culture and our children that is a
dverse if there is too much violence coming out of what they see and experience.” Hollywood promptly fired back a defending salvo: “If you’re looking for violence, what about the evening news?” David Geffen asked rhetorically. “America is bombing Yugoslavia; it’s on every day. It’s not a movie, it’s real.”10

  Guns, of course, were an easy target for Columbine commentators, with noted gun control advocates like Sarah Brady squawking for more legislation. (Brady is the chairperson of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and the wife of James Brady, who was shot by John Hinckley in his attempt to assassinate Reagan.) The ledger was predictable, with liberals calling for more gun control and conservatives seeking a more sinister evil lurking behind those who wield the guns that kill people.

  That evil, we are told, is the lack of morality and religion in public life, especially public schools. On Wednesday, June 16, 1999, barely two months after the Columbine shootings, for example, Congressman Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip, read a letter on the floor of the House of Representatives that reverberated throughout the country and became a flash point of political pundits and radio talk show hosts for months to come. It was written by Addison L. Dawson to the editor of the San Angelo Standard-Times (Texas). The letter was originally published in the paper on April 27, one week after the massacre, but DeLay’s reading of it led to the mistaken belief that it was written by DeLay, and he has been quoted as its author ever since. No matter, because by reading the letter, DeLay was endorsing Dawson’s thesis, which was that guns do not kill people; rather, something else kills people, that something else being broken homes, children’s lack of quality time with parents, day care, television sex and violence, computer games, contraception and planned parenthood, abortion, small family size (a direct result of the previous two), short prison sentences for hardened criminals, and, most notably for our discussion (the style of the letter is sarcastic):