3 Much of the material for this section comes from my essay “William Jennings Bryan’s last campaign,” published in Bully for Brontosaurus (W.W. Norton, 1991).
4
PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONS FOR CONFLICT
Can Nature Nurture Our Hopes?
FOR TRADITIONALISTS OF THE OLD order, 1859 was not the best of years. The principal mark and symbol must lie, inevitably and permanently (at least so long as our culture endures), with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. But Darwin’s vision of a morally neutral world, not constructed for human delectation (and not evidently cognizant either of our presence or our preferences for comfort), received an unusual boost from the literary sensation of the same year—the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald’s very free translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mathematician and freethinker. Each of Omar’s quatrains embodies a philosophical gem of resignation to a world without intrinsic sense or desired form. (Rubaiyat is the plural of ruba’i, a distinctive four-line form of verse with rhymes on the first, second, and fourth lines.)
Instead of presenting the conventional quotes from Darwin, some lines from Omar may give us even more insight into the angst of mid-Victorian times, as traditional moral certainties eroded before a juggernaut of technological transformation and colonial expansion, all fueled by the progress of science. Consider this thought on the cosmic confusion of it all:
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Or this on the earth’s mean estate (a shabby hotel for camel caravans!) and the meandering nature of our lives:
Think, in this battered Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.
Or this on our inability to make nature conform to our hopes and dreams:
Ah Love! could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
Why should we not, in such a world, “take the cash, and let the credit go,” to cite Omar’s most enduring line (usually misattributed to Adam Smith, J. M. Keynes, Donald Trump, or some other figure from a more immediate Western world).
This book rests on a basic, uncomplicated premise that sets my table of contents and order of procedure, and that requires restatement at several points in the logic of my argument: NOMA is a simple, humane, rational, and altogether conventional argument for mutual respect, based on non-overlapping subject matter, between two components of wisdom in a full human life: our drive to understand the factual character of nature (the magisterium of science), and our need to define meaning in our lives and a moral basis for our actions (the magisterium of religion).
I sketch this argument, with examples of support from leaders on both sides, in the first two chapters. The second half of the book then examines the central paradox of why such an eminently sensible solution to the nonproblem of supposed conflict between science and religion—a resolution supported by nearly all major thinkers in both magisteria—has been poorly comprehended and frequently resisted. The two major reasons, defining the last two chapters of this book, can also be simply stated and understood—even if the actual history of discussion, based on a chronicle of confusion, has been downright byzantine. I treated the first, or historical, reason in chapter 3: the reluctance of many religious devotees to withdraw from turf once legitimately occupied under previous views of life and nature, but now properly deeded to the newer magisterium of science (combined with the symmetrical imperialism of many scientists who stage similar invalid forays into the magisterium of moral argument).
I now devote this final chapter to the second, or psychological, reason—an issue whose stark simplicity should also stand forth, even in the historical morass of actual struggle: we live in a vale of tears (or at least on a field of confusion), and we therefore clutch at any proffered comfort of an encompassing sort, however dubious the logic, and however contrary the evidence.
I opened this chapter with classic doubts, from an eleventh-century Persian poet, about nature’s beneficence. We may consult an equally classic Western source for the complement to this fear about nature—our anxiety about our own status and our ability to make sense of our surroundings. Consider these famous lines (heroic couplets rather than quatrains this time) from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34):
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great …
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast …
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Such compounded anxiety about nature and human understanding must generate “rescue fantasies,” to cite a catchphrase of contemporary therapy. We long to situate ourselves on a benevolent, warm, furry, encompassing planet, created to provide our material needs, and constructed for our domination and delectation. Unfortunately, this pipe dream of succor from the realm of meaning (and therefore under the magisterium of religion) imposes definite and unrealistic demands upon the factual construction of nature (under the magisterium of science). But nature, who is as she is, and who existed in earthly form for 4.5 billion years before we arrived to impose our interpretations upon her, greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings. We are therefore left with no alternative. We must undertake the hardest of all journeys by ourselves: the search for meaning in a place both maximally impenetrable and closest to home—within our own frail being.
We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA’s tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature’s construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a “transitional object”—a baby’s warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.
The misguided search for intrinsic meaning within nature—the ultimate (and also the oldest) violation of NOMA—has taken two principal forms in Western traditions. I call the first approach the “Psalm Eight,” or “all things under his feet,” solution, to commemorate both the honest and accurate posing of the question: How, in the light of our cosmic smallness, can we even contemplate any favorable intrinsic meaning?
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers; the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and also the boastful answer of our vainglorious dreams:
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor,
followed by the false construction of nature, as previously quoted (see this page):
Thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.
In other words, “all things under his feet” finds meaning in nature by touting our superiority over other creatures, or advocating the more extreme position that nature exists to serve our needs. If this first solution focuses on the human side, the second strategy of “all things bright and beautiful” identifies warmth, fuzziness, and moral rectitude as the unambiguous pattern of nature. If we wish to integrate ourselves into this ennobling totality, we must, in the
closing words of the parable of the Good Samaritan, go and do likewise.
Both of these “all things” solutions founder upon nature’s intransigence. The solutions, recording our hopes for domination and solace, require that nature be constructed in a particular way. But nature resists our implied architecture by flaunting a set of contrary factual patterns discovered within the magisterium of science. (Under NOMA, these contrary facts do not confute “religion,” or even the prospect of a religious conception of nature; they speak only against particular interpretations advanced by some religious people, and by many nonreligious folks as well.)
I will not rehearse in extenso the familiar arguments against “all things under his feet”—see my previous book Full House, or almost any contemporary volume on principles of evolution or the diversity of life. Homo sapiens may be the brainiest species of all, but we represent only a tiny twig, grown but yesterday on a single branch of the richly arborescent bush of life. This bush features no preferred direction of growth, while our own relatively small limb of vertebrates ranks only as one among many, not even as primus inter pares. Homo sapiens is a single species among some two hundred species of primates, on a branch of some four thousand species of mammals, on a limb of nearly forty thousand species of vertebrates, on a bough of animals dominated by more than a million described species of insects. The other boughs of life’s bush have longer durations and greater prospects for continued success—while bacteria build the main trunk and have always dominated the history of life by criteria of diversity, flexibility, range of habitats and modes of life, and sheer weight of numbers.
The complementary fallacy of “all things bright and beautiful” may be illustrated by the standard example from classical literature on natural history—a case glossed over by supporters, but squarely faced by Darwin, and therefore providing a segue to the next section on Darwin’s seminal defense of NOMA against the psychological impediment.
In fairness, honorable supporters of “all things bright and beautiful” have always recognized that they cannot prove their case with furry pandas, gaudy butterflies, or the noble solicitude of Bambi’s father. For the contrary argument does not deny that some creatures charm our aesthetic sense or evoke our moral approbation (because we have read their overt actions in the inappropriate light of human judgment, not because we have understood the evolutionary basis of such behaviors for the creatures themselves—often an entirely different matter). But, prima facie, nature also seems replete with behaviors that our moral traditions would label as ugly and cruel. And these frequent cases of ostensible opposition, not the familiar examples of apparent support, set the challenge that “all things bright and beautiful” must overcome if advocates really wish to argue that the moral meaning of life lies exposed in nature’s factuality. For if we allow nature to define morality, then we must either claim that nature’s ways embody traditional values of love, kindness, and cooperation—or we must admit that Kellogg’s German generals were right after all, that the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments represent unattainable fantasies, and that the moral order includes frequent murder and rapine.
The obstacles faced by “all things bright and beautiful” are steep indeed. Just consider Darwin’s incisive argument that most cases of apparent support record an opposite reality when we dig deeper:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.
Therefore, advocates for nature’s intrinsic goodness had to find a straight and narrow path down a street with dangers on both sides. Against one flank, they needed to reassert the traditional interpretation of conventional appearances in the face of Darwin’s counterargument, quoted above. But, to avoid the other flank, they had to face the even more difficult task of convincing people that cases of nature’s apparent ugliness really embody moral rectitude when understood in a deeper sense.
In mounting a defense for such an improbable argument, supporters of “all things bright and beautiful” adopted the “ichneumonid wasp” (a group of several hundred species, not just a single creature) as a test case. In translation to human values, the reproductive behavior of these insects could not possibly be more disgusting, or more grisly. The mother wasp seeks another insect, usually a caterpillar, as a host for her young. She then either injects her eggs into the host’s body, or paralyzes the host with her sting and then lays the eggs on top. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the living, often paralyzed, host from the inside—but very carefully, leaving the heart and other vital organs for last, lest the host decay and spoil the bounty. (In the spirit of false comparison, we might analogize this behavior with the old punishment of drawing and quartering for treason, a procedure devised for the same grim purpose of postponing death to extract maximal torture.) J. M. Fabre, the most famous entomological writer of Darwin’s century, described the situation in his customarily graphic manner:
One may see the cricket, bitten to the quick, vainly move its antennae and abdominal styles, open and close its empty jaws, and even move a foot, but the larva is safe and searches its vitals with impunity. What an awful nightmare for the paralyzed cricket!
Now, how can “all things bright and beautiful” be defended in the face of such horrendous realities (in the inappropriate light of human judgment, to be sure, but “all things bright and beautiful” explicitly shines such a light as its central premise)? Several resolutions have been proposed by scientists who, denying NOMA, wish to assert that nature’s facts can set a foundation for human morality. Consider three examples, all from leading naturalists of Darwin’s time, not from marginal figures.
1. The paralyzed hosts may suffer, and the whole system isn’t very nice, but nature exists for humanity, and any device for human benefit records nature’s good intentions. For example, Charles Lyell, in his great textbook on Principles of Geology (1830–33), argued that any natural check upon noxious insects, including the death of many as hosts to wasp larvae, could only record nature’s construction for human benefit since these insects might destroy our agriculture “did not Providence put causes in operation to keep them in due bounds.”
2. Some features of the system may seem to fall on the downside of moral worth, but, considered as a totality, the good guides for human conduct greatly outnumber the bad. William Kirby, Rector of Barham and Britain’s leading entomologist, waxed poetic about the love demonstrated by caring mothers in provisioning infants they would never see:
A very large proportion of them are doomed to die before their young come into existence. But in these the passion is not extinguished … When you witness the solicitude with which they provide for the security and sustenance of their future young, you can scarcely deny to them love for a progeny they are never destined to behold.
Kirby also put in a good word for the marauding larvae, praising them for their forbearance in eating selectively to keep their caterpillar alive. Would we all husband our resources with such care!
In this strange and apparently cruel operation one circumstance is truly remarkable. The larva of the Ichneumon, though every day, perhaps for months, it gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time it avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect upon which it preys! … What would be the impression which a similar instance amongst the race of quadrupeds would make upon us? If, for example, an animal … should be found to feed upon the inside of a dog, devouring only those parts not essential to life, while it cautiously left uninjured the heart, arteries, lungs, and intestines,—should we not regard such an instance as a perfect prodigy, as an example of instinctive forbearance almost miraculous?
3. The paralyzed, but pulsating, caterpillars surely seem to suffer in thrashing agony, but we have been misled. First of all, the wriggling of the caterpillar arises as a mechanical consequence of movement by the foraging larvae inside! Second, lower animals are automata and feel no pain. St. George Mivart, an eminent critic of Darwin, argued that “many amiable and excellent people” had been misled by the apparent suffering of animals. Using a favorite racist argument of the time—that “primitive” people suffer far less than advanced and cultured folk—Mivart extrapolated further down the ladder of life into a realm of very limited pain indeed. Physical suffering, he argued,
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