Ideas Have Consequences

Today, I found an online review of Tim Birkhead's book, Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition. Don't let the cover photo of 2 happy seals fool you; there's some bizarre and distressing conclusions hidden inside.

As the book review summarizes...

Decades of accumulated work of this kind have changed our understanding of the nature of sex, reproduction and the different roles of male and female. From Darwin’s time up to the late 1960s – not coincidentally, the time when the intellectual assault on male-centred academic thinking got under way in earnest – it was thought that male animals competed for female partners, with the strongest and most attractive impregnating the most females; that females sought only monogamy, and if they did have sex with multiple partners (and biologists couldn’t help noticing that they did) it was against their will, always a form of submission to rape.

In the past thirty years, the conventional wisdom has been destroyed. The truth is that females of most species actively seek multiple partners to have sex with. If the aim of males is to put their sperm into as many females as possible, females are trying, with equal determination, to get the very best sperm to fertilise their eggs – even if that means having sex with many males in turn.

Rivalry between males and discrimination by females extends beyond the sexual act itself. Inside the female, the sperm of different males fight for supremacy – this is sperm competition. At the same time, the female may be able to select the sperm that are best for her – this is sperm choice. This is the true battle of the sexes. The males and females of each species are permanently locked in a struggle to out-evolve each other as their reproductive equipment and behaviour change to achieve their conflicting aims – i.e. maximum fertilisation v. best fertilisation...

While the book is focused on animals in the wild, a link is made to that other animal: human beings...

And Birkhead doesn’t let us forget that humans are sexual animals, too: it’s hard not to warm to a book which discusses Harold Macmillan in the context of the sexual problems of the dungfly.

At the risk of sounding overdramatic, when I read this kind of nonsense, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry...it’s so dehumanizing...treating human beings – me and you - with all of our hopes, thoughts, emotions, dreams, etc – as mindless agents in a “sperm competition.”

Yet that's what we are....Or at least that's what we've been told that we are. Starting in school. Then in our media. The message is constantly reinforced in our popular culture.

You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the discover channel
Getting horny now

Ironically, there is no moral disapproval of this "sperm competition"...it is neither good nor bad because the terms "good" and "bad" have no meaning in nature...and WE are part of nature.

Sometimes I wonder how Western civilization has been able to survive for so long under the weight of this corrosive materialist philosophy. Then I remember...

1) These ideas have only been penetrating the American public for about the past 50 years (barely 2 generations), and

2) Up until recently, at least science gave us the possibility of free will – the chance to overcome our “sperm competition” heritage through reason, free will, and moral choice.

No longer. Now we are told that free will is an illusion.

If you have a chance, watch some of the video from AEI's conference: Genes, Neuroscience, and Free Will, which features some of the leading lights of the conservative intelligentsia: Dr. James Q. Wilson, Charles Murray, and David Brooks (who I analyzed here).

Since these are conservative intellectuals, one who think they would be on the frontlines of the Cultural War to PROTECT freedom; rather, by unanimously accepting the idea of "determinism," they are implicitly REJECTING freedom.

Brooks says at one point.: When he talks to neuroscientists about "free will,” they look at him like he has 3 heads....And if you listen to all 2 hours of this discussion, you will not find a single intellectual defense of free will - at least free will in an objective sense. There is a consensus, however, that the concept of free will is quite useful to society.

But how can a "concept" survive when most of society's leaders - whether they're teachers of TV pundits or scientists - are quite eager to proclaim that it's false?

Furthermore, the hope that enough people simply won't pay attention to the "real truth" is a fool's errand since (unlike in the past), with the near-ubiquity of higher education, there are fewer and fewer people who even have the option to ignore the so-called "real truth."

Bottom line: The idea that humanity's purpose is to participate in a "sperm competition" is bad enough…but when you combine it with the idea that “free will is illusion,” you are going to create something lethal – lethal to the individual and to society.

By denying "free will," the neuroscientists (and their defenders) are denying a critical (and much-used loophole) - the possibility of moral choice.

They can no longer proclaim, “Yes, we are highly-evolved apes, but through using our reason, we can choose a moral order based on “X, Y, and Z.”

That’s because...

1) If free will is an illusion, so is reason.

2) If people are simply behaving in the best way to increase their level of “dopamine,” (as Brooks says), the idea of “reason” itself – a set of moral universals that apply to ALL people regardless of their genes or environment – is impossible; the moral philosophy of society – if there is one – would be “do whatever you want.”

What we have here is something more sinister than “moral relativism” – the common idea that “people should choose their own morality." Rather, we are being instructed that morality itself is an illusion, and perhaps more importantly, the lack of morality is natural! Since reason is an illusion, a person's decision to follow their random, emotional instincts is quite fine.

The final question: Where does this leave freedom itself? What is the future of Western civilization – whose twin pillars have always been FREEDOM plus RESPONSIBILITY?

I’m not predicting anarchy or a Mad Max world writ large.

But it’s hard to see how liberal democracy – even in the United States – can survive this kind of intellectual environment – which is permeated nearly every segment of our popular culture (except organized religion, for the most part).

If the day should come when a critical mass of Americans believe… 1) We are nothing more than hairless apes, and 2) Free will is an illusion...Then it’s hard to see how freedom can survive more than another 1-2 generations...unless, of course, there's some sort of intellectual renaissance.

The sad thing is…there no reason for people to believe ANY of this crap.

One final piece of good news: it's hard to see how atheistic materialism (even if it's sugar-coated with consumerism) can fill the hearts and minds of the masses. So regardless of what happens, there will almost certainly be a backlash. In fact, that backlash has already begun.

Should it continue, the possibility of an "intellectual renaissance" becomes very real. Of course, there is still another possibility: that in the rush to reject materialism, people will not REDISCOVER reason, but will rather fall into the waiting lap of religious fundamentalists.

Unfortunately, in the long-long-term, that may be our future: not a grey, pacifist, tyranny, but a hot-blooded, conflict-happy religious war – especially if radical Islam continues to provoke it.

These are all just thoughts brewing inside my head. I make no predictions. I can only state a single truth: "Ideas have consequences." So let's choose our ideas wisely.

-Todd

Note: The photo above is of Dylan Klebold, who, along with Eric Harris, committed the Columbine Massacre. On the day of the shooring, Eric wore a shirt reading "Natural Selection."