The great 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke of three stages that one passes through on the way to spiritual maturity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. During the aesthetic stage, a person is preoccupied with sensual pleasure, with the satisfaction of bodily desire. Food, drink, sex, comfort, and artistic beauty are the dominating concerns of this stage of life. The ordinary fellow drinking beer at the baseball game and the effete aristocrat sipping wine in this box at the opera are both fundamentally enjoying the aesthetic life in Kierkegaard’s sense. The pleasures of this stage are pure and intense, and this is why it is often difficult to move to the next level, the ethical.

At this second stage, one transcends the preoccupation with satisfying one’s own sensual desire and accepts the moral obligation which ties one in love to another person or institution. The young man who finally abandons his bachelor’s life and enters into marriage with all of its practical and moral responsibilities is passing from stage one to stage two, as is the soldier who lets go of superficial self-interest and dedicates himself to the service of his country.

But finally, says Kierkegaard, there is a dimension of spiritual attainment which lies beyond even the ethical. This is the religious. At this stage of life, a person falls in love with God, and this means that she falls unconditionally in love, since she has found the infinite object which alone corresponds to the infinite longing of her heart.

For the religious person, even the objects of deepest ethical commitment—family, country, business, etc.—fall into a secondary position. When Thomas More said on the scaffold, “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” he gave evidence that he had passed from the ethical to the religious stage of life.

This famous account of the stages on life’s way came to my mind as I was watching Woody Allen’s recent film “Vicky, Christina, Barcelona”. Like most of Allen’s movies, this one concentrates on the mores and behaviors of the cultural elite: wealthy business executives, artists, poets, and writers. Vicky and Christina are two young New Yorkers who have resolved to spend a couple of summer months in Barcelona. While enjoying a late meal at an elegant restaurant, they are propositioned by Juan Antonio, an infinitely charming painter, who invites the women to join him for a romantic weekend. Despite Vicky’s initial hesitation, they accept. Juan Antonio is a consummate bon vivant, and he introduces Vicky and Christina to the pleasures of the Spanish good life: the best restaurants, vistas, art galleries, music, etc. And then, of course, he seduces both of them. In order not to spoil the movie for you (and to keep a PG rating for this column), suffice it to say that they become involved in a love triangle—and eventually quadrangle. None of the lovers is capable of a stable commitment, and all make appeal continually to the shortness of life, the importance of enjoying the moment, and the restrictions of conventional morality.

What they all do—to varying degrees—is to reduce sexual relationship to the level of good food and music and art, something that satisfies at the aesthetic level. And what makes this reduction possible is precisely the disappearance of religion. All of the players in this film move in the world of the sophisticated European high culture, an arena from which God has been rather summarily ejected. Kierkegaard thought that the three stages are ordered to one another in such a way that the highest gives stability and purpose to the other two. When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

This film is a vivid presentation of precisely this declension. And the end result of this collapse is deep unhappiness. What struck me throughout Woody Allen’s film was just this: how unhappy, restless, and bored every single character is. So it goes when souls that are ordered to God are bereft of God. There is, however, a sign of hope. As in so many of Allen’s movies—“Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” come to mind—religion, especially Catholicism, haunts the scene.

At the very commencement of their weekend together, Juan Antonio showed the two young women the sculpture that, in his own words, “inspired him the most.” It was a medieval depiction of the crucified Jesus. It’s as though even this postmodern bohemian, this thoroughly secularized sophisticate, realizes in his bones that his life will not hold together unless and until he can fall in love unconditionally. The joy that none of them finds can be had only when they order their aesthetic and ethical lives to the divine love made manifest in that cross of Jesus.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Hiper Cultural)

The second most incorrect thing people say about evolution is that it is the survival of the fittest. (The most incorrect award has to go to the claim "it doesn’t exist"). The problem with this framing is that it sets up a picture of evolution-as-craftsman, carefully scrutinizing genetic variations and selecting and nurturing the most promising variant.

But evolution isn’t selecting for, it’s selecting against. Instead of survival of the fittest, it’s the persistence of the just barely workable. If an organ or a social structure is stable, it has the potential to last. Put simple, evolution favors local maxima.

If you want to get to the higher peak, you need something more directed than evolution or some pretty brutal selection pressures. So even if we believed that evolution was favoring moral improvement, it would be easy for progress to come to a halt far short of its potential.

But it’s worse than that. The z-axis in the graph above isn’t ‘goodness of group dynamics’ or ‘considerate feelings for others.’ It’s simply successful reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists can come up with elaborate explanations of how altruism could be part of a local maxima (or a Nash equilibrium, if we’re talking game theory), but that’s a long way from claiming it’s a necessary property of all local maxes or just the global max.

It’s easy to find counterexamples of stable evolutionary strategies that strike us as morally abhorrent. This one comes from Science as excerpted by TYWKIWDBI, and concerns gelada baboons:

If a newcomer ousts the chief monkey, it’s bad news for the group’s females. A wave of death sweeps through the unit, as the new male kills all the youngsters whom his predecessor fathered...But that’s not all. Eila Roberts from the University of Michigan has found that the new male’s arrival triggers a wave of spontaneous abortions. Within weeks, the vast majority of the local females terminate their pregnancies. It’s the first time that this strategy has been observed in the wild...
 
It’s obvious why the incoming males kill any existing infants. Female geladas don’t become fertile until they stop raising their existing children. Assuming no abortions, they go for three years between pregnancies. That’s longer than the typical reign of a dominant male. So, a newcomer, having finally won the right to mate, has few opportunities to actually do so. To make things worse, his females are busy raising someone else’s children. His solution: kill the babies. The quicker he does this, the sooner the females become fertile again, and the sooner he can father his own children.
 
But why would a pregnant female abort her own foetus? Roberts thinks that it’s an adaptive tactic in the face of a new male’s murderous tendencies. Since the male would probably kill the newborn baby anyway, it’s less costly for the female to abort than to waste time and energy on bringing a doomed infant to term. Her future offspring, conceived more quickly and fathered by the incumbent king of the hill, will stand a better chance of survival.

It’s stable states like these that mean I have little patience for evolutionary psychology or some spins on natural law as a foundation for ethics and obligation. Evolution is a wholly amoral process, so why would I expect that it would preserve and amplify whatever signal points us to the Good and the True?

Some atheists seem to think evolutionary psychology will excuse us from thinking about metaphysics, and some natural law proponents think that by studying our own physical bodies, we can intuit their form and proper function. I’d love to hear commenters on either side explain how they can distill moral instruction from a blind process that can’t take ethics into account.

The one counterargument I want to dispatch in this post is the idea that evolution promotes moral behavior because it has given us an intelligence to recognize moral behavior and to modify ourselves appropriately. This is just saying that evolution has brought us to the point where we can actively and deliberately subvert evolution. This is true, and I’m glad to welcome you to the transhumanist club, but it does not suggest evolution is directed towards moral behavior or reflection.
 
 
Originally posted at Unequally Yoked. Used with author's permission.