Last time, we looked at examples of adaptive torture in the natural world, which highlights the tension between the claim that evolution is good, and the claim that torture is always immoral. One argument justifies torture in the natural world by appealing to the process of natural selection, like this:
The evolutionary process is good. (Premise)
The evolutionary process (at least in this instance) requires torture. (Premise)
So (at least in this instance), torture is OK. (Conclusion)
Another condemns nature by appealing to our abhorrence towards torture, like this:
Torture is always immoral. (Premise)
The evolutionary process (at least in this instance) requires torture. (Premise)
So, the evolutionary process is immoral. (Conclusion)
Each argument invokes a premise that seems intuitively reasonable, and reaches a conclusion that negates the premise of the other. Perry wants us to choose one argument to the extinction of the other: she wants you to accept the second argument rather than the first.
In this regard, she’s not unusual at all. Western philosophers love logical consistency, and they’ll happily sand down the complexities and contradictions of existence to create something smooth, simple, and pure. (I’ll have much more to say about this another day.) But what if we decided not to seek consistency?
In Every Cradle is a Grave, Sarah Perry is specifically rethinking the ethics of birth and suicide; that’s the byline of her book. So resolving moral questions is where she wants to go. But leave morality aside for now. Rather than feeling forced to choose that torture is always immoral, or that the evolutionary process is good, let’s just take a more value neutral approach for a moment—just allow that there is something deeply disturbing about torture, and something equally satisfying or justifiable about the fullness of Nature, without trying to invoke morality at all.
So people seem to think that harm/care is a critical question about morality—or at least, they do according to the work of Jonathan Haidt. But rather than following Perry and treating this as actual morality, let’s just take it for what it is: an attitude, an intuitive value, an emotion baked into us by the process of evolution and growing up inside of our culture.
I think this raises very interesting questions. If evolution, culture, or some combination of the two is what makes us critical of the evolutionary process, what does that mean? Superficially we end up with a paradox, or at least, some kind of partial paradox: Our instincts tell us Mother Nature is bad, because nature has harm and torture baked into its processes by evolution. But our instincts come from Nature. So if Nature is bad, then, doesn’t this mean our instincts are, or at least might be, flawed? And if that’s true, then we can’t be sure Nature is bad or not, though maybe we should still be suspicious?
An Interlude
Winter in New England is white: Bright snow below, and a canopy of clouds above. At first the colors are crisp and refreshing, but as the weeks go by, the unremitting sameness, the drab, colorless monotony becomes oppressive, so that even the palest patch of blue sky, or the dingy green of a house in the distance provides a welcome relief to the beleaguered eye.
After months of walking around in the snow, I can’t help but be reminded of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is an ethical system which seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and in so doing, ends up pointing to the best possible future as one where all sentient beings are imprisoned in pleasure machines providing an endless supply of joy-inducing drugs. The mind naturally recoils from such a thing, and utilitarians have been struggling to find ways of avoiding having to force pleasure-hell on everyone—but why does this vision of the future seem so awful?
A Nature of Many Natures
Though I have never been a pagan, the idea of paganism has always held a certain sweet appeal to me. That the disparate and conflicting natures of many gods imbues life with a charming drama is undeniable—we see it in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, in Game of Thrones, and even in that terrible and utterly unmentionable roleplaying game which so many of you probably enjoy. Such quaint beliefs were not destined to survive the sweep of monotheism which washed across history in a great, inexorable wave, but even in the latter days of the Roman Empire, paganism still had its defenders. My favorite is Emperor Julian.
In Against the Galileans, Julian argues that monotheism makes no sense, because of the different cultures of the peoples in his day:
[I]n the separate deities one quality or another predominates, therefore Ares rules over the warlike nations, Athene over those that are wise as well as warlike, Hermes over those that are more shrewd than adventurous; and in short the nations over which the gods preside follow each the essential character of their proper god. Now if experience does not bear witness to the truth of our teachings, let us grant that our traditions are a figment and a misplaced attempt to convince, and then we ought to approve the doctrines held by you. If, however, quite the contrary is true, and from the remotest past experience bears witness to our account and in no case does anything appear to harmonise with your teachings, why do you persist in maintaining a pretension so enormous?
Come, tell me why it is that the Celts and the Germans are fierce, while the Hellenes and Romans are, generally speaking, inclined to political life and humane, though at the same time unyielding and warlike? Why the Egyptians are more intelligent and more given to crafts, and the Syrians unwarlike and effeminate, but at the same time intelligent, hot-tempered, vain and quick to learn? For if there is anyone who does not discern a reason for these differences among the nations, but rather declaims that all this so befell spontaneously, how, I ask, can he still believe that the universe is administered by a providence? But if there is any man who maintains that there are reasons for these differences, let him tell me them, in the name of the creator himself, and instruct me.1
For Emperor Julian, many cultures require many gods. This is reasonable enough for for the first millennium; after all, why would one God make so many disparate cultures? Much more sensible to assume that more than one personality was at work in producing each one.
Today we would point to different environmental conditions (and different histories), as the explanation for different cultures. And our vantage point is much broader than that of the Roman Emperor, so that we can see for ourselves how climate and geography differ across the biosphere:
While Julian’s argument for pagan deities no longer seems convincing today, Mother Nature is not a single unified being. Selective pressures differ so radically, not only across ecosystems but even within a single niche within a given ecosystem, that a dizzying array of species have resulted, filling the Earth with a never-ending panoply of living things.
With this in mind, does it really make sense to treat Nature in a unified fashion? And is it any wonder then that our moral sense is at odds with itself, if we ourselves originated from a number of cultures, themselves shifting and evolving atop a human nature also disparate and diverse, shaped by selective pressures that changed again and again and again across the aeons of unrecorded time?
Boys and Girls
I’ve always been interested in having a large family, so I took a brief course in early childhood education in college. We had an opportunity to observe children on the playground, noting typical milestones for boys and girls. As a father with many boys, I’ve been able to continue observing the values and attitudes of boys very closely, and I can attest that their instincts differ dramatically from those of girls.
Boys are active on the playground, and spontaneously form groups to play games. Such games tend to be more competitive than social, and boys greatly value fair play, teamwork, and punishment for transgressors. They show very little interest for harm or care, and accept scrapes, bruises, and even physical attacks with little concern, and challenges, threats, and insults are traded regularly.
Often boys test one another socially to determine one-another’s mettle. They have little respect for crybabies, and tend to regard victims as deserving of their fate; strength and resilience in the face of taunts and bullying are universally respected.
Sociologists do note that this is not a universal pattern of behavior; Geert Hofstede finds that the United States is rather masculine, and tolerates much more competitiveness in boys than his home nation of Holland.2 (Uncle Sam is a more assertive god than the Dutch Maiden, I’m guessing.) But just looking at the moral intuitions of preadolescent boys gives a clear set of moral intuitions:
Play games to win
Compete fairly, and
Be brave, strong, and loyal
We can tell that they feel this way because they are very judgmental towards cheaters, traitors, and weaklings. These are clearly different mores from those enumerated by Haidt or discussed by Perry. We do still see a focus on loyalty and fairness, but care and sanctity are notably absent, and the focus on bravery, strength, and victory seem new. Is the playground morality of young boys not really morality at all? Or, has there something missing from the discussion up to this point?
The Freedom of Uninhibited Action
The English language never seems to have the right words for emotion. There’s a kind of feeling, a feeling close to joy—not quite happiness, but a good feeling. An almost carefree feeling that things are right. It’s the feeling a person has when they act immediately and directly on impulse without restraining themselves. I’m going to call it freedom.
We tend to think of restraint as something externally imposed on us, but that usually isn’t true. The external world trains us against the things we want. We want to eat cake all the time and exercise none of the time; we want to give our ex boyfriend a chance because he’s so attractive sorry for breaking up with us; we want to yell at that jerk who so richly deserves it; we want, but we don’t.
In many cases we’ve conditioned ourselves so well that our actual experience of many wants is simply frustration. For me personally, when people make me angry, I usually experience this as frustration, because I’ve learned that there is virtually never any benefit to acting on anger.3 This is one reason why the home feels like such a relaxing place: home is where our inhibitions can drop, and we aren’t restraining ourselves.
I will say that there are bad feelings that don’t really encourage any action. Grief and depression can be very hard, because they don’t encourage us to do anything about them; depression is particularly unpleasant, because depression is a state of hyper-inhibition, where we don’t want to do anything at all.
But even fear and anger don’t have to be unpleasant emotions. If we’re able to give in to them, to scream, run, seek comfort, or lash out, then we’re existing in a very genuine, free state.
There’s a book I like, called Acts of War, by Richard Holmes. It’s a military book about military men, and Holmes notes that, for soldiers, the long moments leading up to battle are always experienced as much more difficult, much more terrifying than the actual battle itself.4
I think the reason for this is that soldiers approach the battle with a sense of obvious fear, but they have no way to act on it. Instead they wait, and wait, and wait, with nothing to do but suppress the fear. The awful tension continues to build until the battle actually occurs. This is an environment to be genuinely afraid, with bullets flying and bombs going off—but no one talks about it that way. When the danger is actually present, when the battle is right on top of them? They just act in the moment, and that action is experienced as relief. They’re free.
The Hunt is Free
Sarah Perry writes about the hunt as though it’s a manifestly awful thing—as though our hearts must go out to the impala as it struggles to outrun the lion. This is a very feminine way of looking at the situation, which, if you follow Perry’s argument, seems to result in a belief that nature is horrible and we should all stop having children.
But consider what the animals are actually experiencing. It’s hard to know, because we can’t really visit the Serengeti and carry out a randomized survey on the impalas. (Sarah Perry distrusts surveys anyway.) But how does it feel to chase and be chased? This is something I know about. Perry writes about the joys of even solitary running, but running with my children, I guarantee it is difficult to repress a smile. Breaking into an uninhibited run is one of the most basic, simple joys of existence. And insofar as I can understand what it’s like for animals at all, it seems likely to me that they’re all experiencing the encounter as pure freedom: the lion, relaxing into its desire to hunt, and the impala, giving in to its fear.
Perry wants us to consider a lion chasing an impala in moral terms, and she is strongly wedded to the idea of harm as an unjustifiable evil. But look at the situation through the eyes of a boy. Boys are excited by a predator chasing its prey. They recognize what’s going on: This is a competition, a game, a race. Life to the victor, death to the loser! And why not? The loser’s a loser. Being slow and weak is a transgression that merits punishment, while victory is an existential, ultimate good, which needs no justification to pursue!
Synthesis
All of these arguments attempt to support the idea that, while nature may be bad, nature is also good. In fact, I really think this mixture of good and bad is paradoxically better than an existence consisting purely of what we think of as good—who wants to eat nothing but sugar all the time? Neither the bland heaven of Christianity, nor utilitarian pleasure-hell, hold any interest for me. I’m a product of natural selection occurring for countless generations amidst threats, tragedies, and joy; is it any wonder that it is in these rich and contradictory circumstances that I find the most satisfaction?
I am old enough by now to know that there are very few simple solutions to personal problems, and what works for me may fall utterly flat for people who intuitively approach the world the way Sarah Perry does. But though I may be male, I’m not only able to see the hunt as a glorious game; I can appreciate an emotional appeal on behalf of victims. And equally, I suspect that even a very feminine person would have enough of an animus to learn to appreciate a masculine evaluation of nature.
I could go on here, and talk about the consequences for a society which focuses only on feminine morals such as harm/care (as our current society seems to be doing) or a society which focuses only on male morals such as victory/loss (as has been the case in other times). But that’s a story for another day. For now, I simply want to discourage the ugly philosophical impulse to smooth over contradictions, and offer a reminder of the beauty and richness that awaits within the complexities of existence.
Conclusion
Sarah Perry has written a compelling book. In this book, she defends the legitimacy of suicide, and argues that the ideal number of conscious beings is zero. I have tried my best to counter her second claim. What about her first claim—what about suicide?
Perry argues passionately, and at great length, that it is only because some people struggle so hard to manufacture meaning in life that they insist we must all accept life is a precious gift. She takes great pains to argue that we do not have a good moral argument against harming the self through suicide (if nothing else, such a harm is consensual). And she points out that many of the things that makes suicide so devastating is that we live in a society that does not accept the choice to die.
In the first part of this essay, I told the story of B, who shot himself, and was found dead by his relatives. In a world where suicide was not so heavily taboo, B could have talked to his friends and relatives about this before making the decision. He could have apologized for wrongs he had committed, thanked those people he appreciated, reached out to those he missed, and said goodbye. He could have ended his life painlessly, in the company of his loved ones. And no one would have needed to undergo the horror of discovering his corpse.
I haven’t spent very much time on these arguments that Perry made, because I found them very convincing. If I’ve focused on our disagreements, I hope that I’ve done enough justice to Perry’s work that you will consider buying it for yourself. Far from threatening or detracting from the meaning of life, Perry’s arguments offer another layer to the beauty of existence.
Though I still have strong reservations against children making the decision to end their lives, and I share her discomfort with the idea of parents abandoning their young ones, I think Perry’s strongest argument against reproducing—that life can be a prison, difficult or even impossible to escape—would be greatly eased in a world where adults are allowed to freely plan to end their lives, and discuss the choice with their loved ones. A world where the suicide is no longer taboo is a world worth moving towards.
Julian, E. (1923). The Works of the Emperor Julian with an English Translation by Wilmer Cave Wright: Volume Three. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Against_the_Galileans
Hofstede, G. H., & Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. sage.
Seneca, On Anger. http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/seneca_anger.pdf
Holmes, R. (1989). Acts of war: The behavior of men in battle. Free Press.
If the female side of morality leads to the conclusion that having children is morally wrong that is... a bit ironic. But it is logical. The most effective way of preventing harm must indeed be to prevent all life.