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In “The Holy Earth” (1915) Bailey wrote about evolution: “This is the philosophy of the oneness in nature and unity in living things.”
About the morality or immorality of the struggle for existence that is the instrument of natural selection, Bailey wrote: “If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition.”
It is, in Bailey’s estimation, morally significant that natural selection is not driven by ambition or purpose. By the expression “process of adjustment” I doubt that Bailey meant to offer an alternative teleology for the struggle. I think he understood that evolution, as understood in science, has no purpose, no meaning in a teleological way. If one removes the idea that life has purpose, then the character of morality must change, if it is to remain significant at all.
For Bailey, I think his expression “The Brotherhood Relation” defines morality, if the word morality even applies. I think the word eschatology applies here more than the word morality. The Brotherhood Relation is something that comes after the era of natural selection, after the era in which survival, the adjustment process, is tied to the instinct to kill. He wrote: “It is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place.” That is an eschatological belief, rather than a moral belief. It is a vision of a new era. It is eschatological in the way Isaiah wrote – the wolf shall dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6-9.) It is a vision of Zion, of God’s holy hill, of “The Holy Earth.”
Eschatology and evolution merge to form ecology in the writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey. In ecology, evolution sings the song of Zion.
John Burroughs wrote: “Natural selection is just as good a god as any other. No matter what we call it, if it brought man to the head of creation and put all things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough for anybody.” That is an allusion to Genesis 1:26 and Psalm 8:6.
Can stoicism overcome the nihilism associated with Darwin’s view, overcome what Burroughs called “the cosmic chill.” I think Burroughs believed stoicism would warm us. He wrote that “most persons feel homeless and orphaned in a universe where no suggestion of sympathy and interest akin to our own comes to us from the great void.” And then, in a sentence that alludes to Psalm 8:3-4 and to Darwin’s great work, he wrote: “A providence of impersonal forces, the broadcast, indiscriminate benefits of nature, kind deeds where no thought of kindness is, well-being as the result of immutable law – all such ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured ourselves to them.”
Inure: this is the counsel of stoics.
Burroughs wrote these lines in a work he titled stoically, “Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism” (1920.)
Thoreau had already famously written, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” They are related, I think – wildness and natural selection. Still, I am not sure Thoreau meant it that way. Although some critics have suggested that wilderness or nature was Thoreau’s god, and that a Zen theme (which is a stoical theme) can be detected in some of his writings, I think wildness was not natural selection to him – wildness was the opposite of civilization. Thoreau was engaged in resistance, not acceptance. In wildness was hope to him.
For me, stoicism fails. Resistance is my path. Resistance, and, like the psalmist and Thoreau, hope that we will find sympathy, kindness in the wildness in or beyond the moon and the stars.
Aldo Leolpold on the land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (A Sand County Almanac, page 224-225.)
One can write about the wildness of nature because natural selection is wild, but it is hard to write about morality in the context of nature because the way of nature – natural selection, or chance and necessity – is indifferent to morality.
Leopold tried to avoid a human-centered ethic, but he did not succeed. Preservation of the integrity, stability and beauty of nature is something humans sometimes seek because we associate them with existence. Natural selection has no such aim – no beliefs, no values, no purposes.
Natural selection is indifferent to existence and nonexistence. Humans are not. We have realized that our existence depends on the existence of the web of life of which we are part. We value that web, like we value integrity, stability and beauty, because the thought of nonexistence is so awful to us.
Integrity, stability and beauty: these are virtues or values. Philosophers have associated them with what is eternal and, therefore, transcendent. It is a strain to sustain belief that they are connected with nature or the cosmos after Darwin. It is hard to sustain belief that existence matters.
Noone loved anyone. She did. “She laughed his joy, she cried his grief … Anyone’s any was all to her.” E. E. Cummings wrote that.
It feels good to be loved, to know that we are loved.
But that feeling, that knowledge is hard to keep. Harder and harder.
Darwin showed us a different knowledge: natural selection is at the heart of life, nothing more. Feelings cannot be trusted, not if we want to know the truth. Love and hate: they are the same to the author of life.
“Busy folk buried them side by side, little by little … noone and anyone,” Cummings wrote.
In the beginning there was no plan. In the end there is no peace. In the middle, noone loves anyone. It is impolite to say that. Teleonomy is jealous of teleology. I know. We must laugh our cryings and do our dance, like the “someones and everyones” in Cummings poem who “said their nevers” and “slept their dream.”
In Eudora Welty’s story, “The Key,” Albert picked up a key on the floor of the train station and placed it in a pocket by his heart. Albert associated the key with happiness. Albert “knew,” Welty wrote, that happiness “is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”
It is hard to sustain that belief, what Albert “knew” about happiness and life, in an age when we “know” that nothing is meant for us, when we know that everything has a cause, but not a purpose, and that where order appears it has not been designed.
A red-haired man accidentally dropped the key that Albert picked up believing it was meant for him. At the end of the story, the red-haired man placed another key in the hand of Albert’s wife Ellie, and then “did not wait to see any more, but went out abruptly into the night.”
I think the red-haired man is a God-figure in the story, not the God of our ancestors, but a contemporary theologian’s God. Welty wrote, “you felt a shock in glancing up at him,” and “you felt some apprehension that he would never express whatever might be the desire of his life … in standing apart in compassion, in making any intuitive present or sacrifice, or in any way of action at all – not because there was too much in the world demanding his strength, but because he was too deeply aware.”
The red-haired man is something like God, or, rather, what is left over of God, when what we know is that natural selection is the giver and taker of life, when what we know is that nothing is meant for us.
About the red-haired man, Welty wrote, “You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done.”
“…the extreme fertility of her garden formed at once a preoccupation and a challenge … she seemed not to seek for order, but to allow an overflowering … she planted every kind of flower that she could … planted thickly and hastily, without stopping to think … if she thought of beauty at all, she certainly did not strive for it in her garden.”
The way Eudora Welty described Mrs. Larkin here in A Curtain of Green resembles the way Darwin described natural selection in The Origin of the Species. In another excerpt the way Eudora Welty described Mrs. Larkin resembles the way some contemporary theologians justify the ways of God, in a way that merges God and natural selection:
“…so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability … Life and death, which now meant nothing to her but which she was compelled continually to wield with both her hands, ceaselessly asking, Was it not possible to compensate? to punish? to protest?”
Mrs. Larkin’s garden reminds me of Eden in Genesis and, at the same time, of the old and wild garden of life that Darwin described. An image in the story that blends the two gardens together is the pear tree at the center of the garden in A Curtain of Green. Eudora Welty mentioned it three times, and the one that I cannot forget is:
”The shadow of the pear tree in the center of the garden lay callous on the ground.”
It frightens me to associate that image with the tree of life, the one in Genesis and the one in The Origin of the Species.
Fecundity and mortality are bound together in the intricate molecules of life, bound together in the struggle for life. They are inexhaustible – to exhaust one is to exhaust the other. In A Curtain of Green, the story of Mrs. Larkin, Eudora Welty wrote: “against that which was inexhaustible, there was no defense.”
At the end of A Curtain of Green, the young man in the story “ran out of the garden.”
Natural selection, the process of evolution that in Darwin’s writings account for the origin of the species, is indifferent to cruelty and kindness. The Bible, although it describes God as kind, describes not only acts of God that sound kind, but also some that sound cruel to our modern ears.
Why do some of us praise God and defend cruelties in the Bible and yet condemn the ethic of evolution for its indifference to cruelty and kindness, while others admire evolution and defend its cruelties and yet condemn the cruelties of God as described in the Bible?
I suspect that these inconsistencies occur because some of us gain more from professing a belief in evolution, and some of us gain more from professing faith in God. We do what we do to advance and defend our interests. We justify the cruelties of the one we love and condemn the cruelties of the one we hate for the sake ourselves.
But if we love or admire both, shall we justify cruelty or condemn it?
In a review of Loren Eiseley’s book, The Unexpected Universe, W. H. Auden wrote, “I must openly state my own bias and say that I do not believe in Chance; I believe in Providence and Miracles.”
When Auden wrote those words, he was writing about Natural Selection and the role that Chance plays in life through that process. His expression places Chance and Natural Selection in opposition to Providence and Miracles. Auden wrote with grace about this opposition by referring to his own bias.
Albert Einstein stated the opposition elegantly, but with less grace: “God does not play dice with the universe.”
George Gaylord Simpson, who sided with Chance rather than Providence, stated the opposition more forcefully and without grace: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
Thomas Huxley referred to this opposition as the great gulf between science and religion – whether Chance or Providence, indifference or benevolence, rules the universe.
The opposition matters. If the outcomes in the game of life are governed by Chance, then the intelligent strategy for life is to cheat when we can, and to hedge when we cannot cheat. If life is ruled by Providence, then the intelligent strategy is to negotiate with Providence, and, when we cannot negotiate, to pray for mercy.
Although reflexively I agree with Auden, I find it hard to sustain his bias. My mind wants to concede some benevolence to Natural Selection and its partner Chance.
I think Simpson’s expression exaggerates the purposelessness of Natural Selection, of Nature, of the role of Chance in Nature. Darwin did not assert what Simpson asserted, and Darwin, like Auden, wrote with grace. Darwin observed that Natural Selection works to the benefit of each specie. In The Origin of the Species, Chapter 4, he wrote that Nature selects “for the good of the being which she tends.”
Darwin’s expression leaves room for negotiation with Providence. It leaves room for prayer.
Darwin did not write about genetic engineering, nor even about genes. He lived before their time. Nevertheless, genetic engineering is a form of human selection (e.g., breeding domestic animals and plants to have certain traits) that began before anyone spoke of genes and Darwin did say this (in Origin of the Species, Chapter 4) comparing human selection with natural selection: “Man selects for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”
I don’t believe humanity really knows how to select for its own good. Darwin thought we do not. He ridiculed human selection, saying: “Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long and a short beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him….How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.”
It seems that from Darwin’s perspective, human selection is not only anthropocentric, it is foolish, and so genetic engineering is foolish. The wiser path for humanity is to leave selection to nature because species and varieties of species selected by the long, slow process of nature “should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship.”
Proponents of genetic engineering, and other forms of human selection, it seems, may believe that natural selection accounts for the origin of the species as Darwin wrote, but they do not appear to see the risk that Darwin saw. It seems: they agree with Darwin on the role of natural selection in the origin of the species, but not on its value for the future of the species; they do not agree that our our wishes and efforts are fleeting or that the products of human selection are poor; they implicitly hold that humanity is ready and able to assume control of selection, of life.
Human selection is not new, of course. It began at least with herding and agriculture. Maybe it began before that. One might argue its long history shows that human selection is safe. But is that history really long? No. The years in which human selection has been practiced are short when measured by geological time and by the long periods of time over which natural selection produced its species. Darwin is probably as right about our future as he is about our past.
It seems incongruent to believe that natural selection explains the origin of the species and to believe that human selection holds any hope for the future of any species.
Darwin wrote that he “sometimes felt much difficulty in understanding” why species have some traits that seem unnecessary for their survival. Unimportant organs were an example of such traits. Even more difficult to understand than unnecessary organs was beauty, superfluous beauty. Some naturalists in Darwin’s time questioned the adequacy of natural selection to explain the origin of the species because it did not seem able to account for beauty. Darwin wrote, “They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety.” Darwin considered their argument that beauty had its own reason, a separate reason from the preservation of life, to be a serious problem for his own argument that natural selection accounts for the origin of the species. The stakes in this dispute were high. They still are. In his words, “This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory.”
Darwin argued that unnecessary organs and traits that are merely beautiful were once necessary for the survival of progenitors and had been inherited by the descendent species even though they were no longer necessary for survival. He argued that natural selection would have eliminated these traits if they caused harm to the descendent species, but would not necessarily have eliminated them if they caused no harm.
A final conclusion about such things seems beyond the reach of science.
Much remains at stake here. Beauty remains potentially fatal to Darwin’s argument. If beauty is superfluous to survival, and yet exists, then perhaps God not natural selection was, after all, responsible for the origin of the species.
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