This article is part of a series of articles on the subject of evolution, ethics and spirituality:

Parts: I, II, III, IV, V, VI (1), VI (2), VII, VIII (1), VIII (2), IX (1), IX (2), IX (3), X (1), X (2), X (3), XI (1), XI (2), XI (3), XII, XIII, XIV, XV

Evolution, Ethics, And Spirituality: Part XVI — Stratum of Emotional Love

Introduction

One of the big problems which has been raised regarding evolution has to do with our developed brain capable of giving us a "moral sense". If everything is competition, a "survival of the fittest" as it is traditionally understood by people, then why are we predominantly good people, at least within our communities? This is a very good objection. Let’s think about it. Good people want a moral sense to behave well in society and be better individuals. On the other hand, bad people never play by the rules, they don’t care about people, just themselves. We can think of a list of what makes good people good, and bad people evil.

Traits of Good People

• Honest
• Loyal
• Altruistic
• Loving
• Self-Sacrificing
• Brave

Traits of Evil People

• Dishonest
• Traitor
• Selfish
• Hater
• Coward
• Spiteful

If we look at this list, it looks like if we placed a good person and evil person in a desert island, then the former will end up being a victim of the latter, perhaps even dinner if there are not many resources in that island.

Let’s look at comics for clarification (yeah … comics!). The problem for a good person in a case like this is the one which Todd McFarlane found about his Spawn comic book series. The hero of the story, Al Simmons, went to Hell when he died because he was a mercenary and assassin, and the Devil chose him as Hell’s Spawn to lead its militia against the forces of Heaven and God. Yet, how should Heaven be? If Heaven’s militia is a band of Mother Theresas, such battle wouldn’t be won by Heaven in a million years. As a result, in the Spawn series, Heavenly forces must be as ruthless as Hell’s demons. When people think "survival of the fittest", people think that there is no chance in "heck" that good virtuous people can arise out of it: there are always evil people, and to deal with them, you will have to be as bad as they are … or worse.

There is something wrong with this picture of evolution. It reminded me of the time I watched the Superfriends when I was little. Ya know! Superman, Batman, Aquaman … etc. always triumph over evil. Yet, as an adult, I watch these series and I’m actually bored with them. If evil was so effective, I wouldn’t know in a million years why wouldn’t evil be triumphant over good.

Yet, there was a recent version of the same idea. In 2001, Warner Brothers released a TV Series called The Justice League and a sequel called Justice League Unlimited, which were far more believable, more interesting, and better version of the Superfriends. Besides, Kevin Conroy gave the Batman his voice … Conroy’s is the best voice for Batman EVER! (but that’s another issue ). One of the things I liked about these series is that they were more "truthlike". There was not one "Legion of Doom" like in the Superfriends‘ series, but rather an inability of the evil villains to keep the group together! In The Justice League and Justice League Unlimited there are four different efforts to create something like "The Legion of Doom" (once under Lex Luthor’s leadership, once under Aresia’s (aka Fury), then twice under Grodd’s, although in the last case, it ended up with Luthor’s), without any success whatsoever of persisting. What was the problem? How ever they wished to establish solidarity against the good guys, evil guys are … ahem! … evil. Elements of dishonesty, thirst for power, self-service, betrayal, and ambition corrupted the group again and again, because each one of the bad guys were bad guys.

If you still don’t get my point, let’s make an imaginary experiment. A whole group of good guys end up in an deserted island, while a group of bad guys end up in another one. What will happen? In the end, the good guys will probably thrive or build a boat to escape, while the bad guys will self-destruct.

What is our lesson here, ladies and gentlemen? That our view of evolution about competing individuals and choosing the success of individuals is wrong. The reason why goodness exists it is because a species is going to succeed through good actions than through evil in a group. So group selection can explain why so many species have altruistic behavior. We developed also a moral sense because not everyone in society is good, hence a moral sense will enable us to recognize good in the world while trying to diminish the evil in society in many ways.

If you think this is only a comic book sort of scenario, think again! Experiment after experiment have confirmed the validity of multi-level group selection in relation with other models such as gene selection or kin selection (which is regarded as a level of group selection). For instance, William Muir carried out an experiment with hens regarding the egg production. He chose the best individual chickens in terms of egg production in one cage, and then he chose the best group of chickens in another cage. Notice that in the latter, there may be some unproductive chickens in terms of egg production. Result? After six generation, only three chickens of the first group survived. The best individual chickens tried their very best to produce eggs by suppressing the production of the other chickens. So, of the original nine, only three remained … the rest were murdered by the three. Even though, yes, the best individual chickens produced more eggs individually, the total of egg production as a whole plummeted . However, in the case of the best group of chickens, not only were they wholly alive, healthy and kicking after six generations, but its egg production increased with every generation.

David Sloan Wilson loves to use this chicken experiment as an example of group selection. At the end of one of his lecture, one university teacher approached him and said: "This describes my department! I know the names of those three chickens!" Apparently his department created an environment based purely on merits, disregarding other aspects of academic life. The result was eerily similar to those of the best individual chickens.

On the other hand, as Omar Tonsi Eldakar has shown in an experiment with group selection in the case of strider, being a gentleman lets you go a long way, needless to say, a successful reproduction and survival of the species. Isn’t that right Jessica?

Similar experiments have been carried out on beetles with similar results (Futuyma, 2009, p. 288-289; Wade (1977)).

What is our lesson here, ladies and gentlemen? That, indeed, selfish people do triumph within groups, yet, they are unable to thrive between groups. Much to the dismay of Richard Dawkins, group selection is the way to go (Wynne-Edwards (1986), Wilson, 2008, pp. 28-35).

From an Evolutionary Standpoint: Love Matters!

As we have explained before, we don’t practice ethics just because of it, we are interested in behaving well or as best as possible. Most organisms out there have absolutely no notion of what ethical is, they have no idea what good or bad values are, or what is right or wrong. Yet, they are able to develop such behaviors which we call "good" (kindness, altruism, cooperation) which let these species survive. One big example of this is the bacteria. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for the fact that at some point in our prehistory, cooperating bacteria led to their own survival through cooperation, which led to the creation of the eucharyotic cell. The reason why we have bacteria (e.g. mitochondria) in our cells is precisely because they form part of this sort of cooperation. Mitochondria and chloroplasts (especially the latter) make our lives possible. Chloroplasts trap the sun’s light and transform them within plant cells. Mitochondria provide energy to all of our cells. This theory of cooperation among bacteria to create a higher level organism, the eucharyotic cell, was proposed originally by Lynn Margulis, and it is called the endosymbiotic theory.

Other animals such as ants or bees cooperate because of instincts more than anything else. If you look at bees, they cooperate among themselves because their genes, through natural selection (group selection) favored those genes which inclined them to cooperate.

Yet, unlike ants or bees, humanity lacks some instincts for survival. Yet, as we have seen before, we have developed empathic emotions, especially love emotions, which enable us to behave well, to be inclined to solidarity and altruism. We can see this in all primates, including those close to us, and we can see it in ourselves too.

This is not exempt from controversy, though. As obvious as all of this may seem, many people ask, from a philosophical point of view: "What is love?" I wish to offer a response to this question by making two very different sorts of "love".

1. Emotional Love
2. Ethical Love

Let me start explaining the second sort of love. This is the kind of love which Kant understood in his works on Ethics, and which has been defended by so many other authors.

Ethical Love

One of the biggest reflections we find in many philosophers’ minds, including Kant’s, is that Jesus asks people to "love one’s enemies". If Ethics has everything to do with obeying an objective command of reason, this particular command doesn’t make any sense. Kant clarifies this commandment in light of his Ethical theory:

It is undoubtedly in this way, again, that we are to understand the passages from scripture in which we are commanded to love our neighbor, even your enemy. For love as an inclination [emotion] cannot be commanded, but beneficence from duty –even though no inclination impels us to it and, indeed natural and unconquerable aversion opposes it– is practical and not pathological love, which lies in the will and not in the propensity of feeling, in principles of action and not in melting sympathy; and it alone can be commanded. (AK 4:399).

"Pathological" in this sense only means a love which is emotionally based (the term is not used to describe emotional love as an illness, the Greek term "pathos" means "feeling"). So, this kind of love that is been commanded is what I will call here ethical love, a love which is not felt but practiced. This is the love that operates in the ethical stratum, as described in our last post. Remember, the ethical stratum consists in, for all practical purposes, what Kant called the "Kingdom of Ends": rational beings legislate maxims as universal laws which are ends-in-themselves, which are simultaneously means for rational beings who are also ends-in-themselves (if this has a Rousseau sort of flavor, it is no accident!) (AK 4:434).

This is the sort of love that is talked about by Erich Fromm in his famous work The Art of Loving, who agreed wholeheartedly with Kant that true love considers another rational being as ends-in-themselves and not as mere means. For him, love is a way of being rather than a mere feeling. It is the sort of feeling that is produced by the practice of caring, respect, and knowledge.

The so-called father of "pop psychology", Morgan Scott Peck, went along those same lines in his bestseller The Road Less Traveled. Yet, for a so-called "father" of pop psychology, the content of the book is not so "pop". His book is philosophical, but it infuses a lot of what he learned as a psychiatrist. The first lesson you must learn when it comes to love is that … that … ummm… life is difficult! (In the footnote he reminds us that the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is that "Life is suffering"). Although we all know this is true, we all forget it. Yet, to overcome difficulty, we need to have discipline. Why would he talk about discipline first and leave "love" for later, if the book is about love itself? Peck replies that without discipline there can be no love. What kind of discipline do we need for true love? Peck gives us four aspects we must fulfill in our lives:

• Delaying gratification in the present for future gains.
• Acceptance of responsibility for one’s decisions and actions.
• Dedication to the truth, which means being true to oneself and with others in words and deeds.
• Balancing by prioritizing conflicting requirements. We referred to this as that it is true applied ethics.

Now that we have discipline, we are able to discuss love. As in the case of Fromm, for Peck, love is not mere attraction or "falling in love", or a passion we feel towards something or someone. Peck calls cathexis the attraction we feel towards something or someone, which we should differentiate from love. Love is not a feeling either, nor is "self-sacrifice", especially if it means denying yourself the good things you need for yourself; self-sacrifice is important for love, but it shouldn’t be absolute for the rest of your life. Remember, you should love yourself too. Remember that the key word in "delaying gratification" is "delaying", it does not mean "eliminating gratification altogether".

What is love then, for Peck? He defines love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own and another’s spiritual growth (Peck, 1978, p. 119). Love, then is an activity not a feeling. Even Peck argues that true love sometimes acts against emotional love.

But to understand this conception of love, we must ask: what does he mean by "spiritual growth"? It means to contribute to others and to oneself to the point of being able to make responsible decisions, show empathy, not accept everything through blind faith, and even lose an irrational attachment to our self-interests for everyone’s sake (including ourselves).

Emotional Love

Yet, there is something lacking despite the validity of ethical love. It operates at the level of the ethical stratum. Yet, as we have said before, we don’t care for ethics just because. Emotions play a central role as motives to act ethically. Without emotions, we are simply unable to make rational decisions, we are totally and absolutely unable to create the necessary empathy to be able to respect others as human beings as ourselves.

André Comte-Sponville talks about a fourth stratum which he calls "ethical", yet it is an inappropriate term. For Comte-Sponville, his notion of "ethical stratum" is extremely close to that which I describe as emotional love. However, Comte-Sponville’s notion of "ethical stratum" is a bit confusing, because in many other ways it seems to correspond to what I call here "ethical love". Inspired in St. Augustine’s ethics, there is a dimension of emotional love which needs "training". As St. Augustine said, we should learn to love first, then do what we will. According to Comte-Sponville, we should develop three sorts of emotional love:

• Love for the Truth
• Love for Freedom
• Love for Humanity

For him, love should serve as motivation for what we (not him) call the "ethical stratum", the ethical stratum should be an external restriction to the juridical-political stratum, which simultaneously establishes external limits to the techno-scientific stratum. So, here is how our final scheme looks like:

This is the scheme we will work with from now on in our next blog posts. When we discuss religion and spirituality, we will consider yet another possible stratum which Comte-Sponville talks about. For now, these are enough for our next discussions.

References

Comte-Sponville, A. (2004). El capitalismo, ¿es moral? México: Paidós.

Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. NY: HarperCollins.

Futuyma, D. J. (2009). Evolution. US: Sinauer.

Kant, I. (1999). Groundwork of The metaphysics of morals. In P. Guyer & A. W. Wood (eds.), Practical philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Muir, W. M. (2009). Genetic selection and behaviour. Canadian Journal of Animal Science, 89, 1, 182.

Peck, M. S. (1978). The road less traveled: a new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. US: Touchstone.

Wade, M. J. (1977). An experimental study of group selection. Evolution, 31, 134-153.

Wilson, D. S. (2008). Evolution for everyone: how Darwin’s theory can change the way we think about our lives. US: Delta.

Wynne-Edwards, V. C. (1986). Evolution through group selection. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo