The Darwinian Comedy

Without God, "everything is permitted," says the Devil to a dreaming Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, expressing a concern that lies buried in those deep-set discontents of the modern secular world. It takes different forms, but the deepest anxiety, I think, is over an alteration of a oft-heard question -- not "Can we be good without God?", but rather, "Can there be good without God?" God, when we believed in Him/Her/It, was in charge of things, and so was a guarantee that things were at least not incompatible with the values that (we believed) came from God. Now, that doesn't seem guaranteed at all. What if, goes the fear, the particular values of benevolence, tolerance, justice, mercy, etc., or any other list of moral goods that we hold dear are ultimately unworkable in the very nature of things?

This then brings up the "Darwinian Comedy".  It might be better named the "Natural Comedy", in contrast to Dante's Divine Comedy, of course, and even Balzac's "Human Comedy", but the first name provides the key to its meaning.

To see that, we need something like the following suppositions:

• In learning to speak the individual acquires a cultural imprint, that continues to be modified in his/her interactions throughout life
• The individual is thus the unit of culture, but cultural groupings form when individuals engage in communication, more or less routinely, in various contexts or situations
• Each individual is involved with typically a number of cultural groupings (e.g., family, school, work, community, and so on), that are part of  the interactions affecting the cultural imprint
• The modifications are a result of feedback from the results of decisions and actions taken on the basis of the concepts, ideas, themes, or memes (both conscious and subliminal) of the cultural imprint -- strengthening those with positive results, weakening others.
• This is a cultural version of a pattern Darwin described for species evolution -- variations having different potentials and then natural or contextual selection of those variations best suited to the context. 
• When such variations on an individual level are communicated in cultural groupings, the result is cultural evolution analogous to, though obviously not the same as, Darwinian evolution of species. 

To that, must be added the fact that the sorts of human values listed above are themselves cultural artifacts, acquired in the same way all other aspects of culture are acquired, and subject to the same environmental (meaning contextual) pressures as all cultural abstractions, concepts, themes, ideas, or memes. That is, like all adaptational processes, our values both help us to shape the world around us and are shaped by the world around us. In that way, for us, they are an integral part of the world, and so cannot, for long at least, be in fundamental conflict with the world. So, Dostoevsky's Devil notwithstanding, even without God, not everything is permitted.

"Comedy" implies, if not exactly a happy ending, at least a positive one. By the "Darwinian Comedy", then, is meant the positive ending to the worry above that nature and human notions of the good might be incompatible. When we can see that nature, even in its form as the unknown unknown that always hovers beyond the reach of human knowledge at any one time, cannot be inimical to values that are essential to human thriving because such values are formed in nature, we can rest in the knowledge that nature always has the last laugh.






Jun 9/20