Why might Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith believe that U.S. biologist E. O. Wilson is "the antichrist"?

Jeremy Griffith at the launch of his book Freedom : The End of the Human Condition at the London Royal Geographical Society on 2 June 2016

The person who has had the biggest influence on the ideas I express in my writing has been Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. In some cases that has been the kind of influence where you adopt an idea which someone puts forward which proves accountable, but more often it has taken the form of a challenge to find a better way of explaining something after having found Griffith’s interpretation unaccountable in some way.

It seems to me that if we want to understand someone, it can be useful to examine those areas in which their behaviour seems out of proportion in some way. An over-reaction can be a sign of insecurity, of a sore spot.

Griffith claims to identify fellow biologist E.O. Wilson with the figure of “the anticrist” predicted in the Gospel of John and “the beast” spoken of in Revelations. This is very peculiar behaviour for a scientist.

Here is the relevant passage from his book Freedom : The End of the Human Condition :

“And this ‘unity of life and all its manifestations of experience—aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational’ is not the fake offering that E.O. Wilson—that lord of lying, the master of keeping humanity away from any truth; indeed, the quintessential ‘liar…the antichrist’ (Bible, 1 John 2:22), the ‘deceiver and the antichrist’ (2 John 1:7), ‘The beast… given… to utter proud words and blasphemies’ (Rev. 13:5)—put forward in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, when he proposed that Evolutionary Psychology’s alleged ability to explain the moral aspects of humans meant biology and philosophy, the sciences and the humanities, indeed science and religion, could at last be reconciled.” from paragraph 1155

Now I don’t know any more about E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality theory than Griffith’s account of it. It seems to have to do with the possibility that we could have developed instincts for cooperation because cooperation has a survival advantage for groups. Evolution eliminates the least fit, but being a member of a cooperative group increases fitness because cooperative groups are more likely to survive than groups where the individuals compete at the expense of the group.

E. O. Wilson

Griffith claims this couldn’t happen because it requires the development to cooperativeness in individuals before the benefits can manifest in groups, and cooperativeness could not arise in individuals without the cooperative individuals being exploited by the non-cooperative individuals which would mean they would be less fit and would be eliminated.

I’m no biologist, but I can imagine a way in which cooperative groups could arise. The assumption seems to be that our instincts drive competition, but I don’t see why we would necessarily have to see it that way. Take food. If there is not enough food to go around, we may compete for what food is available, but is it our selfish genes which are making us behave this way or is it the shortage of food. If there were enough food, it would make more sense for us to share it and enjoy the sensual benefits of loving behaviour with other members of the group. So if there were an environment with enough food so that competition would not be necessary, would not the pleasure principle - the impulse to do what feels good and avoid what entails suffering - lead to group cooperation?

I suppose there is also competition for breeding opportunities, but the idea is that those qualities which allow someone to have the most offspring who survive to mate themselves prosper in the evolutionary process. In some species and some contexts, aggressive competitions may determine who breeds the most. But in the context of a group whose members are not fighting over food, is it not possible that females would chose to mate more often with affectionate rather than aggressive mates?

As I say, I’m no biologist. The fact that I can imagine something doesn’t mean there may not be many reasons why it couldn’t have happened that way. And I don’t know what E.O. Wilson is suggesting beyond Griffith’s very brief, and possibly biased, account.

But why is Griffith so angry about Wilson’s theory? He says that it is because Wilson’s theory grounds both our competitive and our cooperative behaviour in our genes, while Griffith sees our problem as a “psychosis” which can be cured. If it is in our genes, it can’t be cured.

I think this actually does highlight a problem in Griffith’s theory. What he is complaining about in Wilson’s theory applies also to his own.

Griffith believes that our instincts are a dictatorial demand for selfless behaviour. If this is true, then the problem he calls “the human condition” is just as insoluble as it would be if Wilson were right about us having competitive instincts, in fact, our situation would arguably be even more intractable.

You can’t change an instinctive orientation and you can’t make it see reason. If our instincts make us feel bad for not being selfless then we can’t get them off our back.

What Griffith is saying is that we now recognise that the “criticism” coming from our instincts was unjust and so we can go back to following them, reassured that we were not bad to deviate from them originally.

The problem with this is that - no matter how sensible it might be to behave cooperatively - if we have to do it because our instincts will make us feel bad if we don’t - that is a kind of internal totalitarianism.

Freedom means choosing our behaviour to best suit what we feel to be our interests. If we are enlightened, we will realise that our best interests and the best interests of those around us tend to align. But we have to feel that it is our choice.

I don’t believe that our instincts are dictatorial. Just because they gave us a way to orientate our behaviour before we developed intelligence, doesn’t mean there need have been any resistance put up by them to more helpful ways of managing our life.

I think the conflict between good and evil in us is a product of different ideas about how we should self manage which have arisen in the intellect and of the emotional turmoil which can result when those ideas are unhelpful ones. This means we are not doomed by our genetic orientation, either one to competition or to freedom-denying idealism.

I think that, sometimes, in these moments in which another’s behaviour confronts us with a key weakness in our own worldview, we may project onto them some disowned aspect of ourselves.

Griffith accuses Wilson of being “the antichrist” and of arrogance and “blasphemies”. It is Griffith who has claimed that his work represents the fulfilment of that which was promised by Jesus Christ. If his theory is wrong, that means he is the arrogant one committing blasphemy and putting himself in the position of the false Christ.

I once experienced an example of this kind of projection in Griffith’s response to me. I had politely and tentatively questioned him about his assessment of my character type. The appropriate response, it seems to me, would have been to say something like : “Perhaps you don’t understand. I’ll try to give you a fuller explanation.” Instead he convened and meeting and told people that I was : “M-a-a-ssively deluded.” Why this over-reaction to someone politely questioning his interpretation? Was he seeing something in me which really applied to himself?

More critiques of Griffith's work.

My personal story of involvement in Griffith's Foundation for Humanity's Adulthood (now the World Transformation Movement).

BOOK REVIEW : THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition and Saves The World! by Jeremy Griffith

 

This is a review of a booklet which is the transcript of an interview. You can watch the interview or download a free copy of the booklet here.

The cover of this booklet tells us that “This world-saving interview was broadcast across the UK in 2020 and is being replayed on radio & TV stations around the world.” I’d love to see more information on which radio and television stations in which countries have played the interview. I’ve done a Google search for “Jeremy Griffith” with “Craig Conway” hoping to get some idea of how people in various parts of the world responded to these broadcasts, but I haven’t come up with much other than the World Transformation Movement’s own promotions and Craig Conway’s social media.

There is such a thing as under-selling and over-selling something. If one presents one’s product without any major promise of its value, it may be that hardly anyone tries it out. As Jesus pointed out, you don’t want to hide your light under a bushel. But if you lay the promises on too thick, you are liable to illicit suspicion in the prospective consumer that you are a snake-oil salesman or that you are blowing your own trumpet so loudly and repetitively in order to drown out your own inner critic. The title of this booklet “The Interview That Solves The Human Condition and Saves The World!” should suffice to bring that light out from beneath any bushel. Make the claim and then deliver on it. What a person says in praise of themselves or their own work should count for very little. What matters is whether it delivers for the reader. Does it enlighten them? Do things make sense in the world that didn’t make sense before? Politicians and priests will make glorious promises expressed in soaring rhetoric. But their aim is not to appeal to the reason, but to stir up an emotional response, often one which overrides the reason. An appeal to reason should be cool and calm and challenge the reader to find fault with it.

The blurb about Griffith in the front of the booklet says that “his work has attracted the support of  such eminent scientists as… Stephen Hawking…” This seems a bit misleading to me. Griffith put together a documentary proposal in 2004, which he distributed widely to scientists. He received a reply from someone representing Hawking saying that Hawking “is most interested in your impressive proposal” and “please let us know further details in due course.” I would not interpret this as meaning that Hawking was a supporter of his work. It sounds more like polite curiosity. Before using someone’s reputation to lend credibility to one’s controversial theory, it seems to me that it is only right to make sure that they understand what that theory is and have publicly expressed some kind of praise for it.

Griffith says that “the human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been solved.” I think this is false reasoning. Assuming that we can only talk freely about the human condition, as Griffith defines it, if we have a framework of belief (or understanding) which tells us we are not bad, then all that is needed is for Griffith to have a belief which tells him that he is not bad in order to move around smoothly in that framework. The proof of the framework has to be in its explanatory power.

I agree with Griffith that genetic selfishness can’t explain our competitive, selfish and aggressive tendencies. It is very easy to see that differences in these qualities between individuals are often the result of psychological insecurity. And, in a social species, being competitive, selfish or aggressive would only be a genetic advantage in limited circumstance and for limited times. Success in business, or winning a mate and raising a family, etc., is more dependent on the ability to be a cooperative team member than it is on trying to exercise some form of forceful control over others.

But it does seem we have always been an insecure species, always feeling we need to prove something about ourselves as individuals or tribal groups. We develop feelings of resentment which lead us to take out our frustrations by causing the suffering of others.

A capacity for love and cooperation is always there, though, when we are in a situation where we feel safe from criticism. Mutual acceptance and self-acceptance has the power to heal our insecurity and resentment.

Just because our behaviour has a psychological component, however, doesn’t mean that an impulse to propagate our genes may not also be a part of the motivation for our behaviour. It isn’t an either/or.

I see no reason to see our conscience as something instinctive, as Griffith does. Different individuals in different societies have different ideas on morality. They feel guilty about different things. It makes more sense to me to see the conscience as a part of the ego, an internalisation of a learned moral system. A system of expectations we have about ourselves. For me, guilt is always tied up with thinking. I think critically about my behaviour and I feel emotional discomfort. This leads me to concluded that the conscience resides in the conscious mind, i.e. the ego.

How insecure are we actually about being selfish or competitive? I think it depends on the degree to which we have been told we shouldn’t be selfish or competitive. It’s a negative feedback loop. Being criticised makes us more insecure which makes us more selfish. But this is a social phenomenon. I see no evidence that the criticism comes from somewhere below the conscious mind.

Is psychosis the correct term to use to describe the psychological condition which produces our dark side? A psychosis is a mental illness which causes its sufferer to be seriously cut off from reality. But what do we mean by “reality”? I’ve experienced the state which psychiatrist’s call psychosis. I was cut off from reality in the sense that I thought things were going on around me which were not going on around me. Griffith is saying that psychosis is the norm, that we are all cut off from reality as we go about our daily lives. But we have a good enough grasp on reality to do the things we have to do on a daily basis. Of course we are cut off from reality to some degree, because we process the information about the world around us through our conceptual framework which is a product of our view of ourself which may not be an honest one. I prefer to think in terms of neurosis, emphasising the experience of feeling insecure, because that doesn’t require wrestling with the question of whether we can ever experience unfiltered reality and whether it would be advantageous for us to do so. It must be hard to shop for breakfast cereal while your doors of perception are so open that all things appear infinite.

Griffith’s central thesis is that our psychological insecurity and resultant selfish, egotistical and aggressive behaviour is the result of a conflict which broke out early in our development as a species when our newly formed conscious mind came into conflict with a pre-existing instinctive orientation. “A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.”

At first, because we know we have some kind of conflict within us, we may find this argument convincing. But is it?

Are instincts dictatorial? Griffith uses the example of a bird’s flight path. If we were to place a major obstacle in that flight path, would the birds be driven by the dictatorial nature of their instinct to fly headlong into it? Or would they fly around it, following their instinct in a way which was responsive to a changing environment? Surely a lion’s instincts can tell her how to hunt, but not where the game is to be found on any particular day. For that she has to allow her behaviour to be guided by the data taken in from her senses.

If this is the case, then why would a conflict necessarily arise between our instincts and our developing conscious intelligence. Intelligence is a tool, like the senses, with which we can pursue the orientation given to us by our instincts. Why should we expect the instincts to fight back against any experiment in new behaviour?

And Griffith claims that our instinct is for loving, cooperative, selfless behaviour. So wouldn’t an instinct of this kind have to lovingly, cooperatively and selflessly surrender to something which took it in a new direction? An aggressive, selfish instinct might fight back, but not one of this kind.

Griffith describes our instincts as “dogmatic”. The definition of “dogmatic” is “inclined to lay down principles as undeniably true”. But this is something only the conscious mind can do. Instincts are stored information which has proven beneficial to the survival of the members of a species. The fact that it has been beneficial in this way is evidence for its accuracy, but to dogmatically insist upon its truth is something only the conscious mind is capable of. Griffith says that our instincts “are going to condemn him [our mythical ancestor Adam Stork] as being bad.” Again, only the conscious mind can condemn someone on moral grounds. Griffith seems to be projecting the nature of the idealistic judgemental human onto our pre-conscious orientating system.

My contention is that we do have a conflict between good and evil going on within us and that we do become insecure in the face of idealism which criticises us, and that this leads to us becoming ego-embattled - egotistical, selfish, aggressive and alienated. But I see idealism as being a product of the experimentation of the conscious mind. The war within is not between our ego and our instincts, but between conflicting influences within our ego. Our ego is the battleground. If we turn off our ego for a while and reconnect with our instinctive orientation, I believe we will find it to be an all-accepting, all-forgiving, non-judgemental openness to loving interaction with others. Of course we need our conscious mind to understand the world and make decisions. Our loving instincts are not sufficient on their own, but we should not project onto them any aspect of the battle going on in our ego.

This problem of treating the instincts as if they are capable of conscious thought runs through Griffith’s Adam Stork story. He says that Adam ideally would have sat down and explained to his instincts why he wasn’t bad. But this makes no sense, because the instincts are incapable of understanding. You can’t explain anything to them. It is Adam who has to explain to himself that he is not bad. If it were a matter of our instincts understanding us, the problem would be insoluble because it would depend on something which is impossible, i.e. instincts understanding anything at all.

Griffith has said that he was extremely idealistic in his youth. Presumably this led to him being very critical of other’s non-ideal behaviour. Is it possible that when he thinks of the instincts he is thinking of his youthful self. He needed people to explain to him why their behaviour was not as ideal as he felt it should be, but they were unable to do this. Is he seeing in the story of humanity the story of his life? This has to be a strong tendency for anyone who sets out to articulate an all-encompassing account of human behaviour.

Griffith relates his theory about this conflict between the instincts and the conscious mind to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, but he doesn’t deal very thoroughly with that myth. He says that Adam and Eve ate “from the tree of knowledge”. He leaves out the bit about it being the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”. This is misleading. If it is simply the “tree of knowledge” then this suits his theory that the key event was development of the ability to reason. But “tree of knowledge of good and evil” suggests that it is specifically talking about moral knowledge - i.e. idealism, which distinguishes between some forms of behaviour which are categorised as “good” and other forms of behaviour which are categorised as “evil”. General knowledge about how the world around us works need not undermine our self-acceptance and thus make us selfish and ego-centric, but idealistic standards against which we can find our behaviour and that of others wanting does undermine self-acceptance and lead to a negative feedback loop which actually promotes “sinful” behaviour. Hence our fall from grace.

Griffith claims that his work has not been accepted by mainstream science because it conflicts with the prevailing paradigm, but I see no evidence that he presents a credible testable hypothesis.

There is a problem with Griffith’s concept of “love indoctrination”. The idea is that our ape-ancestor’s mothers nurtured them for genetically selfish reasons, but to the infants it looked like selfless behaviour, so they were “love indoctrinated”, i.e. they learned lovingly selfless behaviour. This is supposed to have happened before the liberation of full consciousness, but learning requires a conscious mind. Conscious learning is overlaying and supplanting the underlying genetically selfish instincts. How does this learning from experience end up encoded genetically so that we are born with the orientation? And how can something which is by its nature patient and forgiving become the source of a dictatorial instinct which is intolerant of experimentation?

Is it not possible that what love needs to manifest is simply a niche were it will not be eliminated? Where an animal who doesn’t compete for food dies and the genes of an animal that doesn’t compete to breed are eliminated, evolution selects against love. But in a social animal living in a food rich environment for millennia, there is no evolutionary disadvantage to opening up to the intrinsic pleasure and group advantage of love. The essence of nature is to create through the formation of wholes, so the formation of a loving whole amongst humans goes deeper than instinct to the very heart of the creative principle itself.

This could explain why bonobos developed as such a loving species. In them we may see what our ancestor’s were like before we began to undermine our self-acceptance by applying idealistic moral judgements to ourselves and each other. As Griffith quotes primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, “If you are a bonobo infant, you can do no wrong…” Idealism is the opposite of nurturing. Forgiveness returns us to our own capacity for love, while judgement against a standard of perfection makes us angry and resentful and drives us on to the kinds of actions which will attract only more judgement.

Because he sees the human condition as arising from resentment of the instinct’s judgement of our non-ideal behaviour, Griffith feels that each of us is a deep well of upset. “And no wonder we have led such an evasive, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, escapist, alienated, superficial and artificial, greedy, egocentric, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking existence.” While we are prone to these things, this seems the view of an idealist who only sees the negatives. I find Wilhelm Reich’s concept of the character armour more helpful for understanding the dark side of our nature, i.e. that our personality rigidifies around the battle to justify ourselves. All that is needed is for us to feel truly safe from criticism for this often very destructive defensive structure to begin to soften. But Griffith builds his description of the human condition out of idealistic criticisms, what he sees as “confronting truths”. This might be acceptable if his theory actually worked, but because it doesn’t, I see his writing as a kind of Trojan Horse which promises to defend us against condemnation and thus encourages us to open up to statements like this one which, taken on their own, sound like condemnation. This may make us all the more desperate to embrace his theory uncritically. After all, now that he has presented us in such a harsh light, we need something to feel good about ourselves again.

But if the problem lies not in our instinctive orientation but in idealism as a cultural phenomena, I think all that negative behaviour Griffith describes can still be explained - idealism does make us egotistical, selfish and aggressive - but the way in which this phenomena plays out in the world can be understood with less of a temptation to resort to simplistic over-generalisations, as Griffith does when tackling such subjects as politics and sexuality. One need only see idealism as a kind of thought virus, taking different forms - religion, communism, Critical Social Justice Theory, etc. - spreading from individual to individual and producing different forms of negative symptom in different contexts. The key factor is that we have a form of idea which leaves those it contacts feeling criticised in a way which, rather than being the source of healthy correction, sows the seeds of resentment and ego-embattlement. By contrast there must be a healthier form of idea which heals and brings us back toward the capacity for reason, the courage needed to face our problems and the love to bring us together as a community. We will know when we have found this idea, because it will spread like wildfire, everywhere transforming the darkness into light. It won’t require effort for people to embrace it. By their fruits shall ye know them.

Griffith talks about socialism, the new age movement, the politically correct movement etc. as “pseudo-idealist”. The definition of “idealism” is “the unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection.” Idealism is always a bad thing, because perfectionism poisons any attempt to improve things in the world. The term “pseudo-idealist” would mean someone who is only pretending to have an unrealistic belief in or pursuit of perfection.” Is it worse to be a pseudo-idealist than to be a genuine idealist? They are both negative social phenomena. But is everyone who calls themselves a socialist or a member of the new age movement in pursuit of perfection? There are right wing people who have a perfectionistic view of society which makes them intolerant of others as well. Hitler was an idealist. His ideal was racial purity. The battle between different forms of idealism can not be understood as a simple dualism. Griffith is prone to see it all as an expression of his battle between the selflessness-demanding instincts and the understanding-seeking ego. So he sees the left who call for a fairer society as oppressive of the search for understanding and the right who call for more self-reliance and less regulation as championing the search for understanding, even though someone on the left may be a champion of free enquiry and someone on the right may want to reduce spending on pure research. You can’t simply lay some grand worldview over the struggles of individuals in the world and think you have understood them. You have to acknowledge that there is usually more variety between individuals in particular groups than there is difference between the groups. Griffith wrote an article for a conservative on-line publication “explaining” the irrationality of the left. The readers responded enthusiastically to the claim that the left were crazy, but I doubt if many of them looked more deeply into his work. I’ll be impressed if he gets the same audience to accept his claim that “there’s no longer any reason for the right-wing in politics” and that they should become “effectively…left-wing.” Left or right, you get a lot of people who just want to be told what they want to hear. I put my hope in deep thinkers, some of whom come from the left and some from the right. Left wing examples include James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein, who are at the forefront of the battle to expose Critical Social Justice Theory. There are wise people on the right too, but there are also people who are irrational enough to believe that Donald Trump is the best politician in the world at the moment or who are caught up in bizarre conspiracy theories.

So I agree with Griffith that our species suffers from a psychological insecurity, that some of our distant ancestors were free of this condition, that the human race is not essentially bad but rather heroic and that we can heal the problems of the world with knowledge about the origin and nature of this condition. What I don’t believe is that it originated in a conflict between our instincts and our intellect. I don’t believe our instincts are dictatorial or unforgiving, but quite the opposite and I believe the origins of the problem originated with the development in the conscious mind of our ancestors of idealistic, i.e. perfectionistic, standards for the judgement of moral behaviour. The stricter the standards the more they drive us to the opposite by undermining self-acceptance and generating resentment. Like Griffith I feel we are right on the brink of the abyss. That’s why diagnosing our condition accurately is so important. I don’t feel that he has done so. If he presented his theory as just that and encouraged readers and listeners to find fault with it, I would give this booklet a higher rating, but any work has to be assessed against what it promises. This one literally promises the world, and delivers something far less than that.