Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 10

Darwin vs. Wallace

Griffith points out that “Darwin’s associates, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, persuaded him to substitute the term ‘natural selection’ with the term ‘survival of the fittest’” in this letter from Wallace : http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5140

He says that this made possible the “Social Darwinism” excuse for our competitive behaviour.

I’m not very well-informed on Darwin, Wallace and Spencer, but from what I have been able to discover via Wikipedia, and a reading of Wallace’s letter, the attribution of such a motive to Wallace seems inappropriate. Spencer was the proponent of Social Darwinism. It was his term which Wallace recommended to Darwin, but Wallace’s stated reason was that too many people interpreted “natural selection” as implying that Darwin was saying that there is a conscious spirit within nature which makes a selection. They didn’t understand that talk of nature “choosing” something was merely metaphorical. “Survival of the fittest” has an inevitability about it which in no way suggests the involvement of an intelligence.

One could argue that that was Spencer’s stated argument, but that subconsciously he wanted something which would enable us to feel more comfortable about our competitive behaviour. The problem with such an interpretation is that Wallace’s articulation of the theory of natural selection which was formulated simultaneously and independently of Darwin’s and presented jointly with it, did not emphasise competition between individuals in the way that Darwin’s did. According to Wikipedia : “Darwin emphasised competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, whereas Wallace emphasised environmental pressures on varieties and species forcing them to become adapted to their local conditions, leading populations in different locations to diverge.”

Maybe Griffith’s argument would be more consistent if he said that our need to find an excuse for our competitive behaviour is why the sounder articulation of Wallace was supplanted by Darwin’s more “evasive” competition-emphasising version.

Are We Genetically Selfish or Genetically Selfless or Neither?

I feel no compulsion to perpetuate my genes. And I am just as likely if not more likely to do something to help someone I’m not related to than someone I am. So the idea that genetic selfishness is a major factor in my behaviour, as it supposedly is in other animals, seems unsupported.

If other animals are genetically selfish, and we are not, then how did this occur? Griffith has an explanation, but it seems to be more than is really needed.

Our nurturing period is longer than other animals, presumably because our ancestors lived in a food-rich environment which provided them with more leisure time to care for their infants, as Griffith suggests. He claims this led to the development of a hardwired genetic orientation toward loving selflessness.

Why would that be necessary?

In other animals a harsh environment means that they have to begin concentrating early on the battle to survive. There minds have to be focused on this. Only many many generations of relative freedom from the battle to survive, living in a leisurely nurturing environment, provided the space necessary for the brain’s potential to form new pathways not strictly limited to the needs of day-to-day survival. So we developed intelligence and the ability to reason.

Now animals have to blindly follow their instincts. They have no choice. Having an intelligent brain means we don’t have to follow our genetic impulses if we don’t want to. We can breed or not breed. It’s up to us. The brain brings with it other things to do which can be equally, if not more meaningful. To discover something which is helpful to the group, such as a new source of food, may give us a more meaningful kind of heritage than simply breeding. Finding understanding and communicating on a higher level are imperatives which come from the mind which can smoothly coexist with or over-ride a genetic imperative to perpetuate our genes.

Why would a cooperative past for our species require a genetic orientation towards cooperation? Cooperation is what feels best when we are not selfish. It can easily be motivated by the pleasure principle. Now selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. That suffering can be from an injury or physical sickness, it can be from hunger, thirst or cold, it could be from frustration in our attempts to perpetuate our genes, but for we humans, as often as not, the suffering which makes us selfish is neurotic suffering. Neurotic suffering arises from compromised self-acceptance. The most powerful underminer of self-acceptance is idealism which tells us : “You are unacceptable in some way.” Because the kind of behaviour which idealism criticises is generally defensive behaviour, with offence sometimes seeming the best defence, idealism sets up a negative feedback loop which generates more anti-social behaviour.

Of course things like food shortages, harsh living environments and physical disease might compromise our cooperativeness to some degree, but in the absence of idealism-bred neurosis we would have a good chance of maintaining our solidarity in the face of such challenges, because love - open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication - is such a richly rewarding pleasure-giving experience that we would sacrifice much to maintain access to it. At its deepest level it makes us know that we are life itself, so we may feel we will really lose nothing if we have to give our life because of it.

So no genetic orientation to selflessness is needed to explain the human condition. It all began with a single “mistake” which our conscious minds made. That mistake was deciding that it was meaningful to try, by an act of will, to avoid certain behaviours which we called “evil” and pursue other behaviours which we called “good”. We placed conditions on our love of ourselves and others and thus undermined the unconditional love which is the normal healthy state of any intelligent mind.

Idealism can be understood as a conceptual virus which has plagued humanity and in Griffith’s defiant attempts to “confront us” with our “non-ideal state and behaviour” we see it in its most virulent form. We humans have arrived at a desperate place. Conflict, social breakdown, ecological collapse… These are all real. But Griffith’s ideas are not the solution, they are the very distillation of the problem. What he brings us is poison labelled as medicine.

Read Part 11

DVD Review - DMT : The Spirit Molecule (2010)

DMT : The Spirit Molecule (2010) is a feature-length documentary about a chemical called dimethyltryptamine which is found in nearly all living organisms and which is one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs known to science. This drug has long been used by the indigenous peoples of regions of South America in their shamanic rituals. They produce a drink known as ayahuasca from a combination of plants which allow the DMT to remaining longer in the body without breaking down. Pure DMT provides a very powerful psychedelic experience, but because the substance breaks down so quickly it can't be ingested orally in its pure form but has to be smoked or injected.

But one thing which makes this such an interesting substance for the understanding of consciousness is that the body itself produces DMT naturally in particular circumstances. Though the film doesn't go into great detail about the physiology of this process and what the specific triggers are, it does suggest that this might explain our tendency to have hallucinatory experiences during fasting or sensory deprivation, and may provide a naturalistic explanation for our rich history of reports of religious visions and alien encounters.

There was a good deal of research into the effects of psychedelic drugs in the United States in the early sixties, but once their use started to spread amongst the youth culture the use of these substances was banned and research halted. Then, in the mid 90s, Dr. Rick Strassman was able to obtain government permission to do research into the effects of DMT. This film documents the results. We get to hear from people across a variety of disciplines, from mathematics to ethnobotany to religion, talk about what they feel this substance can teach us about ourselves and, perhaps, the nature of the universe. And some of the subjects of Strassman's experiment tell us what happened when they they were given DMT.

In How to Be Free I speculate about what the basis of consciousness might be and what might lie beneath our conventionally armoured ego. DMT research seems to be one way in which these questions can be explored scientifically.

While I could have done without the gimmicky linking scenes in which Joe Rogan, dressed like a character from a Raymond Chandler novel, talks to us from a retro science lab complete with 1960s-style computer in black and white footage with artificial scratches, I'd highly recommend the film as an introduction to this subject. The film was based on a book (which I haven't read) by Rick Strassman - DMT : The Spirit Molecule : A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Park Street Press, 2000). There is also a website :

http://www.thespiritmolecule.com/

Another documentary which is about to be released to cinemas which may play a significant role in challenging conventional thinking is Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield's film Chimpanzee (2012), which is this year's release from DisneyNature. Walt Disney don't have the best history when it comes to nature documentaries. Their 1958 Academy Award-winning film White Wilderness contained a now notorious sequence in which lemmings were depicted jumping off of a cliff supposedly into the Arctic Ocean. Later it was discovered that the scene was artificially staged at Bow River near downtown Calgary, and the lemmings didn't chose to jump, they were forced off of the cliff by a revolving platform. But, thankfully, times have changed and Disney no longer make their wildlife films, they buy some of the best documentaries being produced in the world and then release them under their label. Sometimes they add some cheesy narration or a sappy song by a Disney artist, but mostly the quality of the films is impeccable.

What is interesting about Chimpanzee is that it deals with the story of a young chimp who is separated from his troop and adopted by an unrelated adult male. This challenges socio-biological theories that emotional bonding and nurturing behaviour amongst animals can be explained by the genetic imperative to foster the survival of one's own genes.