As a person with professional training and lifelong career activity in both evolutionary biology and comparative religion (including the contexts of “contemplative life” and what is often today called “sacred activism”) I want to recount here what got me VERY excited about the main idea in Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes and the Welfare of Others (hereafter “DAE”)- and what, to me, comprise its broad and truly historic implications. After all, we are not dealing here with just a “new book” but a paradigm shift in evolutionary biology itself.
When I first completed a detailed reading and markup of DAE, from both my professional biological and comparative religion backgrounds, I said to myself– “finally, after decades of sacred activists and social progressives feeling their social idealism was doomed to be an upstream battle against a hostile, unkind, and even cruel evolutionary process, here is a view of evolution, claiming to be the new mainstream, that paints a very different picture– one of the evolutionary process preferring structures that serve the well being of the whole and not just the desires of this or that powerful individual or self interest group”. What a difference from the reductionist extremes of “random-neutral”, “who knows where it’s going?”, “there’s nothing we can do” or even “control and power is the only way” (as with old-time Marxist-Leninism, National Socialism or even modern corporate plutocracy)!
Further, I heard the book proclaiming that the development of such holistically serving cultural structures is “in our hands”, as a consequence of the conscious choice associated with humanity’s uniquely sentient process of cultural evolution. In a way, this had Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” written all over it.
Further, I saw an explanation of why our world is now full of dysfunctional organizational principles when it could be one filled with functional organization principles– if WE took our creative role in the cultural evolution process. Most of my humanist friends had thought we had arrived at today’s current dysfunctions somehow by accident—e.g. “we did the best be could”, “what went wrong?” etc.
For me, on the largest face, this evolutionary altruist view signaled a potential joining of hopes and dreams of both sacred and secular activists alike– no matter that one saw a world driven by “divine providence” (or cosmic self-organization) while the other envisioned just random processes of innovation and natural selection. In the new evolutionary view, as David Sloan Wilson says, both camps could—perhaps– be “simply positive” and, further, share a “simply positive” emergent world.
After all, this evolutionary process selects directly on actions, not their proximal cause narratives. These narratives–always a cause of conflict—might, in a truly intelligent Homo sapiens, become quite secondary. And this, I saw, was also the message of “Interspirituality”, an evolutionary emergence in religion and spirituality which also holds that religious narratives can become secondary to spiritual solidarity around basic shared values, ethics, and ideals at the heart of all the world’s “Wisdom Traditions”. I elaborated this view in my book with David Ord, The Coming Interspiritual Age, which speculates on how religions’ similar spiritualism, ethics and value foundations might become part of the world’s “solutions”, and not either just irrelevant or an ongoing part of world’s divisive problems.
Further, wasn’t this view what had always been the “great ethical manifold” of founding Humanists such as Felix Adler (see, for example, An Ethical Philosophy of Life )? They also believed that ethical and values-related actions could be held in common among people of entirely different religious narratives.
This, to me, made DAE quite revolutionary– just as revolutionary as what I was hearing at comparative religion conferences where religions were saying “to heck with catastrophic end-of-the-world scenarios”, what about constructive “beginning-of-a-new-world scenarios?”– and noting that the latter, if true, were here now, and “in our hands” as well.”.
Evolution in DAE painted a very different picture than what the public seems to have assumed is a “mainstream” science view. I remembered that when doing my evolutionary biology doctorate in the late 70’s “group selection” and “altruism” were out (as was continental drift, and the bird-dinosaur relationship—both no brainers today) and the “selfish gene” and “social Darwinism” were in. My thinking then, as a younger graduate student, was that the orthodox view was so counterintuitive. So, it was gratifying to read, in DAE, the track by which, finally, group- and multi-level- selection, and all their implications, were now the consensus view.
I was also excited because I am a big “utilizer” of integral theory and integral vision (from the work of Ken Wilber, Don Beck, and others). Their vision, that all (and very different) kinds of conversations can, must, and need to be on the table globally today– from the best of most subjective to the best of most objective—to me is just common sense. When I heard the co-discover of DNA, Dr. James Watson, say (on TV’s “Charlie Rose”) that understanding consciousness was the next great discovery of humankind but that the world’s spiritual traditions had absolutely nothing to contribute to that conversation, I agreed with Wilber that this was, unfortunately and tragically, the “gold standard of ignorance” from an otherwise brilliant man. It also demonstrated how dramatically “silo-ed” our planet’s worldviews are, precisely at a time when they need to be moving into a convergent conversation.
However, David Sloan Wilson was advising much the same as Wilber– that divergent worldviews are all “senses of meaning”, over time create “lineages of meaning”, and that all these ways of knowing have a certain “equivalence” in working out, and working through, a global conversation where all the aspects of who we are as humans are “on the table” for discernment of our world future and direction.
In July 2015, Wilber and Wilson joined me, and colleagues, at a “From Self Care to Earth Care” conference in Denver, Colorado. A video of Wilber’s presentation is now available on YouTube and, as of this writing, has over 12,000 views. Wilber emphasized that nearly 70% of world religions are “stuck” at the “magic/mythic/literalist” level (or “style”) of religion—the one based on the general rubric of “I am right and you are wrong” (and, in the conflicts we see in the name of religion, often “dead wrong”). As Wilber pointed out, the ongoing inherent violence within how religion is most often practiced by Homo sapiens is a global tragedy. It is particularly tragic because the more highly evolved practices of religious spirituality actually often embody the qualities of love, kindness, mutuality, nurturing—yes, altruism—taught by the founders of near all of these historic traditions. We must, he said, pay profound attention to the cultural evolution needed to rectify this imbalance. That is, we must address how the practice of religion can cease to be one of the major problems for the world’s future, and become part of the solution. This view is also at the heart of the message of DAE.
Further, at the global cultural level, the problems of the “spirituality/ reductionist” divide requires serious attention. Today, we have very well-meaning people believing, on the one hand, that subjective/ spiritual experience is an important part of the makeup of human beings (“wired into us” some even say) and that this dimension must be figured into the collective skillsets of how human beings move forward in the future. Meantime, others believe spiritual/ subjective experience is nothing more than pre-rational superstition, a part of our past, which must be abandoned in favor of our intellectual and technical skills. Subjective experience, whatever it is, shouldn’t be taken seriously, other than perhaps the phenomenon of “falling in love” (again, whatever that is).
This divide is a real, and huge, problem at the global level. Certainly if you talk to a well-meaning, well- and conventionally-educated, yet fully ethical, mainland Chinese citizen, the modern materialist view stands out, as does the antipathy toward that “vendor of old-time superstition” The Dalai Lama. Never mind, or never mention, all the political prisoners in Chinese jails or The Dalai Lama saying, “the problem with the Chinese government is simply that they don’t understand kindness”.
There can be no doubt that the world is at a divide regarding the kind of future it may have. As David Sloan Wilson warns, if we don’t take seriously our sentient role in our own cultural evolution, and select the kinds of structures that promote global welfare, evolution might just take us somewhere we don’t want to go, like global political or economic dictatorship.
So, as well, Does Altruism Exist?, along with being a harbinger of hope, is also a great “warning shot across the bow” for modernity and post-modernity as well, which is entirely another conversation—but one I hope will also occur.
