E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
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To suppose that the living standard of the rest of the world can be raised to that of the most prosperous countries, with existing technology and current levels of consumption and waste, is a dream in pursuit of a mathematical impossibility. Even to level out present-day income inequities would require shrinking the ecological footprints of the prosperous countries. That is problematic in the market-based global economy, where the main players are also militarily the most powerful, and in spite of a great deal of rhetoric largely indifferent to the suffering of others.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. There is no genetic destiny outside our free will, no lodestar provided by which we can set course. Evolution, including genetic progress in human nature and human capacity, will be from now on increasingly the domain of science and technology tempered by ethics and political choice. We have reached this point down a long road of travail and self-deception. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
On the one side, ethics and religion are still too complex for present-day science to explain in depth. On the other, they are far more a product of autonomous evolution than hiterto conceded by most theologians. Science faces in ethics and religion its most interesting and possibly humbling challenge, while religion must somehow find the way to incorporate the discoveries of science in order to retain credibility. Religion will possess strength to the extent that it codifies and puts into enduring, poetic form the highest values of humanity consistent with empirical knowledge.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
If the religious mythos did not exist in a culture, it would be quickly invented, and in fact it has been everywhere, thousands of times through history. Such inevitability is the mark of instinctual behavior in any species. That is, even when learned, it is guided toward certain states by emotion-driven rules of mental development. To call religion instinctive is not to suppose any particular part of its mythos is untrue, only that its sources run deeper than ordinary habit and are in fact hereditary, urged into birth through biases in mental development encoded in the genes.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
The rising agricultural societies, egalitarian at first, became hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the advantage of the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority, once again – no surprise – to the favor of the rulers.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
Not just hunter-gatherer bands but also groups and nations at the level of high civilization are prone to adopt animal species as totems to reflect the qualities they most value in themselves. American football fans, having at last found a way to form their own Paleolithic tribes, cheer for the Detroit Lions, Miami Dolphins, and Chicago Bears.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
Early humans invented [the arts] in an attempt to express and control through magic the abundance of the environment, the power of solidarity, and other forces in their lives that mattered most to survival and reproduction. The arts were the means by which these forces could be ritualized and expressed in a new, simulated reality
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts. In combination they gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment.
These revelations, not disobedience to the gods, are what drove humankind from paradise. Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:
Where cultural relativism had been initiated to negate belief in hereditary behavioral differences among ethnic groups – undeniably an unproven and ideologically dangerous conception – it was then turned against the idea of a unified human nature grounded in heredity. A great conundrum of the human condition was created: If neither culture nor a hereditary human nature, what unites humanity? The question cannot be just left hanging, for if ethical standards are molded by culture, and cultures are endlessly diverse and equivalent, what disqualifies theocracy, for example, or colonialism? Or child labor, torture, and slavery?
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