David Lahti is an evolutionary ecologist in New York city, but also has a Ph.D. in philosophy. That can be a dangerous combination, leading to all sorts of strange pronouncements. Sure enough, in Tuesday’s Guardian, Lahti ponders the conflicting tendencies of humans to be both cruel and cooperative. One might expect both of those tendencies, of course, to evolve in a social species like ours. But we can also, as Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer have emphasized, use reason and empathy to exercise a degree of altruism beyond that vouchsafed by our genes.
None of this has anything to do with religion. Nevertheless, in a piece called “Why does religion keep telling us we’re bad? (subtitled “Evolution has carried us a long way, but we can become complacent, which is where religious admonitions come in”), Lahti somehow manages to slip in some gratuitious praise for faith as a way to keep us on a moral path:
Many of the evolutionarily savvy among us have chosen one of two roads with regard to describing our moral nature. One is the comforting notion that we are generally prosocial nice folks except for those odd meanies who must be explained as having some strange allele or bad childhood environment. The other common option is a descent into moral scepticism or nihilism where nothing matters anyway because it’s all just a product of our evolution. These alternatives together look remarkably like a sour grapes attitude: either we are fundamentally good, or else forget it there’s no such thing as good and bad. The main reason for Isaiah’s admonition to remember how we fall short, as for most Jewish and Christian moral admonitions come to think of it, is to counteract our tendency to look at ourselves with rose-coloured glasses and become complacent. It looks like we could use a dose of my father’s old time religion after all.
Well, we’re neither “fundamentally” good nor bad; we have evolved (and cultural) tendencies in both direction, and different aspects predominate at different times—precisely as you’d expect if those tendencies evolved to be adaptive in different situations. Sometimes it paid our ancestors to be aggressive, or even murderous; at other times our best interests were served by being cooperative.
Let us accept this, then, and work on the good parts. We don’t need religion to remind us of how often we go “bad,” particularly since religion is a particularly powerful stimulus for that behavior. I have no idea why Lahti saw fit to mention scripture.
Meanwhile, also at the Guardian, atheist Andrew Brown continues to osculate the rump of religion, reminding us that social democracy in Sweden has failed because it couldn’t replace the authority of God (his piece, called “Social democracy and the loss of trust,” is subtitled, “The rejection of God by Social Democrats and societal values by neoliberals has left a moral vacuum that will be difficult to fill”):
Taken together, these scandals show that both left and right are in trouble. The old Social Democratic model is completely broken, but the new, competitive model doesn’t work very well, either. In both cases, people don’t believe in society partly because they no longer have any reason to fear it.
The conformism of Sweden is something almost every visitor notices and complains about. But many foreigners suppose that it is imposed from above, on a duped or unwilling population. I don’t think that was ever true. The way it really worked was written in gothic script outside the German church in the old town of Stockholm: “Fürchtet Gott! Ehret den König!” – “Fear God and honour the king!”
Of course, very few people fear God in Sweden today. At some stage in the 20th century, God was replaced by the future. The future, which everyone was confident could be trusted, appeared to have the attributes of God, an inscrutable wisdom that could nonetheless be trusted, and was, in any case, authoritative. In the end, the future could talk to you with the crushing authority of God talking to Job. . .
. . . Social democracy spent decades smashing up the old authority structures, among them God and the traditional family, in order to take over their authority. From the 1980s onwards the neoliberals spent decades smashing up Social Democratic beliefs. And at the end of this process, the future has let both sides down. The idea of society as a place of mutual service has disappeared or at least attenuated to an ideal.
Our Swedish readers may want to weigh in on this nonsense. It really is time for the Guardian to retire Andrew Brown. He’s lost even his ability to be controversial—for he no longer makes sense.
