The theme of strict self-governance, the control of animal appetites, appears again and again in the world’s great religions. Also widespread, is the doctrine of brotherly love that Darwin found so beautiful. Six centuries before Jesus, Lao-tzu had said, “it is the way of the Tao..to recompense injury with kindness.” Buddhist scriptures call for “an all embracing love for all the universe..unmarred by hate within, not rousing enmity.” Hinduism has the doctrine of “ahimsa,” the absence of all harmful intent.
People tend to say and believe things that are in their evolutionarily ingrained interests. This does not mean that harboring these ideas always gets their gene spread. Some religious doctrines – celibacy, for example – may dramatically fail to do that. The expectation, rather is simply that the doctrines people latch on to will have a kind of harmony with the mental organs natural selection has designed. “Harmony”, admittedly, is pretty broad term. These doctrines may, on the one hand, slake some deep psychological thirst (belief in an afterlife gratifies the will to survive); or they may, on the other hand, suppress some thirst so unslakable as to be a burden (lust for example). But in one sense or another, the beliefs people subscribe to should be explicable in terms of evolved human mind. Thus when diverse sages manage to sell the same themes, the themes may say something about the contours of that mind, about human nature.
Donald T. Campbell, one of the first psychologists to get enthusiastic about modern Darwinism, has suggested as much. In an address to the American Psychological Association, he spoke of “the possible sources of validity in recipes for living that have been evolved, tested, and winnowed through hundreds of generations of human social history. On purely scientific grounds, these recipes of living might be regarded as better tested than best of psychology’s and psychiatry’s speculations on how lives should be lived”.
Some have noted that, while these religious ideas must by definition have a kind of harmony with the brains they settle into, that does not mean they are good for those brains in the long run. Some ideas, indeed, seem to parasitize brains – they are “viruses”, as Richard Dawkins puts it. The idea that injecting heroin is fun keeps infecting people by appealing to myopic cravings, rarely to the ultimate advantage of those people.
Besides, even if an idea does spread by serving people’s long term interests, the interests may be those of its sellers, not its buyers. Religious leaders tend to have high status, and it is not beyond the pale to see their preachings as a form of exploitation, a subtle bending of the listener’s will to the speaker’s goals. Certainly Jesus’ teachings, and Buddha’s teachings, and Lao-tzu’s teachings had the effect of amplifying the power of Jesus and Buddha and Lao-tzu, raising their stature within a growing group of people.
The great religions are at some level ideologies of self-help. It would indeed be wasteful, as Campbell suggests, to throw out eons of religious traditions without inspecting it first. The sages may have been self-serving, like rest of us, but that does mean they weren’t sages.
The concept of evil – still people seem to find it useful, and the reason is that it is metaphorically apt. There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long term happiness to us and may bring greater suffering to theirs. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it out genes. If it will help to actually use the word evil, there is no reason not to.
When the Buddha urges digging up the “root of thirst”. He isn’t necessarily counseling abstinence. Certainly there is talk in many religions of abstinence from various things, and certainly abstinence is one way to short-circuit the addictiveness of vice. But the Buddha put his emphasis not so much on a laundry list of proscriptions as on a generally austere attitude, a cultivated indifference to material rewards and sensory pleasure.
This fundamental defiance of human nature is encouraged in some measure by other religions. The Hindu scriptures, like Buddhists and Christians, dwell at more length, and more explicitly , on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who “abandons desires,” who “has lost desire of joys”, who “withdraws, as tortoise his limbs from all sides, his sense from the objects of sense.” Hence the idea man as depicted in the Bhagvad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism. This way the image that inspired Gandhi to persevere without “hope of success of fear of failure.”
That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a sever maxim – life is a suffering – and placing it at the very center of his philosophy. If you accept inherent misery of life, and follow the teachings of Buddha, then you can, oddly enough, find happiness.
In all these assaults of the senses there is a great wisdom – not only about the addictiveness of pleasures but about their ephemerality. The essence of addiction, after all, is that pleasure tends to dissipate and leave the mind agitated, hungry for more. The idea that just one more dollar, one more dalliance, one more rung on the ladder will leave us feeling sated reflects a misunderstanding about human nature – a misunderstanding, moreover, that is built into human nature; we are designed to feel that the next great goal will bring bliss, and the bliss is designed to evaporate shortly after we get there. Natural selection has malicious sense of humor; it leads us along with a series of promises and then keeps saying “Just Kidding.” As the Bible puts it, “All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.” Remarkably, we go our whole lives without ever really catching on.
The advice of the sages – that we refuse to lay this game - is nothing less than an incitement to mutiny, to rebel against out creator. Sensual pleasures are the whip natural selection uses to control us, to keep us in the thrall of its warped values system. To cultivate some indifference to them is one plausible route to liberation. While few of us can claim to have traveled far on this route, the proliferation of this scriptural advice suggests it has been followed some distance with some success.
It remains true that pleasure is ephemeral; that its constant pursuit is not a reliable source of happiness; that we built not to easily grasp this fact; and that the reasons for all this are cleared in the light of new Darwinian paradigm.
There are scattered hings in the ancient scriptures of an understanding that human striving – after pleasure, after ewalth, after status – is yoked to self-deception. The Bhagvad Gita teaches that men “devoted to enjoyment and power” are “robbed of insight.” To pursue the fruits of action is to live in a “jungle of delusion”. The Buddha said that “the best of virtues is passionlessness; the best of men he who has eyes to see”
This grasp of our naturally skewed perspective is bound up with exhortations towards brotherly love. For a premise of those exhortations is that we are deeply inclined not to view everyone with the charity we extend to our kin and ourselves. Indeed, if we weren’t so deeply inclined, if we didn’t buttress this inclination with all the moral and intellectual conviction at our disposal, you wouldn’t have to start a whole religion to correct the imbalance.
PS - The above is an excerpt from the book - The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.
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