Retropost, 2015: The Meaning of Human Existence

 

En competición y en colaboración

Puntualizando tanto énfasis en la colaboración que pone Irene Vallejo en su artículo, en modo en exceso socialista-comunitarista-buenista:

Una de las mayores ventajas de la cooperación, en efecto, es que da ventajas competitivas frente a otros grupos. Algunas de las dinámicas evolutivas relacionadas con esto las comentamos en Somos hijos de la guerra. De modo más general, la dialéctica o interacción entre colaboración y competición la analizaba desde el punto de vista sociobiológico Edward O. Wilson en su panorámica sobre las peculiaridades de la naturaleza humana, The Meaning of Human Existence. Aquí lo comentábamos:

"E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." 

         http://www.academia.edu/31529791/WilsonConspectus.pdf

Me citan en Benin

 

En este artículo sobre una obra teatral de August Wilson:

Ogoanah, Felix Nwabeze. (U of Benin, Nigeria; felix.ogoanah@uniben.edu). "The Emergent Properties of 'Song' as a Metaphor in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone." Alicante Journal of English Studies  27 (2014): 143-62.* (Play, 1984) Online at Semantic Scholar.*

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d83/688d00bac6b4cc4f81b88f29dfefa0953f

2021

The New Novelists of the 1950s

(from The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders)

Samuel Beckett's trilogy, pulished together in London in 1959 under the English titles Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, was in every sense the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. The edition bore the announcement that the three novels had been 'translated from the original French by the author'. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English—the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, but published posthumously in 1992), the ten interconnected stories derived from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—had responded with a gauche confidence to the challenge of Joyce's experimental 'work in progress', Finnegans Wake. The titles of the first two of his pre-war works (one being loosely adapted from Chaucer, the other bawdily punning on a phrase of St. Paul's) also suggest the degree to which Beckett was self-consciously attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. Murphy is the most substantial of the three. Its solitary title character, who 'sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton', is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935) and he has an unbroken view from his window to the northwest). His 'mew' (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moultin falcomry) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal ('Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings'). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man's energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world.

When Beckett returned to fiction after the Second World War, he opted for the discipline of writing in French rather than in English. He also chose the form of a fluid monologue, a positively gushing 'stream of consciousness', rather than that of a third-person narrative. Molloy (written in 1947, published in Paris in 1951, and subsequently translated into English in 1955) shares a deliberate ambiguity of telling with its two successors. Each of the ageing narrators in the trilogy habitually contradicts himself, stumbles over the contortions of his syntax, and is obliged to pause in order to reflect on precisely how he has to express himself or on what he feels pressed to say. Both the flow of narrative and the language employed threaten to break under the strain. Beginnings are vexed or subverted, tenses shift between past and present, and what seem to be digressions or interpolations assume a vital momentum. Molloy (the very title of which may possibly, with the addition of one simple vowel, glance back to Joyce's superlatively fluid consciousness, Molly) is built around two self-explorative consciousnesses, the one seeking the other. Much as the disabled Molloy melts disconcertingly into his contemporary other half, the self-abused, decayed Moran, in the first novel, so both Molloy and Moran are subsumed in the other compulsive story-tellers of the trilogy, Malone and the isolated, unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. The last anguished and lachrymose teller recognizes the extent to which he has assimilated and now disowns the experiences of his narrative forebears: 'All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing . . . I though I was right in enlisting these sufferers in my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.' Whereas Murphy sits it out 'as though he were free', this man of sorrows, the Unnamable, wrenches phrases from himself in his isolation and probes the implications of the perception that he is neither truly alone nor free of a larger humanity ('the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles'). The trilogy ends with an ultimate contradiction in terms: 'in silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' 

Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narrative form had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950s. The one British writer of the period who keenly responded to the idea of creating an avowedly 'Modernist' fiction, and whose experiments were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). Durrell was born in India of parents whose families had made the sub-continent their home for several generations. Although he became briefly acclimatized to bohemian (as opposed to 'respectable') England in the early 1930s, Durrell found what he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then, after the German invasion of Greece, to Egypt. As a young man he also responded to the liberating influence of two modern writers in particular, D. H. Lawrence (with whom he shared an antipathy to British reserve as much as to British rain) and the Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller (with whom he embarked on a long correspondence). Miller's influence can be felt on Durrell's The Black Book: An Agon, 'a savage charcoa sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', which was privately printed in Paris in 1938 (its overt eroticism precluded its publication in Britain until 1973). In 1944, as Press Officer of the British Information Service in Egypt, Durrell was posted to Alexandria, the city of 'five races, five languages, a dozen creeds' which inspired the four novels of his 'Alexandria Quartet'— Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960). Durrell's dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Aleandria, a city he described in Balthazar as 'half-imagined (yet wholly real), [which] begins and ends in us', is a phantasmagoric, Eliotic place in which men and women dissolve into one another and ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences. The city's real and imagined disconnections provide the setting for a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected, unfulfilling love-affairs. The narrator, Darley, is both a self-conscious, self-referential teller and an incorporator of the narrative voices of other tellers, notably that of a fellow-writer, Pursewarden. In one of the 'workpoints'—sentences, ideas, and occasionally poems or translations seemingly discarded from the main narrative of Justine and then appended to it as a kind of afterthought—Pursewarden's 'n-dimensional novel' is described by its author as having a forward narrative momentum which is 'counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern'. Readers are doubtless meant to read Darley's actual narrative as somehow shadowing Pursewarden's speculative one. The Alexandria Quartet, in common with Durrell's yet more ambitious 'Avignon Quintet'—Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quincx (1985)—attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. Durrell's literary reputation, so buoyant in the breezy, liberal climate of the early 1960s, tended to sag thereafter. Where his contemporary, Beckett, was economical, he was prodigal; where Beckett saw the force of scrupulous compression, he indulged in a passion for words which is more often libertine than it is liberating.

William Golding's first and most enduringly popular novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), gives a surer indication of his continuing concern with moral allegory than it does of his subsequent experiments with fictional form. Golding (1911-93) set the novel on a desert island on which a marooned party of boys from an English cathedral choir-school gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regresses into dirt, barbarism, and murder. The island is cut off both from the disciplined harmony of the boys' musical background and from a disharmonious world of grown-ups at war. The novel is shaped intellectually by an intermixture of the Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism, and a systematic undoing of R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story of plucky and resourceful boys, The Coral Island (1857). At the end of the story an officer from the warship that rescues the boys dejectedly remarks, 'I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that'. The sudden shift of viewpoint and the dejection were re-explored, with subtle variations and darker ramifications, in each of Golding's subsequent novels. As the range of his fiction shows, Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, or Jones, however, he was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth; he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes. It is not just British boys who reveal their innate depravity, but the whole human race. The Inheritors (1955) moves back into an anthropological, rather than Adamic, prehistory in which the talented, if thoroughly nasty and brutish, progenitors of Homo sapiens exterminate their gentler, simpler-minded Neanderthal precursors. The dense, difficult Pincher Martin (1956) has as its greedy egotistical 'hero' a drowned sailor, lost from a torpedoed destroyer, whose body is rolled by the Atlantic. But the 'Pincher' is also a survivor, one whose consciousness tries desperately to hold on to its fragmented identity in a watery purgatory. This identity attaches itslf to an imagined rock, one that Martin names 'Rocall' and one which he also recognized in its rhymed naval transmogrification as 'Buggerall' (a hellish nothing). Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structue in Free Fall (1959), a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under the force of gravity. The subject of  The Spire of 1964 was both more concrete and more elusive. Jocelin, the ambitious Dean of an unnamed English cathedral at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, is a fallen man obsessed with raising a tall stone spire above his cathedral. His obsession is determined by a serpentine knot of motives—architectural, theological, visionary, psychological, sexual, self-deprecating, and self-aggrandizing. Jocelin both achieves his desire and fails in it; he builds and awe-inspiring structure on shaky foundations, but he is also forced to experience its maiming; he erects an airy reflection of heavenly glory, but he is also obliged to recognize the hot, distracting force of the phallus; he periodically escapes upwards, with a vertiginous thrill, into a Gothic fretwork, but he is held earthbound by the overloaded, creaking pillars that have to support his aspiration. Finally struck down by a mortal paralysis, and attended by a priest known as Father Adam, the dying Jocelin struggles to find the meaning of his life's work, a meaning which gradually forms itself around the metaphoric core of the lost earthly paradise: 'In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaing to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension—It's like the appletree!'

Golding's The Pyramid (1967) was followed by what appeared to be an abstention from fiction, an abstention broken in 1979 by Darkness Visible. All Goldint's opening scenes, suggestions, and sentences are disconcertingly striking. None is more so than that of Darkness  Visible, a compelling evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz out of which walks a fearfully burned child: 'He was naked and the miles o light lit him variously . . . The brighness of his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.' From the terrible beauty of this beginning there develops an intense and sometimes confusing exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity, of disinterested love and calculated terrorism. The four novels published since Darkness Visible—Rites of Passage (1980), its sequels Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), and The Paper Men (1984)—have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories all of which are concerned with extremity and isolation. The most successful is Rites of Passage, the first volume of a sea-trilogy set on a decayed man-of-war bound for Australia in the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Its cocky, journal-writing narrator, Edmund Talbot, is alerted to the problems of 'too much understanding' but can himself comprehend littls of 'all that is monstrous under the sun'. Talbot, like all Golding's central characters, is rawly exposed both to his darker self and to the grinding despair of one of his fellow-passengers. Although Golding's work has sometimes been compared to that of Conrad, it is often closer in spirit, and in its aspirations to the condition of poetry, to that of Eliot. Each of Golding's male protagonists seemes obliged to re-articulate the agonized, incomprehending, unspecific question of Gerontion: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

As his novels of the 1950s suggest, Angus Wilson (1913-91) seems to have been intent on restoring Victorian narrative styles to English fiction in opposition to what he saw as the errant experimentalism of the Modernists. In contrast to the slim, even anorexic, shapes accepted by his contemporaries, he steadily swelled the physical shape of the novel to something approaching its nineteenth-century proportions. As a means of emphasizing where his artistic loyalties lay, he published a fine, but decidedly untheoretical, study of Émile Zola in 1952 (though revised in 1965); in 1970 he added an observant, semi-biographical, critical introduction to Deickens and in 1977 an essay on Kipling  Wilson recognized in Dickens a writer who combined 'art and entertainment' and whose works made up 'a complete whole—the World of Charles Dickens'. In 1961 he also proclaimed his continuing confidence in the 'God's eye view', the omniscient narrative stance of many of many of the Victorian novelists that he admired. Although some critics have attempted to draw parallels between Wilson's own work and that of Zola, Dickens, and even George Eliot, the parallels cannot really be sustained. He was, it is true, a convinced realist who occasionally indulged in grotesquerie and fantasy and a finely tuned comic writer who habitually allowed for the intrusions of tragedy and cruelty, but the world of his own novels is idiosyncratic and decidedly that of the mid-twentieth century. Wilson, who began his literary career with two volumes of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), had a talent more developed for creating scenes, set pieces, and characters than for the spruce and ordered fictional shapes that defined themselves against what Henry James had dismissed as 'loose baggy monsters'. Wilson's novels, from his first, Hemlock and After (1952) to his last, Setting the World on Fire (1980), are essentially comedies of manners in which the comedy winces, sometimes gratuitously, with pain. As an observer and mimic, Wilson also had an exceptionally sharp ear and eye for the whims, voices, vogues, pretensions, and pomposities of his time. He had a particularly fastidious distaste for the kind of social gatherings which represent what he called in his essay The Wild Garden, or Speaking of Writing (1963) 'the hell of the human failure to communicate', where the damned are 'the social climbers, those wanting to be loved, the unloved women who push people around, the organization men who fall to pieces when they are alone'. His two most 'traditional' novels, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), are also probably his surest comments on the cultural, social, and sexual tensions of a period struggling to come to terms with the conflicting claims of tradition and novelty. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is especially adept in its panoramic movement from scene to scene and in its gradual establishment of connections between a disparate number of characters. Wilson beds his novel in an archaeological fraud (perpetrated in 1912 before the narrative begins) whose ramifications return to darken the present of Gerald Middleton, an ageing historian. Late Call (1964) also introduces the idea of historical determination (its opening 'Prologue' is set in 1911) but it narrows the scope of its plot to an account of the alienation of the retired Sylvia Calvert amid the affected liberalism and the engineered environment of one of the 'New Towns' (social experiments much promoted by government planners in the late 1950s). The latter part of Wilson's career was marked by an increasing experimentalism, not all of it successful. Late Call is notable for its deliberate use of pastiche and its undercutting of cliché; Old Men at the Zoo (1961, but set in an 'utterly improbable' 1970-3) for its juxtapositions of men and beasts against a background of 'wars, domestic and foreign'; No Laughing Matter (1967) for its long time-span (1912-67), for its parodies, and for the introduction of scenes presented as if they were written for the stage. Neither the capricious As If By Magic (1973) nor the yet wilder Setting the World on Fire (1980), however, exhibit quite the vivacious panache of Wilson's earlier work.

Iris Murdoch (born in Dublin in 1919) was, in the early part of her career, to remain equally faithful to traditional fictional shapes. Unlike Wilson, however, she underpinned her novels with arguments derived from a scrupulous investigation of the problems posed by moral philosophy. This underpinning has been consstently enhanced by a series of independent philosophical studies, notably Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). If Murdoch was amongst the earliest readers to respond positively to Beckett's fiction (she read Murphy as an undergraduate at Oxford and paid homage to it in her own first published novel, Under the Net, in 1954), her only work of fiction whih can be said to draw directly from Beckett's example is Bruno's Dream (1969), a study of the atrophying consciousness of an old man. Murdoch sketched the nature of her own philosophical and literary standpoint in an article entitled 'Against Dryness' in 1961. 'We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age, she argued, an age in which 'we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality' and in which the connection between art and the ora life had languished 'because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself'. The problem with much modern writing, as she saw it, lay in 'our tendeny to produce works which are either crystalline or journalistic'; writers needed to turn away from 'the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards the real impenetrable human person'. Against the 'consolations of form, the clean crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth', writers should pit 'the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character'.

None of Murdoch's own novels could remotely be called 'dry', despite the determining concern with ethical dilemmas that each betrays.  All of them are carefully patterned, though the rules of the obscure game which decide these patterns often seem to be broken, reformed, and realigned by the very nature of the freedom which she allows her characters. Jake Donaghue, the male narrator of Under the Net, both resists and creates theoretical patterns with words which, like nets, entrap and constrain perceptions of a larger and expanding reality. As a range of novels from The Flight from the Enchater (1955) to The Sea, The Sea (1978) and The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) suggest, those characters who attempt to impose nets, theories, mystical enchantments, 'artistic' arrangements, or restrictive myths upon reality must themselves adapt to a world which of necessity eludes predetermined human systems of control. In The Bell (1958) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) the loss or fragmentation of objects also seems to suggest why established patterns of relationships between characters must themselves be removed and reordered. As Rupert warns in the latter novel, 'some general view . . . makes you blind to obvious immediate things in human life'. In some senses, Murdoch's fascination with spiritually gifted outsiders, androgynes, and foreigners (particularly East Europeans) further emphasizes the fictional significance she places on inteterminacy, difference, and strangeness. The Bell, set in a lay religious community established in a country mansion near to a convent of enclosed nuns, begins with a fragmenting marriage and gradually explores the emotional, sexual, and moral tensions which force the community itself to break up and re-form. The convent bell, from which the novel takes its title, bears the inscription 'Vox ego sum amoris' ('I am the voice of Love'); it is at once an aesthetic focus and a disturbing catalyst, an ideal and a breaker of ideals. It proves to be less of a link back to a restrictive and legendary past, than an announcer of new freedoms and the rightness of new contingencies. As the Abbess, one of Murdoch's first spiritually gifted outsiders, has announced, 'all our failures are failures in love'. New contingencies also determine the nature and the structure of what remains Murdoch's most experimental novel, The Black Prince (1973). Its narrator, Bradley Pearson, a novelist, both tells the story and, in as sense, is the story. 'Art', he remarks, is telling the truth, and is the only available method for telling certain truths. Yet how almost impossibly difficult it is not to let the marvels of the instrument itself interfere with the task to which it is dedicated'. The Black Prince is, on one level, a contrived intellectual thriller; on another it is an equally contrived multiple and untrustworthy narrative. It opens with two Forewords, the first by a supposed editor, Loxias (whose name is derived from the Greek word for 'oblique'); the second by Pearson himself. As the narrative line develops, so do different ways of approaching and understanding 'truth' and 'reality'. It ends with six separate, disparate and, to some degree, conflicting postscripts, four of them written by different members of what Murdoch describes as her 'dramatis personae'. The use of this theatrical term serves as a deliberate reminder of the Shakespearian echoes and connections with which the narrrative has played and with which it finally fragments ('Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you, nothing'). If Loxias, the supposed editor of the manuscript, is here echoing Pearson's own sentiments, he is also playing a Horatio to a dead Hamlet, an uncloaked Prospero, deprived of his charms, asking for the indulgence of an audience.

Muriel Spark (b. 1918), a Catholic convert of Jewish descent and Scottish birth, shares with Murdoch and Golding a pressing commitment to moral issues and to their relation to fictional form. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), is concerned with a neurotic woman writer, Caroline Rose, having to come to terms with her new-found Catholicism, with her hallucinations, and with her God-like status as a creator. Rose, is not merely working on a study of contemporary fiction entitled Form in the Modern Novel (and having particular difficulty with the chapter on realism), she has also resolved to write a novel about writing a novel. Spark has been as consistently fascinated by the narrative problems posed by self-consciously literary texts as she has been preoccupied with the theological problem of evil. As the opening paragraph of her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), serves to suggest, she has been equally determined to explore the potential of light to dispel darkness and to illuminate the creatures, the thoughts, the motives, and the sins that dwell in darkness.

It is not insignificant that in 1951, before she had embarked on her own career as a novelist, Spark published a critical reassessment of the work of Mary Shelley under the title Child of Light. Her own early novels marked new advances in the often distinctly British exploration of the Gothic. If, on one level, she revealed herself as the Scots heir to the tradition of Burns, Hogg, and Stevenson, on another, hers is a Gothic enlivened by a decidedly post-Calvinist glee. Memento Mori (1959), which was recommended to readers as a 'brilliant and singularly gruesome achievement' by Evelyn Waugh, is concerned with a diverse group of London geriatrics who receive anonymous telephone calls telling them to remember the inevitable fact of their impending deaths. Spark's title recalls the skulls and funerary desk ornaments favoured by baroque meditators on mortality, but her own narrative is wry, blunt, and provocatively funny. She ends the novel with dry medical case histories as one of her characters, paralysed by a stroke, searches through his mind, 'as through a card-index', for the causes of his friends' mortal sicknesses: 'Leslie colston, he recited to himself, comminuted fractures of the skull; Godfrey Colston, hypostatic pneumonia; Charmian Colston, uraemia; Jean Taylor, myocardial degeneration; Tempest Sidebottome, cancirnoma of the bronchus; Guy Lees, arteriosclerosis; Hanry Mortimer, coronary thrombosis . . . ' His litany is broken by the third-person narrator turning to a separate meditation, one that finally turns on the reader with the words of a children's catechism: 'Jean Taylor lingered for a time, employing her pain to magnify the Lord, and meditating sometimes confidently upon Death, the first of the four last things to be ever remembered.' The Gothic of The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is quite distinct in its comic chill. both novels are, in their different ways, concerned with possession; the first with necromancy in a south London suburb in the 1950s, the second with the peculiar exercise of psychological power in an Edinburgh's girls' school in the 1930s. Miss Brodie's superbly poised and precisely defined moral sway over her favourite pupils is compared by one of her protégées to that of 'the God of Calvin'; the narrator, however, suggests a more delationary contemporary parallel, based on Miss Brodie's fondness for pointing out the common Latin root of the words 'educare' and 'Duce': 'Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress . . . the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti.' 

The dispassionate, sometimes ironic, sometimes disingenuous tone of Spark's narrators helps her to create a sense of discordance between the aberrance of what happens and its cool, precise delineation. This is particularly true of her 'metaphysical shocker', The Driver's Seat (1970), a carefully ordered, even meticulous, present-tense account of a woman with a death-wish who plots the circumstances of her own violent murder. The novel undermines easy assumptions about cause and effect as much as it challenges ideas of authorial authority and control. If Not to Disturb (1971)—with its opening quotation from The Duchess of Malfi, its foul weather, and its 'zestful' aristocratic cretin imprisoned in a wing of a Swiss château—is Gothic in the traditional sense of the term, Spark's The Abbess of Crewe (1974), a brusque investigagion of an upper-crust English convent, completely avoids the prurience traditionally inspirational to earlier Gothic novelists. The convent is ruled by an Abbess adept in expoiting all the technological and propagandist skills of the twentieth century in order to manipulate her sisters into compliance with her will. She not only appreciates the state of the art, she is also, like so many of Spark's protagonists, something of an artist herself. 'Scenarios', the Abbess tells the nuns, 'are an art-form . . . based on facts. A good scenario is a garble. A bad one is a bungle. They need not be plausible, only hypnotic, like all good art'. Throughout the narrative, she has revealed a remarkable taste for secular literature. (Machiavelli jostles with a wide range of poetry). At the end, when she meets her Watergate, she gives orders 'for the selection and orchestration of the transcripts of her tape-recordings'. At certain points in the transcripts she includes the explanatory instruction 'Poetry deleted'. It is distinctly more elegant, but no less polite, than the phrase it echoes, Richard Nixon's 'Expletive deleted'.

Bunting and Larkin

—oOo—

To be continued...

Great Idea, Wrong Species

Communism: "Great idea; wrong species." –E. O. Wilson, ant expert. pic.twitter.com/4GHqbKvfBp

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) June 10, 2020

Great Idea, Wrong Species

Communism: "Great idea; wrong species." –E. O. Wilson, ant expert. pic.twitter.com/TBtHaPOFF7

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) 26 de mayo de 2018

E.O. Wilson: On The Shoulders of Giants

'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas ('How Things Hang Together': The Connection of Everything)

Exponemos las nociones filosóficas de symploké y conectivismo, en su relación con (1) los sistemas naturales y las máquinas mentales, los mapas cognitivos y los modelos; (2) la estilística cognitiva y la integración conceptual, y (3) la noción de consiliencia del saber propuesta por E. O. Wilson (1998). En los ensayos filosóficos sobre la historia de la ciencia de Adam Smith vemos un importante precursor de la teoría cognitivista de mapas y modelos, y del ideal de consiliencia en la filosofía de la ciencia.

'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2782797

  José Angel García Landa

Universidad de Zaragoza

May 24, 2016

Ibercampus, May 21, 2016

English abstract: 

'How Things Hang Together': The Connection of Everything

This paper deals with the philosophical notions of symploké and connectionism, as they relate to 1) natural systems and mental machines, cognitive maps and models; 2) cognitive stylistics and conceptual integration; and 3) to E. O. Wilson's (1998) notion of consilience. Adam Smith's philosophical essays on the history of science are seen here as an important precursor of the cognitivist theory of maps and models, and of the ideal of consilience among philosophers of science.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

 

Number of Pages in PDF File: 14
Keywords: Adam Smith, Philosophy, Consilience, Connections, Conceptual integration, Cognition, Maps, Models, Theories, Knowledge, Science, Theory of Science

_____. "La conexión de todas las cosas." Ibercampus 21 May 2016.*

         http://www.ibercampus.es/la-conexion-de-todas-las-cosas-33023.htm

         2006

_____. "'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas ('How Things Hang Together': The Connection of Everything)." Social Science Research Network 24 May 2016.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=2782797

         2016

_____. "'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas (How Things Hang Together: The Connection of Everything)." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 26 May 2016.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2016/05/how-things-hang-together-la-conexion-de.html

         2016

_____. "How Things Hang Together." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 18 May 2016.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2016/05/how-things-hang-together.html

         2016

_____. "'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas." Academia 25 May 2017.*

         https://www.academia.edu/33190494

         2017

_____. "'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas." ResearchGate 26 May 2017.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317170343

         2017

_____. "'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 5 Jan. 2023.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/conexiondetodas.pdf

         2023

_____. "'How Things Hang Together': La conexión de todas las cosas." Knowledge Commons Works 5 May 2026.*

         https://doi.org/10.17613/r32ff-9r196

         https://works.hcommons.org/records/r32ff-9r196

         2026

How Things Hang Together

—oOo—

E.O. Wilson - Evolution and Our Inner Conflict

una publicación de Narratología evolucionista - Evolutionary Narratology.

E. O. Wilson's 'The Meaning of Human Existence': A Conspectus

E. O. Wilson has provided a consilient evolutionary approach to anthropology, and to the problems of human nature, action, and ethics, in his book 'The Meaning of Human Existence' (2014). This paper provides a conspectus of the book's argument, and a commentary of some of the critical issues raised in it from the standpoint of cognitive and evolutionary narratology, especially the theory of retrospection.

E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: 

A Conspectus

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2626377
Ibercampus (June 30, 2015)      

Number of Pages in PDF File: 16

My Papers
Jose Angel Garcia Landa http://ssrn.com/author=889468

Also here:

_____. "The Meaning of Human Existence—A Conspectus." Vanity Fea 21 April 2015.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/the-meaning-of-human-existence-e-o.html

         2015

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 30 June 2015.*

         2015 – DISCONTINUED 2022 – Online at Net Sight de José Angel García Landa.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/WilsonConspectus.pdf

         2024

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." SSRN 3 July 2015.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=2626377

         2015

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 4 July 2015.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2015/07/e-o-wilsons-meaning-of-human-existence.html

         2015

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." Academia 20 Feb. 2017.*

         http://www.academia.edu/31529791/WilsonConspectus.pdf

         2017

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." ResearchGate 21 Feb. 2017.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jose_Angel_Garcia_Landa/contributions

         2017

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 20 June 2022.*

         http://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/WilsonConspectus.html

         2022

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/WilsonConspectus.pdf

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/WilsonConspectus2.pdf

         2023

_____. "E. O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence: A Conspectus." Knowledge Commons Works 6 May 2026.*

         https://doi.org/10.17613/8mc02-xaq13

         https://works.hcommons.org/records/8mc02-xaq13

         2026

Critical Consilience

A commentary on Bill Benzon's article on the next 100 years in the human sciences:

José Angel García Landa • a day ago

I would argue that it is already the case not perhaps that "nothing in the human sciences makes any sense except in the light of evolution" but that "MANY THINGS in the human sciencs make no sense except in the light of evolution". And, moreover, that "MANY THINGS in evolution makes no sense except in the light of the human sciences". In the sense that evolution is a theory, model, narrative, and so on, and these are the province of the human sciences.

Bill Benzon José Angel García Landa • 10 hours ago

On the first, perhaps we have a different understanding of the maturity of evolutionary thinking in the human sciences. You seem to have a more generous estimate of the current state of affairs than I do. I'm not sure what to make of your second remark. It looks a little like a formulaic claim to intellectual hegemony based on the fact that, as all knowledge is discourse, the discourse of discourse is therefore a discourse of discourses.

José Angel García Landa Bill Benzon • 5 minutes ago

Well, there may be a bit of infinite regression lurking around, I agree, but there are also insights to be gained from this perspective. I wouldn't argue for the 'intellectual hegemony' of the humanities, but rather for the benefits of an ongoing critique of science inasmuch as it is a "discourse", yes.

—and another one on the same, in a discussion of E. O. Wilson's notion of the epigenesis of natural human universals  and the "psychological exile" of mankind, which I see as a significant model for consilience on the humanites. Benzon sees in Wilson and Carroll's a displaced theological model interfering with their science. I argue from the other side of the issue:


The alternative would seem to be that the "psychological exile" is a materialist insight which sneaked into theological doctrine, or perhaps rather, a way of formulating a materialist insight about the difference between man and animals in theological terms (originally in mythical terms). The biological function of art would seem to be a subset of the biological function of culture at large—and it does not seem as if we haven't made any progress in understanding that function "ever since Darwin". Along with that understanding there may come new insight into the ways previous discourses or epistemes dealt with what is, from our perspective, a fundamentally biological or ecological problem—and these attempts to deal with a real, material problem that is now perceived as such would count in a way as proto-materialist insights.


Or perhaps put otherwise, there's reasons for things, and therefore there's a lesson in materialism (as well as a moral, and a tale) in everything.

Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est, et speculum.
Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
nostri status, nostrae sortis
fidele signaculum.
Nostrum statum pingit rosa,
nostri status decens glosa,
nostrae vitae lectio.

Consiliencia: La unidad del saber

The Meaning of Human Existence—A Conspectus

E.O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence (New York: Norton, 2014) — A Conspectus.
 

E.O. Wilson has provided a consilient evolutionary approach to anthropology, and to the problems of human nature, action and ethics in his book The Meaning of Human Existence. Here follow my notes providing a conspectus of the book — with some parenthetical comments (JAGL). 



I. The Reason We Exist

"History makes little sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes little sense without biology. Knowledge of prehistory and biology is increasing rapidly bringing into focus how humanity originated and why a species like ours exists on this planet."

1. The Meaning of Meaning. Meaning is either "intention", "design", or seen as the result of "overlapping networks of physical cause and effect" —the 2nd view is more inclusive. Understanding brings about the capacity to decide—and the greatest moral dilemma: "how much to retrofit the human genotype". "We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us" (15).

2. Solving the riddle of the human species. This cannot be entrusted to the humanities. "The time has come to consider what science might give to the humanities and the humanities to science in a common search for a more solidly grounded than before to the great riddle of our existence" (18). Eusociality (the "true" social condition) is an extreme biological rarity, arising only 19 times in biological history. It originates in social life around a protected nest, with parents and children cooperating in raising additional generations. "Such primitive assemblages then divide easily into risk-prone foragers and risk-averse parents and nurses" (21). Australopithecine eusociality as a result of a shift in diet and foraging strategies. "A premium was placed on personal relationships geared to both competition and cooperation among the members" (21). Cognitive improvements in memory, prediction, and in "the ability to invent and inwardly rehearse compeing scenarios of future interactions." All this allows the evaluation of social interactions: "They allow us to evaluate the prospects and consequences of alliances, bonding, sexual contact, rivalries, domination, deception, loyalty, and betrayal. We instinctively delight in the telling of countless stories about others, cast as players upon our own inner stage. The best of it is expressed in the creative arts, political theory, and other higher-level activities we have come to call the humanities." The origins of social intelligence are ascribed to either kin selection (now discarded by Wilson) and the theory he now favors, in which "the grand master is multilevel selection. This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups" (24). Multilevel selection is a sustainable model, kin selection is unrealistic. There is consistent human interest in details of social behavior, in gossip, in social evaluation of others. "We are compulsively driven to belong to groups or to create them as needed, which are variously nested, or overlapping, and in addition ranging from very large to very small" (Note here the analogy of social networks in electronic media. And, most important—perhaps it is these shifting borders and embeddings of social groups that give our minds the most powerful analogue for the spontaneous syntax of frame theory—JAGL). Competition and belief in the superiority of our own group. Teaching evolution and prehistory: "Students will be taught prehistory as well as conventional history, and the whole properly presented as the living world's greatest epic." (25). Wilson advocates ecological realism and responsibility: "It is folly to think of this planet as  a way station to a better world. Equally, Earth would be unsustainable if converted into a literal, human-engineered spaceship." (An argument against the lessons on mankind's survival being taught in such movies as Interstellar.—JAGL). "Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life" (26). "What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies." (Wilson seems to be thinking of religion-ridden USA.—JAGL).

3. Evolution and Our Inner Conflict. Human beings, inherently good or inherently bad? "Each of us is inherently conflicted. Team player or whistle-blower? Charitable donation or personal certificates of deposit? Admitted traffic violation or denial?" (27)  "We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of truth and hypocrites"—because of our evolutionary history (28). Source of the mystery: "The leading candidate is multilevel selection, by which hereditary social behavior improves the competitive ability not just of individuals within groups but among groups as a whole" 828). Genes promoting group behavior have been selected by natural selection, we tend to belong to groups and to assume group behavior. Development of group sociality starting from competing individuals; dynamics of competing altruism and selfishness: "a conflict ensued between individual-level seleection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, on the one side, and group-level selection, with competition among groups, on the other" (33); "Within grups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue" (33). An inherent conflict, which "might be the only way in the entire Universe that human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve." We should understand that this is the source of human creativity.



II. The Unity of Knowledge

"Although the two great branches of learning, science and the humanities, are radically different in the way they describe our species, they have risen from the same wellspring of creative thought." (35).

4. The New Enlightenment. Disappointment with the Enlightenment led to Romantic subjectivism, and "For the next two centuries and to the present day, science and the humanities went their own ways" (39). "Yet the Enlightenemnt was never proved to be impossible. It was not dead. It was just stalled" (39). "Studying the relation between science and the humanities should be at the heart of liberal education everywhere, for students of science and the humanities alike" (40). There has been an excessive emphasis on specialization for academic success. But creativity is associated to poetic thought, analogies, metaphors, curiosity. Anthropocentricity sharpens social intelligence. "We are devoted to stories because that is how the mind works—a never-ending wandering through past scenarios and thorugh alternative scenarios of the future" (43). Science specialises in the study and measurement of continua in every field, "The exploration of continua allows humanity to measure the dimensions of the reals cosmos, from the infinite ranges of size, distance, and quantity, in which we and our little planet exist" (50).  The insights of the humanities are limited to our human perception, and they must be placed within the context provided by science. And this understanding will give new insights to the humanities to express our existence in ways that further the Enlightenment.

5. The All-Importance of the Humanities. From the point of view of aliens, the humanities would be our most specific and unique kind of knowledge (the rest is objective science). "They are the natural history of culture, and our most private and precious heritage" (57). Soon humans will have the power to control their own genome and future evolution. An unprecedented dilemma is created. "Now we are talking about a problem best solved within the humanities, and one more reason the humanities are all- important. While I'm at it, I hereby cast a vote for existential conservatism, the preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust" (60).

6. The Driving Force of Social Evolution. Paradoxical effects of natural selection in cooperative behaviour. Selfishness benefits the individual but weakens the group and eventually the individual too. Altruism damages the individual but benefits the group. "The two levels of natural selection, individual and group, illustrated by these extremes, are in opposition. They will in time lead to either a balance of the opposing genes or an extinction of one of the two kinds altogether. Their action is summarized in this maxim: selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members." For inclusive fitness, the individual (not the gene) is the unit of selection. But it is unrealistic. "The use of the individual or the group as the unit of heredity, rather than the gene, is an even more fundamental error" (64). Inclusive fitness has been the dominant model to explain advanced social behaviour (from J.B.S. Haldane and William D. Hamilton, in the form of kin selection). "Also in 1964, Hamilton took the kinship principle one step further by introducing the concept of inclusive fitness. (...) With inclusive fitness the unit of selection had passed subtly from the gene to the individual" (69).  Wilson himself promoted the model, and "the eloquent science journalist Richard Dawkins" popularized it in The Selfish Gene. By 2000,

It was a common practice for writers of technical papers to acknowledge the truth of the theory, even if the content of the data to be presented were only distantly relevant to it.  Academic careers had been built upon it by then, and international prizes awarded.
    Yet the theory of inclusive fitness was not just wrong, but fundamentally wrong. (70)

But through the system of peer review they hindered publication of contrary evidence and opinions en leading journals (71). The theory was a house of cards, risking collapse. "Pulling cards, however, was worth the price to reputation. There existed in the air the promise of a paradigm shift, a rare event in evolutionary biology" (72). Wilson, together with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, discredited inclusive fitness in the cover article of Nature (2010). Dawkins "responded with the indignant fervor of a true believer" (73). But he could not refute the refutation. The argument is summarized in the appendix.   The driving force of human sociality was different from that of social insects. "As brain size more than doubled, the bands used intelligence based on vastly improved memory. Where primitively social insects evolved division of labor with narrow instincts that play upon categories of social organization in each group, such as larvae and adults, nurses and foragers, the earliest humans operated with variable instinct-driven behavior that made use of detailed knowledge of each group member by all others" (75). "The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction (...). Social intelligence enhanced by group selection made Homo sapiens the first fully dominant species in Earth's history" (75).



III. Other Worlds

"The meaning of human existence is best understood in perspective, by comparing our species with other conceivable life-forms and, by deduction, even those that might exist outside the Solar System."

7. Humanity lost in a pheromone world. "The humanities treat the strange properties of human nature by taking them as 'just is'" (79). But science must identify the causes of this nature. Our species won "the grand lottery of evolution. The payout was civilization based on symbolic language, and culture, and from these a gargantuan power to extract the nonrenewable resources of the planet—while cheerfully exterminating our fellow species" (80). But our biological nature makes us perceive only a fraction of reality—our olfactory reality is very limited. Other species communicate mainly through pheromones, detected to an infinitesimal proportion. Pheromone attacks in ants, chemical defenses in plants, etc. "In a nutshell, the evolutionary innovations that made us dominant over the rest of life also left us sensory cripples. (....) We cannot talk in the language of pheromones, but it will be well to learn more about how other organisms do it, in order better to save them and with them the majority part of the environment on which we depend" (90-91).

8. The Superorganisms. Colonies of ants are superorganisms, some more highly organized than others. We can learn a lot from studying them, but nothing applicable to human morality—a different kind of being. "The advanced superorganisms of ants, bees, wasps, and termites have achieved something resembling civilizations almost purely on the basis of instincts" (99). With complexity also comes fragility, because of their connection to many aspects of their environment. Human societies are not superorganisms, because the labor division is based on the transmission of culture, and human individuals are too selfish: "They will always revolt against slavery: they will not be treated like worker ants" (101). (I would argue that many societies of hierarchical human predators have found the techniques to deal with that selfish and rebellious potential, and keep the faces under the boots. —JAGL).

9. Why Microbes Rule the Galaxy. Potential for life within a narrow "Goldilocks" limit. Versatility of microbes in many ecosystems within that limit (e.g. SLIMEs (subterranean lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems) under the earth surface). Extremophiles too, candidates to have analogous life forms on Mars, Callisto, Europa, Titan or Ganymede.  Finding extraterrestrial life would tell us about the degree to which Earth and humans are exceptional. "If, on the other hand, the code of extraterrestrials is basically the same as that of native Earth organisms, it could suggest (but not prove, not yet) that life everywhere can only originate with one code, the same as in Earth's biological genesis" (108).

10. A portrait of E.T. The extreme complexity and rarity of intelligence at the human level makes it far more unlikely than the simple existence of extraterrestrial life. "The final evolutionary steps prior to the human-level singularity, that is, altruistic division of labor at a protected nest site, has occurred on only twenty known occasions in the hisotry of life. Three of the lines that reached this final preliminary level are mammals, namely two species of African mole rats and Homo sapiens—the latter a strange offshoot of African apes." (111). So, "intelligent E.T.s are also likely to be both improbable and rare" (112). But, guessing in an informed way: they would be land-dwellers, relatively large animals, biologically audiovisual, with a distinct, big head located up front, and with light to moderate jaws and teeth. They have a very high social intelligence and a small number of "free locomotory appendages, levered for maximum strength with stiff internal or external exoskeletons composed by hinged segments (...) and with at least one pair of which are terminated by digits with pulpy tips used for sensitive touch and grasping" (116). They are moral (as a result of natural selection at individual and especially group level). And they may have found ways to extend their memory or to change their biological makeup, but not drastically, just like we "will be existential conservatives" (118). But there are likely no extraterrestrial colonizations; the aliens would have to destroy all native life in order to reconstruct a viable ecosystem for themselves. It is more feasible to avoid planetary destruction, given the advanced technology needed. "There live among us today space enthusiasts who believe humanity can emigrate to another planet after using up this one. They should heed what I believe is a universal principle, for us and for all E.T.s: there exists only one habitable planet, and hence only one chance at immortality for the species" (121-22).

11. The Collapse of Biodiversity.
Even as we discover more species, extinction goes on at an alarming rate as the result of our action—some call this the Anthropocene. Taxonomy and the investigation of biodiversity: an important activity. Identifying 'keystone' species, those on which the life of an ecosystem depends. "The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves" (127). HIPPO: Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, Population growth, Overharvesting. Conservationism has real effects, but it is too limited. "The remainder of the century will be a bottleneck of growing human impact on the environment and diminishment of biodiversity" (131). We are responsible, we understand the problem, and we have moral values. "Might we now extend the same concern to the living world that gave us birth?" (132).



IV. Idols of the Mind

"Humanity's intellectual frailties identified by Francis Bacon, in one of the principal achievements of the first Enlightenment, can now be redefined by scientific explanation."

12. Instinct. The human mind originated as, and remains, "an instrument of survival that employs both reason and emotion" (135)—not an instrument of pure reason or emotional fulfillment. "The particular conglomerate of reason and emotion we call human nature was just one of many conceivable outcomes" (136). Our self-image is biased, as Bacon showed. E.g. extremes of human nature as entirely cultural and constructed, vs. extreme of genetic determination. "Both views, it turns out, are half wrong and half correct, at least in extremity. The paradox created, often described as the nature-versus-nurture controversy, can be solved by applying the modern concept of human instinct, as follows" (137). Instincts in humans exist, but they are flexible, "What is inherited is the likelihood of learning one or a few alternative behaviors out of many possible. The strongest among the biased behaviors are shared across all cultures, even when they seem irrational and there are plenty of opportunities to make other choices" (139). E.g. a bias toward phobia for snakes (as against the more dangerous automobiles).  The intensity of biases is a product of evolution by natural selection. "For example, human beings are born gossips. We love the life stories of other people, and cannot be sated with too much such detail. Gossip is the means by which we learn and shape our social network. We devour novels and drama. But we have little or no interest in the life stories of animals—unless they are linked in some way to human stories" (142). "What we call human nature is the whole of our emotions and the preparedness in learning over which those emotions preside. Some writers have tried to deconstruct human nature into nonexistence. But it is real, tangible, and a process that exissts in the structures of the brain. Decades of research have discovered that nature is not the genes that prescribe the emotions and learning preparedness. It is not the cultural universals, which are its ultimate product. Human nature is the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person." (143) E.g. a bias towards a kind of habitat (gardens, etc.)—we have some innate propensities.


13. Religion. "The brain was made for religion and religion for the human brain. In every second fof the believer's conscious life religious belief plays multiple, mostly nurturing roles. All the followers are unified into a vastly extended family, a metaphorical band of brothers and sisters, reliable, obedient to one supreme law, and guaranteed immortality as the benefit of membership." (149). Priests: "They sacralize the basic tenets of civil and moral law, comfort the afflicted, and take care of the despreately poor. Inspired by their example, followers strive to be righteous in the sight of man and Go. The churches over which they preside are centers of community life." (150)  "The great religions are also, and tragically, sources of ceseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world. Teir exquisitely human flaw is tribalism." (150). Need for memebership in a group. Religious groups defined by their creation story and by privileging its own members. "Faith is biologically understandable as a Darwinian device for survival and increased reproduction. It is forged by the success of the tribe, the tribe is united by it when competing with other tribes", etc. (151-2). "For ages no tribe vould survive unless the meaning of its existence was defined by a creation story. The price of the loss of faith was a hemorrhage of commitment, a weakening nad dissipation of common purpose." (152-3). Religion fosters tribalism: "Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things" (154); "faith has hijacked religious spirituality" (155). Intellectual compromisers face Kierkegaard's dilemma of the Absolute Paradox, the intellectual inconsistency of a personal God. "As Carl Jung once said, some problems can never be solved, only outgrown. (...) The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods." (158).

14. Free will. "I don't believe it is too harsh to say that the history of philsoophy when boiled down consists mostly of failed models of the brain" (161). Project of neuroscience (the Brain Activity Map) to connect all processes of thought to a physical base. It should be feasible to study the emergence and nature of consciousness in a scientific way, as it is the result of evolution. "The second point of entry into the realm of consciousness and free will is the identification of emergent phenomena—entities and processes that come into existence only with the joining of preexisting entities and processes. They will be found, if the results of current research are indicative, in the linkage and synchronized activity of various parts of both the sensory system and the brain." (165). The nervous system can be conceived as a superorganism, analogy with termites. Selective nature of human perception, we are aware of a small part of the space-time and energy fields in which we exist. Our perception allows us to see and know the events that matter for our survival. Another elemnto for our understanding of decision and consciousness is our current understanding of "the human necessity for confabulation. Our minds consist of storytelling." (167). Stories as a means to organize and use information, applying past stories—"Then we look forward to create—not just to recall this time—multiple competing senarios. They are weighted against one another by the suppressing or intensifying effect imposed by aroused emotional centers. A choice is made in the unconscious centers of the brain, it turns out from recent studies, several seconds before the decision arrives in the conscious part." (167). (Conscious awareness is then in part an emergent result of these competing scenarios, and a way to manage them through increased attention. An important issue here—Wilson proposes a narrative theory of consciousness, in which fiction and possible stories play an all-important role for decision-making and generate our impression of freedom—JAGL). "Conscious mental life is built entirely from confabulation. It is a constant review of stories experienced in the past and competing stories invented for the future. By necessity most conform to the present real world as best it can be processe by our rather paltry senes. Memories of past episodes are repeated for pleasure, for reharsal, for planning, or for various combinations of the three. Some of the memories are altered into abstractions and metaphors, the higher generic units that increase the speed and effectiveness of the conscious process.  // Most ciionscious activity contains elements of social interactions. We are fascinated by the histories and emotional responses of others. We play games, both imaginary and real, based on the reading of intention and probable response" (168). (And all this might be related to our account of the symbolic-interactional theatre of interiority—JAGL). "The self cannot exist as a paranormal being living on its own within the brain. It is instead the central dramatic character of the confabulated scenarios. In these stories it is always on center stage, if not as participant then as observer and commentator, because that is where all of the sensory information arrives and is integrated. The stories that compose the conscious mind cannot be taken away from the mind's physical neurobiological system, which serves as script writer, director, and cast combined. The self, despite the illusion of its independence created in the scenarios, is part of the anatomy and physiology of the body" (169). That does not mean it can be fully analyzed or reconstructed; so we can believe in the illusion of free will. "And that is a very fortunate Darwinian circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it the conscious mind, at best a fragile dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism." So, free will exists "if not in ultimate reality then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the species." (170).

V. A Human Future.

"In the technoscientific age, freedom has acquired a new meaning. Like an adult emerging from childhood, we have a vastly wider range of choices but also a comparably larger number of risks and responsibilities."

15. Alone and Free in the Universe. "What does the story of our species tell us? By this I mean the narrative made visible by sicnece, not the archaic version soaked in religion and ideology. I believe the evidence is massive enough and clear enough to tell us this much. We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millioins of species in Earth's biosphere. Hope and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one. We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It menas we are completely free. As a result we can more easiy diagnose the etiology of the irrational beliefs that so unjustifiably divide us. Laid before us are new options scarcely dreamed of in other ages. They empower s to address with more confidence the greatest goal of all time, the unity of the human race.
    The prerequisite for attaining the goal is an accurate self-understanding. So, what is the meaning of the human existence? I've suggested that it is the epic of the species, begun in biological evolution and prehistory, passed into recorded history, and urgently now, day by day, faster and faster into the indefinite future, it is also what we will choose to become" (174). "The self-contained worldview of the humanities described the human condition—but not why it is the one thing and not another. The scientific worldview is vastly larger. It encompasses the meaning of human existence—the general principles of the human condition, where the species fits in the Universe, and why it exists in the first place" (174). Can we accomplish the goal of achieving a harmonious, paradisal existence in our biosphere environment? "We can plausibly accomplish that goal, at least be well on the way, by the end of the present century. The problem holding everything up thus far is that Homo sapiens is an innately dysfunctional species" (176)—hampered by the Paleolithic Curse. "And it is still taboo to bring up population policies aiming for an optimum people density, geographic distribution, and age distribution. The idea sounds 'fascist', and in any case can be deferred for another generation or two—we hop" (177). "Scientists who might contribute to a more realistic worldview are especially disappointing. Largely yeomen, they are intellectual dwarves content to stay within the narrow specialties for which they were trained and are paid" (178). A dysfunctional element in the human makeup: "Selfish activity within the group provides competitive advantage but is commonly destructive to the group as a whole. Working in the opposite direction from individual-level selection is group selection—group versus group. When an individual is cooperative and altruistic, this reduces his advantage in competition to a comparable degree with other members but increases the survival and reproduction rate of the group as a whole. In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths" (179)."The products of the opposing two vectors in natural seletion are hardwired in our emotions and reasoning, and cannot be erased. Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox, or spider, for example, whose traits were born solely of individual selection, or a worker ant, whose social traits were shaped entirely by group selection" (179). There is a resulting instability of the human mind: "They created a mind that is continuously and kaleidoscopically shifting in mood—variously proud, aggressive, competitive, angry, vengeful, venal, treacherous, curious, adventurous, tribal, brave, humble, patriotic, empathetic, and loving. All normal humans are noble and ignoble, often in close alternation, sometimes simultaneously" (180). "We must learn to behave, but let us never even think of domesticating human nature" (180). Destructive traits of social life as parasites of the mind, they must be kept within tolerable bounds. E.g. tribal religions should be subject to historical and critical scrutiny; Wilson calls disingenuously for debates among leaders to defend their supernatural beliefs in a rational way. (But surely the point is to avoid such rational debate! —JAGL). "It would be far from irrational in today's better-informed wolrd to reverse the practice and charge with blasphemy any religious or political leader who claims to speak with or on behalf of God"; ""It might eventually be possible to hold seminars on the historical Jesus in evangelical churches, and even to publish images of Muhammad without risking death" (182). Pro rationl scrutiny on beliefs, politics, evolution, etc. Wilson opposes the social prestige of faith: "Faith is the evidence given of a person's submission to a particular god, ane even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god" (184). Cost of religious enmity to evolutionism: "Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore, psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution" (184)—vs. Creatioinists. The force behind blind faith is evolution: "The welfare of the group and defense of its territory is biological, not supernatural in origin" (185). Another misconception: "the belief that the two great branches of learning—science and the humanities—are intellectually independent of each other. And more, the farther apart they are kept, the better" (185). Scientific knowledge will become unified, but the humanities will continue to grow and diversify. (Actually both will grow and diversify and also be unified; consilience also takes place within the humanities, as Wilson well knows—JAGL). "Although the details of the creative arts are potentially infinite, the archetypes and instinct they are designed to exemplify are in reality very few" (186). "Science and the humanities, it is true, are fundamentally different from each other in what they say and do. But they are complementary to each other in origin, and they arise from the same creative processes in the human brain. If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning" (187).

(Yes, but... perhaps this enlightened view of mankind is not for everyone. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. And most people make do with simpler, more simplistic and proactive, shorthand accounts of human existence and purposes. That's what religion is for, in part. And just as there are individuals who choose to believe blindly, no matter the contrary evidence, there will be whole groups, nations and civilizations, which will choose, to the end, to hold on to their belief as identity glue. And who will use that as a lever in group competition, a competition which will favour, if we have to believe Wilson, the groups made up of altruists driven by collective ideals, not groups of individualists. The Enlightenment had better become a collective ideal, soon.—JAGL).


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Appendix: An argument for the limitations of inclusive fitness, summarizing "Limitations of Inclusive Fitness" by Wilson et al, in PNAS 110.50 (2013)—a mathematical argument.

"It is immediately obvious that the additivity assumption which is essential for the concept of inclusive fitness need not hold in general. (...) It is clear that in general fitness effects cannot be assumed to be additive" (192-3). Many biologists signed a manifesto in opposition to this, holding that "inclusive fitness is as general as the genetical theory of natural selection itself."But this assumption "rests on an alternative approach, which deals with the additivity problem in retrospect. In this approach, the outcome of natural selection must already be known or specified at the outset, and the objective is to find additive costs and benefits that would have yielded this outcome—regardelss of whether they correspond to actual biological interactions" (194). (As I see it, Wilson is accusing the inclusive fitness theory of resting on hindsight bias, or of articulating prophecies after the facts are known). But the "Regression Method Does Not Yield Predictions". "We now evaluate the various claims made regarding the regression method, starting with the claim that it predicts the direction of selection. This claim cannot be true, because the allele frequency change over the considered time interval is specified at the outset. The 'prediction' merely recapitulates what is already known, such that the sign of BR-C [Benefit . Regression - Cost] agrees with the predetermined outcome" (195)—(So, a case of "foregone conclusions" in the method—JAGL). The "Regression Method Does Not Yield Causal Explanations" (196). Hanger-on traits, supposedly leading individuals to interact with individual of high fitness, cannot be understood as "cooperative" traits, "However, of course, this gets causality backward—the high fitness causes the interaction, not the other way around" (197). Without additional assumptions, the regression methods explains nothing, in the scientific sense. "There Is No Universal Design Principle" (199). "Because experiments have shown that finess effects in real biological populations are nonadditive, these results cannot be expected to hold in general" (200). Models which are explanatory must take into account special assumptions and make them explicit. "Having realized the limitations of inclusive fitness, sociobiology now has the possibility to move forward. We encourage the develoopment of realistic models grounded in a firm unserstanding of natural history. With the aid of population genetics, evolutionary game theory, and new analytic procedures to be developed, a strong and resilient sociobiological theory can emerge" (202).



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JAGL: Richard Dawkins replies to E. O. Wilson (without naming him) in "This is my vision of 'Life'". But he does not address the mathematical argument nor the accusations of hindsight bias.

Dawkins, Richard. "This Is My Vision of 'Life': A Conversation with Richard Dawkins." Text, video and audio. Introd. John Brockman. Edge 30 April 2015.*

http://edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-this-is-my-vision-of-life

2015

Spiritual dilemma

—oOo—