1
Your body is home to uncounted
beneficial bacterial species, from the ones in your gut that carry
out digestion to those in your mouth that help fight fungal and viral
infections. In fact, most of the species living in your body are good
for you. They are symbionts. They help form the complex ecosystem
that is your body.
Unfortunately, our culture has tended
to cultivate an irrational fear of germs. Only a very small
percentage are harmful, and by simply sterilizing our food, our body,
and our homes, we can throw natural ecosystems out of whack and allow
for pathological bacteria to spread more easily. To help our own kids
develop a healthy immune system, my wife and I have let them play
outside in the dirt since they were babies. To help them develop a
healthy attitude toward
germs, we talk about “good germs” in yogurt and garden
vegetables. When they ask us what makes someone sick, we like to say
“bad germs” to make it clear that not all germs make you ill.
Your body has many complex mechanisms
evolved to fight bad germs. Skin oil, saliva, and tears contain
enzymes specially-designed to slice up incoming bacteria, like
razor-wire. Your immune system learns to distinguish good from bad
and places specially-designed markers called “antibodies” to help
remove the bad. These systems aren’t perfect. Sometimes your
immune system will incorrectly label harmless substances as bad, and
when this happens it’s called an “allergy.”
Among good germs, some of the most
interesting are your mitochondria. Billions of years ago these were
independently-living single-celled organisms. At some point they
invaded the cells of our ancestors. But instead of causing problems
they actually provided benefits. Though they still have their own DNA
sequence separate from ours (which can be used to traced maternal
lineage), they exist in every one of our cells, producing a molecule
called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) that is burned as fuel elsewhere
in the cell to provide energy. If your mitochrondria died, you would
die, and vice versa. It’s a very close symbiotic relationship.
A symbiont is usually defined as an
organism that benefits another, and is given benefits in return. But
let’s be a little more precise. Natural selection is unyielding
about what survives: it is whatever produces the most surviving
offspring on average. So, to be more specific, a symbiont helps
another organism reproduce and is rewarded by being able to reproduce
more successfully itself. In evolutionary theory, “reproductive
success” is considered a mouthful and you normally use the term
“fitness.”
By this definition, all the good germs
that form the ecosystem of your body are symbionts. They make you
healthier, fitter, and in return they come along for the ride when
you have children and thus spread them to the next generation. If
you’re not used to thinking of it this way, it may sound a little
creepy, but it’s life. Every successful ecosystem is like this—as
it spreads it benefits its members by giving them an expanding
environment to fill.
A parasite, on the other hand, is best
defined as an organism that reduces the fitness of another,
and in return enhances its own fitness. Invasive species are like
this. Bacterial infections are like this.
Brain parasites are a particularly
weird example. Toxoplasma gondi, for example, leaves eggs in
cat feces. There the eggs lay dormant until eaten, frequently by
rats. Once inside a rat, they will mature and often infect the brain.
Eventually, sometimes years later, they alter the rat’s brain
chemistry, causing it to become sexually aroused by the smell of
cats. This is the parasites working hard to be eaten, so they can
spread to a new feline host. The fitness of the rat is thus lowered,
and the fitness of the parasite enhanced.
Viruses are likewise a bit weird in how
they work. Their spores are often shaped like little moon-landers,
ready to attach to your cells and inject their own DNA, reprogramming
the cell to become a zombie-like producer of more viral spores.
Again, this is parasitic behavior. The virus benefits; the host is
harmed and often destroyed.
Richard Dawkins claims
that religious faith is a special kind of virus, spread not by spores
filled with alien DNA, but by priests filled with unscientific
convictions. Once infected,
The patient
typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that
something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't
seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless,
he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to
such a belief as “faith.”
It’s an intriguing idea. But is it
sound? Dawkins has received plenty of criticism for it. The two most
common objections:
(a) Ideas (or as Dawkins calls
them “memes,” as analogues to genes) don’t spread
mechanically by natural selection, like viruses, but are consciously
adopted by reasoning individuals. But this objection falls right
into Dawkins’s trap. His point is that religion is not consciously
adopted at all, but the result of mystification, indoctrination, and
anti-scientific thinking. He goes further and admits that,
Scientific ideas,
like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this
might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that
scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious.
In other words, it’s not that
religion is a meme and science is not. Dawkins’s point is that
science is a good meme, while religion is a viral one. Reason is a
symbiont and faith is a parasite. But if symbiont/parasite is the
important distinction, why does Dawkins spend so much time arguing
that faith is an unscientific meme? (“Patients typically
make a positive virtue of faith’s being strong and unshakable, in
spite of not being based on evidence.” // “A related symptom ...
is the conviction that ‘mystery,’ per se, is a good thing.” //
“It is as though the faithful gain prestige through managing to
believe even more impossible things than their rivals succeed in
believing.” // etc. etc.) He commits a non sequitur here.
The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. His argument runs
like this: Science is beneficial. Religion is not science. Therefore
religion is not beneficial. Therefore it is a parasite. But the fact
that religion is not science does not immediately imply that religion
is not beneficial.
(b) This brings us to the other common
objection, namely, that Dawkins focuses on the virus-like aspects
of religion and ignores the positive. To properly assess it, we
need to be absolutely precise: Is religion a symbiont or a parasite,
by the best definitions we have of these terms? Does religion
increase or decrease one’s reproductive fitness? For a thorough
answer to this question, see this
article. If you prefer a summary, see the following table, which
uses data from the article linked to:
Religion : Fertility Rate
Islam : 3.1
Christianity : 2.7
AVERAGE : 2.5
Hinduism : 2.4
Judaism : 2.3
Folk : 1.8
Other : 1.7
Buddhist : 1.6
Both Christians and Muslims have a
higher fertility rate than average. People unaffiliated with any
religion are expected to decline, from 16.4% of the population in
2010 to 13.2% in 2050. Islam is the fastest growing religion and will
grow from 23.2% to 29.7% of the world population during the same
period. And what about the U.S. in particular? Let’s take a look at
another set
of data:
Religion Fertility Rate
Mormonism : 3.4
Black Protestant : 2.5
Evangelical Protestant : 2.3
Catholics : 2.3
Jews : 2.0
Mainline Protestants : 1.9
Atheists : 1.6
Agnostics : 1.3
Converting from atheism to Mormonism,
therefore, will more than double your reproductive fitness. The two
lowest-fertility groups are the non-religious ones.
Religion increases fitness. It’s not
a parasite, it’s a symbiont. If you want to get scientific about
it, look at the numbers.
2
The
line between symbiont and parasite can often shift or prove illusory.
E. coli is essential to a working digestive system. It keeps bad
germs out and harmlessly inhabits us almost immediately from birth to
death. Once in while, a mutant or foreign variant can cause
infectious diarrhea and even death. Even mutations of cells with
human DNA can cause them to replicate out of control, to become
pathogenic—a process called cancer.
In the
realm of ideas, there are a number of such symbionts gone parasitic.
The one I find most interesting, being the most pervasive in the
modern West, is the notion of Progress.
There
is a certain kind of progress that is most often a good germ, and
this goes by the term “civic responsibility.” This is the idea
that you should get involved in your local community and help make it
better and more prosperous. Unfortunately, this good idea as too
often mutated, by stages, into such less-good and eventually harmful
ones from state reform, to nation-wide reform, and
finally to Global Progress,
which I capitalize because it is the deity of modern progressivism,
whose ultimate goal, it seems clear, is the elimination of all
poverty worldwide and forever.
In
my upcoming book, Progress Debunked, I will argue that this goal is
not only practically unfeasible, but logically impossible. The
elimination of suffering, if we analyze the idea in terms of what it
means biologically and psychologically, also means the elimination of
joy and with it the elimination of life itself. In biological terms,
the elimination of natural selection means decay by mutation. In
cultural terms, perfect freedom of thought and of morality means
decay by cultural mutation.
If
you want an overview see these posts: Preface,
Introduction,
Chapter
1 Excerpt, Chapter
2 Excerpt. Suffice it to say that at present I’ll be reasoning
from the assumption that World Progress (or simply Progress with a
capital P) is impossible.
The
ideal of Progress is a rather new strain, not much more than three
centuries old. It became popular largely as a result of the Marquis
de Condorcet’s 1794 book, Progress of the Human Mind.
Admittedly, two hundred years is old enough that it throws some doubt
on how harmful a meme it might be. That is, Progress can’t be a
deadly pathogen because otherwise it would have killed off all its
hosts. Still, it is relatively young as religions go and it seems
likely that it lacks long-term evolutionary viability.
It has nevertheless succeeded in
spreading widely, and most liberals in the West now believe in
something like it. Human ingenuity, most believe, will continue to
create new technology that will continue to make life better and
better. The past is past and the future will either become perfect,
or will keep getting more easy-going and fun. Fewer wars, less
back-breaking work. We’ll help the rest of the world improve too.
This is all part of the complex of ideas that is Progress. In fact it
is such a popular belief now that most of us in the West believe it
without realizing that we believe it, having grown up around no
respectable alternatives.
The idea of Progress does often coexist
more-or-less peacefully, even in the same person, alongside various
religions, including Christianity. But even then it does have a
tendency to reduce fertility. Progressivism teaches that unless you
have fewer children, the world will become “overpopulated” (a
term, I’ve pointed out, that Malthus himself never used).
This teaching is logically
inconsistent. By reducing human reproduction we reduce the suffering
caused by having to support children. But this ignores the joy
inherent in raising a family. Rather than merely decreasing
suffering, birth control also reduces joy, and thus reduces the total
quantity of life. This way of doing things will, on the whole,
shrink and give way to more flourishing ways of living, such as
traditional Catholicism and other ideologies that teach the
biologically-sound view that reproduction is the essential function
of sex. The suicide of the ideal of Progress is already happening as
the native population of the secular West declines, giving way to
Islam and more family-centered forms of Christianity.
This is why, on the whole, I think that
the myth of Progress should be discarded. Population growth and
resource limitations have always given rise to equal amounts of
suffering and joy. Looking for some magical formula whereby you can
have all the good of life with none of the bad is an opium-dream.
Unfortunately, this dream of Progress has become almost inextricably
integrated into our Western ideological ecosystem. It is not easy to
discard. It’s in fact developed its own adaptations over the last
two centuries of its quasi-symbiosis, including its own kind of
immune system, comprising ideas like relativism and political
correctness. As we’ll see, unless you can replace these defense
mechanisms with something more effective, those excommunicated from
the Cult of Progress are prone to all kinds of ugly ideological
germs.
Might it not be better just to let this
benign parasite, Progress, alone? Is it really doing all that much
harm? If the worst it can do is reduce the number of white people
lording over the world, isn’t that sort of a good thing? What’s
wrong with welcoming immigrants and letting them take over the
genetic legacy of the West?
I like to think of my challenges to
Progress as an FYI. It’s a warning more than anything. What I’m
saying is, look, you are free to believe in it if you’d like. We
don’t need to outlaw the idea. But people should be aware of what
it is, especially its disadvantages, because it’s so taken over our
intellectual culture that we’ve left critique of Progress almost
entirely to certain ugly fringe elements. Things could get even
uglier if these fringe elements start to win the wider philosophical
and cultural war.
Because Progressivism is seen as a
constant overcoming of the past, it tends to forget tradition, seeing
anything old-fashioned as outdated. As a result, it tends to mutate
fast, latching on to any new cause it can champion to unite
Progressive voters. As it’s mutated it’s given rise not only to
political correctness, but all the increasingly sensitive forms it
comes in today. Originally, being PC served the useful function of
fighting Nazi, fascist, and KKK-style racist ideologies. But today
many universities require professors to abstain from mentioning
anything that suggests that DNA can make any difference to
success, or even that ethnicity can make any difference to economic
or political behavior. Many require that lecturers give “trigger
warnings” anytime they even discuss the possibility of
non-equitable relations among different sexes or cultures.
These are allergic reactions, an immune
system gone haywire. It’s the sort of over-sensitive perception
that led Hillary Clinton to call most of Trump’s supporters
“deplorables,” thus demeaning almost a quarter of the U.S.
population. This is too much. Out of self-defense these “deplorables”
are starting to become aggressive and allergic themselves. The
Alt-Right, a group of anti-democratic libertarian monarchists, is
growing in influence. It regularly uses the term “cuckservative”
to refer to Republicans or any conservative that they see as
selling-out to liberalism. In this way they have made themselves
equally allergic, and the divide deepens.
It makes me think of HIV. We’ve got
viruses attacking the very immune system that keeps us safe from
viruses. The break-down in dialogue between Left and Right is like
organ-donation gone bad, the body and the organ reacting with mutual
allergies. This sort of thing is deadly.
The cycle of reaction and
counter-reaction is halting dialogue. It’s destroying the rational
benefits of freedom of speech. It gives rise to viral propaganda with
similarities to the sort that created Communism and Fascism.
Freedom of speech is an essential
immunological function in our culture. It gives every idea a fighting
chance in the ecosystem. It creates a jungle of ideas. Freedom of
speech is the Law of the
Jungle. Just as your body needs a healthy balance of germs, just as
your body in fact destroys fewer germs than it lets be, freedom of
speech must tolerate all but those few ideas that cannot be
tolerated. It may seem to permit too much from the likes of white
supremacists, but if we do not allow them a voice they will find more
violent and virulent ways to make themselves heard. The last thing we
want to do is make them martyrs to the cause of truth—but this is
very nearly what is happening.
The Law of the Jungle is not kind. It
means survival of the fittest. And Christianity in particular has
survived such jungles before, most especially the late Roman Empire.
It is no fossil species. Its numbers have grown to 2.2 billion. If
you want to talk about fossil species, I should mention that Paganism
and Druidism, popular only among certain pockets of hipsters today,
are your prototypical fossil species when it comes to culture,
gaining curious converts precisely because they are so small and
unique. Nazism is younger but no less a fossil.
I’ve heard Christianity criticized as
non-adapting because it retains the same canon of scripture it did
millennia ago. But this is to ignore the fact that in the early
church there were many competing canons. It was popular choice and
debate that eventually led to the scriptures adopted by Catholics.
And even then there are differences in canon among Orthodox,
Protestant, Mormon, and many other sects of Christianity. And there
are differences in translation, interpretation, and application. Just
compare the Amish to the Anglicans. In fact, Christianity is part of
an even bigger family tree that has diversified from its original
Semitic roots millennia ago into Islam and Judaism as well. These
churches have gradually accepted and absorbed insights from science,
including Greek philosophy, a heliocentric solar system, Newtonian
physics, and in some cases Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Christianity is an old symbiont and
it’s been with us for several ages, both dark and golden. I’d be
very surprised indeed if suddenly a viral argument from a
theologically-naive atheist (e.g. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris)
annihilated this entire tradition overnight. I know physicists,
philosophers, biologists, successful businessmen, and public
intellectuals who are all Christian. I am a Christian. It does not
preclude intelligence or rationality—in fact it strengthens the
intellect by giving it firm ideological ground in long-standing moral
values. And faith is not incompatible with science. Almost every
pre-20th century Western scientist, including Newton,
believed in God.
If anything’s a virus, it’s those
notions that come and go in short-lived epidemics from age-to-age.
Fascism, authoritarianism, utopian socialism, materialism, and
militant atheism come to mind. These ideas are simple, seductive,
spread quickly among the impressionable, mutate fast, and tend to
burn themselves out.
Next week, in Part 2 of 3, we’ll
discuss this new far-right movement, the Alt-Right, in these
terms—parasite or symbiont?
The term Theologically-naive atheist (might) be a misuse of the term in this instance. Who knows for i am but a fool.
ReplyDeleteHi Steven. I actually don't know of any popular book by an atheist that takes on Christian theology (such as Thomism) with any real depth. If you can think of an example I'd be happy to take a look.
ReplyDeleteHi Sam. I can think of no reason an avowed atheist would undertake such a task.
DeleteI assumed most probably incorrectly. that one would posses an understanding of what they claim not to believe in. Again i am but a fool.
Dawkins's book, the "God Delusion," is an example of a book by an atheist attempting to disprove God. Seems a good enough reason to learn some theology. But he doesn't bother. Strikes me like trying to disprove Darwin's theory without ever bothering to read or understand any books on evolution.
ReplyDelete