Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy. - Slate Magazine
Further to today's lengthy post on the ultimate value of emotions, it's worthwhile reading this article on the increasing research into the animal predecessors to the "good" human emotions.
(You should at least read it to see how empathy is not evenly spread around the primate world. Baboons are apparently not very nice.)
Such "bottom up" arguments for the evolution of a human sense of morality are used to attack the "top down" (god derived) arguments for our sense of morality, of which CS Lewis was a notable proponent. In Mere Christianity, Chapter 2, Lewis tried to answer "objections" that morality is really all about instinct by arguing that if you have competing instincts in facing a particular situation, there is a third bit of your mind by which you judge one of those instincts as more worthy than the other. He has various ways of proposing why it is not merely a case of the strongest instinct always winning, but I don't really have time to set them out here.
Lewis' arguments still seem to me to be quite clever, but given the mystery of the workings of the inner mind, I can certainly see how they are also far from conclusive.
In any event, I'm not sure that increasing evidence of animal instinctive kindness is necessarily threatening to Catholic style belief in God, which by and large has accommodated evolution. Why should it surprise us that what we value in our feelings should be shared in some instinctively understood way by our closest animal relatives? The real issue (and here I guess I am more or less following the Lewis line) is how our human rationality deals with those instincts, and whether there is reason to believe that there is God who cares about those choices.
5 comments:
I haven't read that Lewis book for a long long time, but I wonder if some people mightn't find some of his later and more speculative works more accommodating.
Lewis loved animals and habitually thought of them as souls and moral actors in their own right: hence the importance of beasts in the Narnia books, and their significance in his sf as well. There's a number of poems and essays elaborating on these themes too.
Yes, he was fond of animals, even to the point of speculating that some may share in an afterlife. Mosquitoes and humans could both be accommodated quite well in Hell, I think he said.
I also am reminded of a comment about how to view artificial intelligence in a science fiction novel by Rudy Rucker, where he suggested that instead of seeing AI as implying a downgrading of the significance of human intelligent, we could perhaps see it as another part of the universe being uplifted towards the great universal pool of intelligence. We're all headed - or drawn - upwards, if you get the idea.
Somewhere Lewis said something similar of animals. If I recall correctly, he was disputing the idea that a wild dog, say, is more intrinsically a dog than a domesticated one. (I may be making a mistake here: I can't exactly recall the context or detail.)
I think there was a speculative chapter in The Problem of Pain, which I haven't read, about the souls of animals. Lewis wondered in one essay whether humans don't redeem household pets in an analogous way to Christ/creation. It was speculative stuff.
You remember chapters from books you haven't read? You are indeed clever.
It's mentioned in a book that I have read, a collection of Lewis essays.
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