Stories as Adaptations

The stories we tell, whether fictional or “real,” are adaptations in social evolution. That is their function, and our brains have evolved to crave them. A people, or a person, without stories is without a framework of life and without hope.

Stories are experiments in which we test hypotheses about how to live in a world of limitations and conflicts. In addition, I believe that all stories are just one story, the story of love, which is always costly. Stories are not mere entertainment. They are the way we members of the primate species Homo sapiens live in the world.

As such, stories (whether fictional or not) must weave together plots that provide some sense of cause and effect (without which the world is meaningless) and offer some hope for going forward. Reality may, in fact, be unmitigated depression and hopelessness, but stories should not be, for stories are our way of coping with hopelessness and maybe overcoming it.

These are my thoughts after seeing a movie many of you have seen and all of you have heard about, Twelve Years a Slave. It is the story of a free black man living in New York, Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Georgia. Such kidnappings happened hundreds of times, and Northup was one of the few people to ever escape from this situation. For almost the entire two hours, I felt totally asphyxiated with depression. Nearly every person and event in the movie was the picture of hopelessness. Every time it looked like there might, just might, be a flicker of hope, it was dashed. For example, Northup realized that he might be able to use blackberry juice to make ink in order to write a letter to tell his friends where he was so they could rescue him. But his hopes were crushed by the treachery of the white man whom he trusted. The slaves were subjected to every imaginable indignity and suffering, and some that I had previously (despite my fertile writer’s imagination) never imagined, such as when the clinically crazy plantation mater made his slaves act out ballroom dances so that he could pretend that he had a social life. Oh, it’s all true; slave owners did not treat their slaves as property, to be managed wisely, but would inflict suffering on them even though it entailed economic loss. The principal demon of the story personally beat his most productive slave nearly to death—a process shown in full graphic detail. Every possible hopelessness was depicted, such as Northup crushing his beloved violin.

At the end, I felt sick for being mostly white, and as if the suffering of my Native American ancestors counted for nothing. But there were even blacks in this movie who were cruel. This movie made me feel filthy for being human. It’s enough to make you wish we would just go extinct.

This is not what a story is supposed to do. If Twelve Years a Slave were fiction, it would be totally unacceptable; its only saving grace is that this story actually happened.

But the producers of this movie made their story even worse than the reality. According to historical records, Northup’s white friends back in New York kept trying to locate and rescue him. Now this would have conferred a plot line of hope had it been included in the movie. But in the movie, the rescue was nothing but random good luck, when a random Canadian (Brad Pitt) happened to randomly pass through and take Northup’s message back to his white friends in New York.

What is the message of this story? That all humans are depraved? Or is it that we should, like Solomon Northup, persist in our circumstances no matter what they are just in case a one-in-a-thousand random rescue comes along? Neither of these messages offers any hope.

A story, in order to fulfill its evolutionary function, should offer a reason for hope, not just random good luck at the end. In this sense, the movie almost reminded me of the P.D.Q. Bach opera (by the humorist Peter Schickele) in which all the characters died at the end then got up and started singing “Happy ending, happy ending…” The producers of Twelve Years a Slave excised every possible element of hope, even the one that really happened.

The movie was very well done, and deserved the acclaim it received. My review is from the viewpoint of a scientist who sees stories as an evolutionary adaptation, and who also writes fiction. As a matter of fact, I finished writing a novel only two hours before seeing this movie.

I will mention one valuable insight from this movie. The plantation masters forced the slaves to listen to Biblical passages about how servants should be submissive to their masters. Certainly, in many if not most cases, religion has been used and continues to be used as a tool of oppression. It does not have to be this way. But religion in the hands of the rich and powerful is nearly always oppressive, itself a form of slavery. Once in a while, religion provides a message of liberation.

The contrast with another famous slave movie, Amistad, could not be greater. Amistad, like Twelve Years a Slave, was based on a real event. But Amistad had a message of hope woven through it. If, in fact, it could be shown that the captives on the ship Amistad were part of an illegal (as opposed to legal) slave operation, there was the real chance that they might be freed by the American court system. Eventually, they were. And it was not random luck that freed them, but the persistent efforts of an old and retired John Quincy Adams. Amistad inspired me. Twelve Years a Slave just made me just want to crawl in a hole.

Why did human language and human intelligence evolve? Nobody knows. But I’ll bet one of the first uses to which either was put was to offer the tribes that developed these abilities a sense (even if it is a delusion) of hope that kept them going despite desperate circumstances and eventually made them prevail. We are the descendants of the people who told stories of hope, not those who wallowed in depression.

I also posted this essay on my evolution blog, but did not include the paragraph about religion therein.

Thomas More and Communism, part two

In the previous essay, I described how the sixteenth-century Catholic scholar Sir Thomas More proposed (indirectly, through a fictitious traveler named Raphael Hythloday) a perfect, communistic society. But More went further than just describing the perfect society. He criticized European societies, including the England in which he lived.

European societies, More indicated, made common people suffer. More asked whether having someone on their knees before you make your knees hurt less. How can someone else’s pain lessen yours?

More described the people of Utopia as doing things that would even today draw sharp criticism from conservatives. People voted for their church leaders and there were even a few female priests (something that even today the Catholic Church does not do). Utopia had state-sanctioned euthanasia. Adultery was punished but divorce permitted, thus removing the need for lawyers. (More was a lawyer.) More even admired Utopian courtship. Before marriage, the affianced partners got to look at each other naked so that they would know what they are getting.

War was unknown in Utopia. How did the Utopians manage this? They offered rewards to people from enemy nations who would betray the enemy.

More said that the Utopians were originally pagans but embraced Christianity. However, they banished any Christians who were intolerant of other viewpoints.

Above all, Utopia was a communist society, just like early Christian communities described in the second chapter of Acts. “Though no man owns anything, yet every man is rich.” And yet the rich in England, said More, were not as happy as any of the Utopians. Many sins die when money dies, said More. Wherever people starve, he said, the rich have full barns. He said that it was better “…to be rid of innumerable cares and troubles than to be besieged with great riches.” In England, wealth was measured by how much discomfort it causes to others. He described the love of wealth as a “hell-hound” that “creeps into men’s hearts…”

More has the fictitious Raphael Hythloday criticize sixteenth-century England in these words: “For what justice is this, that a rich…userer [banker]…or to be brief, any one of those who either do nothing at all, or else something that is not very necessary to the commonwealth, should have a pleasant and wealthy living, either in idleness, or in unnecessary business, when meanwhile poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters, and plowmen, by such great and continual toil, as beasts of burden are scarce able to sustain, and again such necessary toil that without it no commonwealth would be able to continue and endure one year, yet get so hard and poor a living and live so wretched and miserable a life that the state and condition of the laboring beasts may seem much better and more comfortable? [That was one sentence, but a powerful one.—HA] For they [the animals] are not put to such continual labor, nor is there living much worse; yea, for them it is much pleasanter, for they take no thought in the meantime for the future. But these ignorant, poor wretches [humans] are now tormented with barren and unfruitful labor, and the remembrance of their poor, indigent, and beggarly old age kills them off. For their daily wage is so little that it will not suffice for the same day, much less yield any overplus that may daily be laid up for the relief of old age.”

Of course, More could simply say, “Oh, Raphael said that; I just wrote down his words.” Take that, Harry.

To summarize, More (through Hythloday) is saying, Rich people do very little that is valuable to the nation as a whole, while the poor work as hard as they can, doing jobs that are necessary for the survival of our nation, under conditions that would be considered abusive to animals, and cannot even earn a living wage, much less save up for retirement. The only thing missing from this statement to make it applicable almost five hundred years after it was written is that today the rich people accuse the poor of being lazy. Or at least, in Mitt Romney’s case, 47 percent of them. Today, as in 1516, bankers play around with other people’s money and lose a lot of it, woopsie, and still receive million-dollar bonuses.

I realize that there is likely to be no way that natural selection, whether biological or cultural, could produce a sustainable state of communism. More’s Utopia is a fantasy land easily invasible (I think that’s a word) by selfish people. But it might work on a small scale. More, after all, based his Utopia on vague stories he had heard about Native American tribes. My Cherokee ancestors really did hold all their land in common. More even located Utopia in a vaguely American geographical location.

If you have a better idea, leave a comment. Let’s talk.

Thomas More and Communism, part one

As I explained in an essay on another blog, The world appears to be heading toward a nation and world in which rich people do little work, and poor people are desperate. What can we do to prevent this? The only solution just might be communism.

I do not mean Marxist communism. Marx’s ideas have been demonstrated to be wrong. And both Leninist and Maoist communism failed. One important reason that they failed is that they were not really communism. They were simply oppression. Stalin and Mao lived in luxury. The only thing Marxist about them is that they should have quoted Groucho Marx and said that they would refuse to join any club that would have them as members.

No, the kind of communism that I refer to was described by one of the most famous Catholic scholars of all time: Sir Thomas More (St. Thomas More to you Catholics). You have heard of him. He was the scholar who would not consent to Henry VIII divorcing Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Ann Boleyn. Fat King Harry would not just leave More alone in the silence that he maintained on the subject, but had him beheaded. You can learn about this story by watching the best movie ever made, A Man for All Seasons. The Paul Scofield version is infinitely better than the Charleton Heston version.

Catholics have not generally (except for some Liberation Theologians) been associated with communism. Nor, before Pope Francis, were they likely to criticize rich capitalists. But wait till you hear this.

In his 1516 book Utopia, Thomas More described a fictitious land in which life was perfect, something that More said he wished more than hoped for. This book is where the term “utopia” came from, and it could mean either “good place” or “noplace” depending on which Greek derivation you chose. More meant it both ways. More put his opinions into the mouth of the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, rather than to publish them as his own opinion. That way More could claim that he was simply reporting what this man told him about Utopia and what this man said about England. Below, when I refer to what More said, I mean that he said them through Hythloday.

Utopia was a city in which every man has abundance. More modeled the city of Utopia after the Biblical city foursquare but also after Marco Polo’s Hangzhou, with wide streets, bridges and canals. As in Plato’s utopia, nobody locked their doors. At the time, England had 15-hour workdays, from 5 am to 8 pm, but in More’s Utopia they only worked six hours (this is still more than they worked in Oz). Despite such short workdays, all the necessary work got done because nobody was idle—there were no monks or nobles sitting around and consuming resources while producing nothing of value. Only the essentials were produced, nothing superfluous. The recreation of the Utopian people was learning at home. And there were socially-imposed population limits. If a family had too many kids they had to leave Utopia. Everything was free at the markets since nobody took more than he needed. Hospitals were ample and clean, with isolation wards to prevent contagion. They all ate together in cafeterias, because they loved to eat good food together rather than bad food at home. Even in hospitals, women nursed their own children (unlike B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two). Everyone needed permission to travel, but if a visitor stayed more than a day, he had to work where he was visiting. Nobody had much privacy in More’s Utopia (this sounds like Cuba to me). There was no bank credit, only public credit. Gold had no value to them, unlike iron, air, water, and earth, which are useful. In Utopia, diamonds were for kids to play with. Foreign ambassadors would come wearing a lot of gold, and were mistaken for fools. More pointed out that in England someone with the wits of an ass could rule good people because he had gold. More pointed out that Plato and Francis Bacon also said gold is worthless. Why should anyone admire gold, opined More. Everyone can enjoy the sun and stars for free! Why should anyone admire wool? A sheep once wore it. The counterfeit jewel looks the same as the real one. The Utopians did not wear fancy clothes. With fancy clothes, said More, you “do doubly err,” thinking your clothes are better (which is mere convention) and thinking yourself better for wearing them.

In the next essay, I will continue describing Thomas More’s view of a perfect society, and which might be the only society that can allow the world to avoid massive future crisis.

Does Humankind Belong on Earth?

Happy Earth Day. Do we, as destructive humans, have a right to wish the Earth a happy Earth Day?

Is humankind a legitimate part of the natural world, belonging to the Earth’s ecosystems and ecological communities, or is mankind a diseased scab upon the planet? This question is meaningless, because here we are, like it or not. Meaningless, that is, unless you are God and capable of wiping out life on Earth and starting over.

What follows is one blogger’s review of the movie Noah, starring Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins and other very good performers. I review it primarily as a writer and as a scientist who thinks about Big Questions. My verdict is that it was better than the original. The reason I say this is that the original Flood story (Genesis 6-8), which is a gigantic epic even more worthy of immortality than the Odyssey, addressed issues of major importance, but left some questions unanswered. The movie filled in the missing issues.

The major point of both the original and the movie is that human evil had defiled the Earth, and the human stain needed to be cleansed away. In the original, God recognizes Noah and his family as uniquely virtuous on the entire face of the Earth. In the movie, Noah recognizes his own sinfulness, and concludes that his job, and that of his family, is to facilitate the rescue of the innocent animals, and then to vanish into obscurity after the job is done. This is why, as he saw it, only his eldest son was married, and this son’s wife was barren.

But then Noah’s wife implores Noah’s mystical, magical, and still-living ancestor Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins; who else?) to restore Mrs. Shem’s fertility, and he does. Thus, while the Ark is floating on the face of the waters, Mrs. Shem becomes pregnant. Noah decides that, since his duty is to bring the human blight to an end, he must kill the child if the child is a girl (a boy would just grow old and die without issue). So what does he do? Wouldn’t you like to know!

As a result of his decision, Noah concludes that he has failed God. This is why, in the movie (something left totally unexplained in Genesis), Noah goes off to live in a cave and get drunk. But Mrs. Shem convinces him that in fact he made the right, not the wrong, choice. Noah returns and is reconciled to his wife. It is a supremely touching scene. Mrs. Noah was working in the garden, so that human life might continue on Earth. Noah walks up to her, places his hand on hers, and then begins gardening with her. You will not be surprised to hear what I did when I got home from the movie. My wife was out in the garden planting delicate parsley seedlings. I did with her exactly what Noah did with his wife in the movie. Then I gently, oh so gently, watered the seedlings, seedlings so delicate that too much water would plaster them to the sticky ground.

The ecological theme was clear. Sinful humankind had created an industrial civilization (a sticks-and-stones version of it, at any rate) that had made the Earth a barren wasteland. And Noah had to save biodiversity—all of it, not just the species Noah deemed useful.

The problems that creationists leave unexplained in their literalistic interpretation of the Flood story are similarly left unexplained in the movie. But that’s okay, since it is just a story. It is the creationists that turn it into a problem. It is a story that reveals deep truths, and might be considered truer than literalism.

Even the little touches were good. Hopkins, playing Methuselah, had a craving for berries, and was out grubbing for berries in the forest. He finally found one (judging from the leaves, I’d say it was a bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) just as the Flood waters overtook him.

So I invite you to leave doctrinal arguments aside and go see this movie, in which a modern reinterpretation of great fiction addresses some of the most important questions in human history and in the world today.

A Good Friday Gospel

How did you spend your Good Friday? I spent the period between one and three pm listening to Science Friday on public radio. This show had lots of interesting things, except for one segment in which a science writer insisted that, as I interpreted it, it is impossible to say that God does not not not exist. Whatever. But even this person, who is creating something of a pro-religion stir in science communication circles, admitted that the God of western religions is mythological. He was defending Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God, a God that or who makes no difference whatsoever in the daily operation of the world or of anyone’s life.

Meanwhile, millions of Christians were reliving in their minds the story of Jesus dragging his cross through the streets of Jerusalem and then being crucified. This is supposed to be what the gospel is about: a man who was supposed to be the son of God getting killed so that all the sin in the world is potentially atoned for. I say potentially, because these Christians insist that a person must assent to a detailed list of beliefs before the Christians will permit the blood of Christ to actually do any atoning. But if you leave out the part about human Christians anointing themselves as the filter to decide whom God can or cannot save, the story itself is quite beautiful, a story of fallen creatures being redeemed into goodness. Who would not want to believe this?

Jesus was also an articulator of one of the most advanced visions of altruism (which is a recurring them on this evolution blog) in the ancient world.

But actually, to thousands of fundamentalist Christians, the supposed gospel of redemption from sin is quite secondary in importance. So is Jesus’ message of altruism. To the fundamentalists, the most important things to believe are: first, that the United States is God’s Chosen and Holy Nation on the face of the Earth; and second, the most important thing in life is that Jesus wants them to do is to collect assault weapons. If you are a liberal or a Muslim, they do not believe that Jesus wants you to collect assault weapons, however. And certainly, if you are a foreigner, your nation is not God’s Chosen Nation.

You may rightly wonder if I am making this up. But a gripey-looking old man left a flyer on my screen door handle a few days ago announcing an upcoming conference at a Baptist church in Durant, Oklahoma. (I hesitate to name names, but I am getting this information from the flyer.) It is called the Patriots Conference. Its avowed purpose is to reclaim America’s Christian heritage (the beliefs of deists such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams apparently do not count, and the religious neutrality of the constitution must be ignored). One of the speakers is apparently going to talk about how accumulating assault weapons helps to prevent “the threat of tyranny.” There is something called the “Black Robe Regiment” about which nothing is said and apparently all the fundamentalists around here already know about. Their declaration of values includes the “use [of] firearms as central to the preservation of peace and liberty” (emphasis mine). And to make the emphasis on assault weapons absolutely clear, the conference organizers are going to give away a DPMS Panther Oracle ATACS .223 16” BBL. 6-Position Stock to one lucky attendee.

Now, if a Muslim group held such a conference, you can be damned sure that there would be an armed uprising in rural Oklahoma. It would widely be considered an open call for terrorism.

Visibly missing from their declaration of values is any mention of peace, either international or domestic. The death and resurrection of the Prince of Peace, and the reconciliation among people of the world that this supposedly made possible, is simply not mentioned. It appears to me that the main work that Christians believe Jesus did on the cross has no effect whatsoever on this conference or the list of values associated with it. To judge from this conference, Jesus came to Earth so that we could all have assault weapons. That is the rural Oklahoma version of the Easter story. (But their list of values does include a rejection of progressive taxation. What this means is that poor people and the Koch Brothers should pay the same amount of tax.)

I actually wish that I could attend this conference as a sort of sociobiological observer. But I will be out of town at an artistic celebration of blood, violence, murder, and passion. I refer, of course, to the Tulsa Opera production of Carmen.

Anti-Altruists

There are some people—the exact number is hard to determine—who care nothing for their fellow world citizens. Some of them are psychopaths, whose brains make them incapable of empathy, but psychopaths are only part of the problem. There are many others who are anti-altruists even though they may not be clinically psychopathic. One example, and I’m sure you can think of many in your own experience, is the people who left beer bottles and cans on the beach and under the trees at the state park where the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences had its meeting last weekend. They left their litter—some of it dangerous broken glass—not by accident but deliberately. They were sending a message to the rest of us. They wanted to make it perfectly clear that they hate the rest of us and the planet that we share with them.

I’m not talking about careless litterers, of which Oklahoma has a large number. A lot of people put trash in their truck beds and seem totally unaware that this trash can blow out of the truck bed and onto the road. One time, as I drove at full speed down an interstate highway, a plastic door lifted up out of a truck bed and slammed against my car. I wonder if, sometimes, Oklahoma drivers lose furniture out of the backs of their trucks (maybe a couch with Granny still sitting on it). Just yesterday someone lost a truck wheel out of the back of their truck and left it on a busy street. Instead I refer to deliberate litterers. Deliberate litterers are on a par with chimpanzees flinging their shit at people. They are worse than if they were children who never grow up.

What do we do about such people? There is nothing we can do. Laws do not stop them. They will not listen to any appeals to reason much less empathy. All we can do is to tolerate them. All we can do is to clean up after them and hope they don’t shoot us. Empathy is one of the greatest capacities that has evolved in the human species, and we must simply accept that there is a margin of losers who do not possess this most important human trait. We are accustomed to thinking of mutations such as trisomy 21 as a deleterious mutation. But Down’s syndrome people are almost always cheerful and nice. The lack of empathy, socially and perhaps genetically influenced, is a truly bad part of human variation. You may have heard about the psychologist who discovered that he was genetically psychopathic but had grown up training himself to be empathetic. We can only hope that some of the kids who have received anti-altruism in their genes and upbringing may be able to similarly overcome this curse. We continue to offer messages and examples of altruism in the hope that this may, once in a while, occur.

Darwin, Animals, and Religion

I just posted a new Darwin video. In this video, Darwin explains that the monotheistic religions evolved in parts of the world where the largest and most noticeable animals were livestock, which have been bred to be stupid. Understandably, people in these regions saw a vast gulf between humans and animals, and thought of themselves more like gods than like animals. But in regions of the Earth where people encountered disturbingly intelligent primates, especially monkeys and apes, they tended to think of themselves as part of a continuum of animals and have polytheistic religions. I hope you enjoy it. It includes a cameo appearance by the world-famous Spooky the Cat, whose first appearance was in my book Life of Earth, which was published in the United States and in Taiwan.