(ABS: Let me add here one paragraph from Jack Miles' comment on Installment # 2, which came in after that entry had gone public:)
While your account of the emergence of value in evolution is both attractive and persuasive, I would underscore a point that I do not think you would reject--namely, that your implicit critique of science is scarcely less severe than your rejection of religion. The locus of this critique is your valorization of the subjective against received science's devaluation of it. This is crucial to the story you are developing.)
I am reminded, too, of a passage in William James's Will to Believe where he imagines a man determined to base his marriage decision only on objective evidence. What happens? He never marries because, of course, further data can always revise any incipient commitment, so the moment of commitment never comes.
Love makes the world go 'round, as the saying goes, or go forward, as you claim here. Your stress here on the subjective does not duplicate but seems to me to complement recent work that I have found particularly interesting in cognitive science as it has turned to the phenomenon of religion. Two years ago, at an annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion where the overall focus was on the climate change crisis, I attended a fascinating presentation by Ara Norenzayan, who is the author of the book Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton University Press). That presentation definitely whetted my appetite. I've also lately received Richard O. Prum's The Evolution of Beauty, How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--and Us (Doubleday). The centrality in this work (a big, intimidating book!) on mate choice might appeal to you.
I can send you, too, if you want, a book chapter* that I downloaded from somewhere or other by Norenzayan and two colleagues from the University of British Columbia, which is, I believe, a strong center for related research. This chapter is entitled "The Evolution of Prosocial Religions," and its abstract includes the following:
Five different hypothesized mechanisms are presented through which cultural group selection may have operated to increase the scale of cooperation, expand the sphere of trustworthy interactions, galvanize group solidarity, and sustain group-beneficial beliefs and practices. The mechanisms discussed involve extravagant displays, supernatural monitoring and incentives, ritual practices, fictive kinship, and moral realism. Various lines of supporting evidence are reviewed and archeological and historical evidence is summarized from early China (roughly 2000 BCE-220 BCE), where prosocial religion and ritual coevolved with societal complexity.
On this list of mechanisms, what might pop out as particularly relevant to installment #3 is fictive kinship. The most natural love-unit is the couple and their offspring. Extending the kind of trust/love/allegiance that operates within the family or the moderately extended family to larger groups involves developing mechanisms of "brotherhood," whatever may be the language employed to enable it. Norenzayan's Big Gods may be particularly interesting in this regard because, I gather from the Amazon description of it, he includes the functionality societies that have been but no longer are religious. They continue somehow to enjoy the "brotherhood" benefits in social solidarity that religion will have conferred in their pasts. How do they do it? Evidently, he discusses this.
Fictive kinship as a heading, though, points to a critique that I know some gay colleagues of mine at the University of California would quickly make of installment #3--namely, that your emphasis on procreation and therefore on the heterosexual couple is "hetero-normative" and excludes them from the broader story. They would want room made for generativity outside the biological family. I'll be surprised if you haven't read--probably years ago--Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society. Generativity in that book is one of the predictable challenges (identity crises) that must be overcome as we mature and then age. Physical reproduction is, actually, the usual form that generativity takes, and perhaps it must inevitably be what scholastic philosophy would call the analogia analogans--namely, that to which analogies are drawn from other areas. The family has got to be central, and it's obviously connected with neoteny and the extended period of sexual latency and physical dependency in the human young during which they must be sustained by some network of love relationships as they are acculturated into the system that ultimately will maintain physical as well as cultural life in a host society. But nowadays, of course, gay couples are sometimes parents. And even when one is a parent, one way or another, one's real generativity can easily extend to many with whom one has no familial relationship.
Your concern is with how the right story can make such generativity possible, or how the lack thereof can hinder it. The hindering, and the Parable of the Tribes, is, I know, your next topic, but the fostering as in this new research--building to some extent, as I point out, on a critique of widespread scientific assumptions--is where I myself would be headed if I were younger and not already contractually "booked up" with very different projects.
* From what book? Alas, I don't know. I am a terrible intellectual magpie. My nest is full of colorful scraps of lost origin.
Andy Schmookler:
Thanks for your thoughtful discussion here, Jack. Two points here I want to address.
First, on the notion that "your emphasis on procreation and therefore on the heterosexual couple is 'hetero-normative' and excludes them from the broader story." Such a complaint would not surprise me but, while I am quite sympathetic to the historical/cultural experience that would give rise to such a complaint, I think it misguided.
The reality is that sexuality in evolutionary history is rooted firmly in the reproductive process. That's true not only for mammals like us, but throughout the living world where "sex" operates, even in the world of plants.
From pistils and stamens to things closer to home, the main thing about sex has been about bringing male and female parts together.
That gives the heterosexual dimension of lovers' relationships a centrality in the picture.
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