Rational Philosophy

The AP reports on the success of a Japanese team in making genetically modified mice that show no fear of cats. This demonstrates that mice fear cats instinctively, upsetting the more commonly held view that the fear is learned.

The scientists from Tokyo University found that the modified mice quite happily cosied up to the unmodified cats and played with them.

I’ve been reading a fascinating biography of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is getting a lot of play at the moment because of his role in insisting on the separation of church and state as America was being constituted. Jefferson, a Virginian, saw and felt the unfairness of a system in which religion gets forced on people. Fortunately for the country he was a persistent and forceful person who carried forward this conviction even when others would have been OK allowing some degree of intermingling.

Roger Cohen invokes Jefferson’s ideas in an opinion piece that counters Mitt Romney’s vapid criticism of European Secularism, echoing to some degree my own response the other day. Jefferson was an enlightened man. His father read the classics out loud to his family. He had a classical education at home and then at university. Jefferson had great sympathy for the enlightened movements of Europe, and considered anything short of a rational grounding for society unacceptable. In his native state, he reformed the laws of inheritance, for instance, because he thought them inherently unfair.

Jefferson, one can imagine, must be turning in his grave. As Europe has marched on to become widely secularist and for the most part enlightened, America has slumped into a nation riddled with weird zealotry and faith-based fervor, where politicians either make it in part because they genuinely appeal to the religious community or are cowed into pandering to that community. As I sit here, I can think of several reasons why this gap has opened up — the sheer size of America, isolating far-flung communities from the influence and challenge of rigorous thought, the psychological composition of the people who populated America — people came here seeking peace and prosperity trusting largely in their faith that God would provide, the long, lingering influence of slavery and segregation, which was propped up by the idea that whites were somehow better than blacks, a very irrational proposition. I’m sure there are many other potential explanations.

But, as I see it, the point is less how did this happen, and more, how will this change.

The NY Times reports on a new study that indicates that human evolution accelerated rapidly in the last 40,000 years. There’s debate about whether that acceleration has continued over the past 10,000 years, but the study brings with it some hope that we’re not done yet.

Back to those mice…

If mice are genetically programmed to fear cats, this tells us two things: First, that while environment can affect our thoughts and behavior, we start from a predisposition toward a certain psychology and physiology. (My fear of spiders, for instance, may have been influenced by my mother’s fear of spiders, but it was probably also an inherent fear.) Second, that mice evolved their fear of cats.

And if mice can evolve a fear of cats (which seems self-evident to my mind), then human beings can evolve to become more enlightened.

Did I skip a step or two? I fear I did.

1. Is it evolutionary progress to become more enlightened? If you question the answer to this, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

2. What evolutionary pressure will cause the human race to become more enlightened?

Again, I can come up with several theories in answer to the second question, and I’m sure you’ll find your own. All other things being equal, I think that women are more likely to find enlightened men attractive and vice versa. Who wants to be married to a cave-man? An enlightened man will also be more helpful around the house and with the kids, prompting the woman to be OK having more kids with him. And enlightened people are probably less likely to die stupid, meaningless deaths.

As I argue in my book we’ll one day look back on religious fundamentalism as an anomalous blip in the history of America. The Japanese modification of mice to fear no cats gives me fresh hope that American genes will adjust over time to fear no smiting from on high. At which point the Bushes and the Huckabees and the Romneys of the world will disappear from the political scene with a puff of enlightened smoke.

In the third installment of Erroll Morris’s fascinating essay on the history and historical veracity of two photographs taken during the Crimean war, we find this wonderful quote from one of Morris’s interlocutors — “Certainly the more information we get, the higher the level of ignorance seems to be.” I couldn’t agree more. Beyond a certain point, the amount of information available to us becomes overwhelming. We cease to be able to discern what’s imporant.

It’s for this reason that I have a certain nostalgia for the idea of Cuba. I’ve never been there, but it seems that along with his willful limitation of personal and political freedoms Fidel has kept Cuba constrained in a bubble of simplicity. People have less to process. Life takes on an easier pace. People appreciate what they have all the more for what they don’t have. Now that Castro’s rein seems close to an end, and his brother Raul seems set to pick up where Fidel left off, but not exactly, we look on and wonder whether the bubble will burst.

My daughter has been writing a High School paper on whether and how the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in Cuba over the past thirty years. It’s been fairly straightforward for her to research and list the various freedoms that have been withheld from the Cuban people. But it got me wondering about freedom. I asked her if the history teacher had assigned anyone the task of writing the same essay about the United States. He hadn’t.

Which of the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in this country over the past thirty years? United States citizens and permanent residents (such as myself) do have certain important rights and freedoms (some of them that squeaked in quite close to that 30 year boundary!!) but in certain important and insidious ways I believe our freedoms are restricted.

If we sit back and think about how the forces of government and economics shape and constrain our lives, we start to feel somewhat less free. We elect a government, but the political parties are increasingly constrained by the forces of economics and political exigency… which are in turn constrained by economics. And we get to choose what we do with our lives, but unless those choices fall into some pretty neat buckets we’re going to have a hard time of it.

I’m not defending Castro’s abuses. But I’m just trying to get to the heart of the idea of freedom. Isn’t a large part of freedom the feeling of ease that one gets when one doesn’t feel beseiged? And in America today aren’t we beseiged by information, by images and expectations, by fears and constraints?

(And I’m not even touching on the encroachments on the right to privacy and right to liberty and right to fair treatment meted out by the Bush administration. Ironic for Bush to lecture Cuba on freedoms. But that’s another story.)

I watched The Age of Innocence last weekend — Martin Scorcese’s rendering of Edith Wharton’s novel of the constraining customs of New York society. As one character points out, she had thought that people came to New York to escape the restrictions of European society, and is surprised to find out that the restrictions, if anything, are subtler but more pronounced.

To sum it up, perhaps, the kind of freedom I’m talking about is that enjoyed at its fullest by the young child who knows nothing of expectations or correctness or obligation. It’s the freedom to take off all your clothes and play with your toy trains while the world around you teeters on in fear and uncertainty.