Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

462 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
the weak, and the rest of the Social Darwinist nonsense. It is amusing to note
that the fundamental (bad) argument of the Social Darwinists is identical to a
(bad) argument used by many religious fundamentalists. Whereas the
fundamentalists sometimes begin their arguments by saying, "If God had
intended Man to ... [fly, wear clothes, drink alcohol,...]," the Social Darwinists
begin theirs by saying, in effect, "If Mother Nature had intended Man
to...," and even though Mother Nature (natural selection) can be viewed as
having intentions, in the limited sense of having retrospectively endorsed
features for one reason or another, these earlier endorsements may count for
nothing now, since circumstances have changed.
Among the Social Darwinists' ideas was a political agenda: efforts by dogooders
to provide nurture for the least fortunate members of society are
counterproductive; such efforts permit those to replicate whom nature would
wisely cull. These are abominable ideas, but they were not the primary target
of Nietzsche's criticism. His primary target was the historical naivete of the
Social Darwinists (Hoy 1986), their Panglossian optimism about the ready
adaptability of human reason (or Prudence) to Morality. Nietzsche saw their
complacency as part of their heritage as "English psychologists"—
intellectual descendants of Hume. He noted their desire to avoid skyhooks:
These English psychologists—what do they really want? One always discovers
them ... seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which
has been decisive in its evolution, in just that place where the intellectual
pride of man would least desire to find it (in the vis inertiae of habit, for
example, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and chance mechanistic hookingtogether
of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive,
molecular, and thoroughly stupid)—what is it really that always drives
these psychologists in just this direction? Is it a secret, malicious, vulgar,
perhaps self-deceiving instinct for belittling man? [Nietzsche 1887, First
Essay, sec. 1, p. 24.]
Nietzsche's antidote to the banalities of the "English psychologists" was a
very "continental" romanticism. They thought the passage from the state of
nature to morality was easy, or at least quite presentable, but that was
because they just made up their stories and didn't bother looking at the clues
of history, which told a darker tale.
Nietzsche began, as Hobbes had done, by imagining a premoral world of
human life, but he divided his story of transition into two phases (and told
his tales in reverse order, starting in the middle, something that confuses
many readers). Hobbes had noted (1651, pt. I, ch. 14) that the very existence
of any practice of forming contracts or compacts depends on the capacity of
human beings to make promises about the future, and what
Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories 463
struck Nietzsche was that this capacity does not come for free. This was the
topic of the Second Essay of the three that make up the Genealogy-. "To
breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical
task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem
regarding man?" (Second Essay, sec. 1, p. 57). This "long story of how
responsibility originated" is a story of how early human beings learned to
torture each other—literally—into developing a special kind of memory, the
memory needed to keep track of debts and credits. "Buying and selling,
together with their psychological appurtenances, are older even than the
beginnings of any kind of social forms of organization and alliances" (Second
Essay, sec. 8, p. 70). The capacity to detect cheating, to remember the
promise broken and punish the cheater, had to be drilled into our ancestors'
brains, Nietzsche surmised: "Its beginnings were, like the beginnings of
everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time"
(Second Essay, sec. 6, p. 65 ). What is Nietzsche's evidence for all this? An
imaginative—not to say unbridled—reading of what we might call the fossil
record of human culture, in the form of ancient myths, surviving religious
practices, archeological clues, and so forth. Leaving the gory details aside,
fascinating though they are, Nietzsche's suggestion is that eventually—perhaps
via an instance of the Baldwin Effect!—our ancestors "bred" an animal
with an innate capacity to keep a promise, and a concomitant talent for
detecting and punishing a promise-breaker.
This permitted the formation of early societies, according to Nietzsche, but
there was still no morality—not in the sense that we recognize and honor
today. The second transition occurred in historical times, he claimed, and can
be traced via etymological reconstruction and a proper reading of the texts of
the last two millennia—an adaptation by Nietzsche of the philological
methods that he had been trained to use. To read these clues in a new way,
you need a theory, of course, and Nietzsche had one, developed in opposition
to the tacit theory he discerned in the Social Darwinists. The proto-citizens of
Nietzsche's second Just So Story (told in the First Essay) live in societies of
sorts, not Hobbes' state of nature, but the life he describes in them is about
equally nasty and brutish. Might made right—or, rather, might ruled. The
people had concepts of good and bad, but not good and evil, right and wrong.
Like Hobbes, Nietzsche tried to tell the tale of how these latter memes arose.
One of the most daring (and ultimately least persuasive ) of his speculations
is that the memes for ( moral) good and evil Were not just minor
permutations of their amoral predecessors; the memes traded places. What
had been good ( old-style ) became evil ( new-style ), and what had been bad
(old-style) became (morally) good (new-style). This "transvaluation of
values" was, for Nietzsche, the key event in the birth of ethics, and he
explicitly opposed it to Herbert Spencer's bland supposition that