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

464 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
the concept "good" is essentially identical with the concept "useful," "practical,"
so that in the judgments "good" and "bad" mankind has summed up
and sanctioned precisely its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences
regarding what is useful-practical and what is harmful-impractical. According
to this theory, that which has always proved itself useful is good;
therefore it may claim to be "valuable in the highest degree," "valuable in
itself." This road to an explanation is, as aforesaid, also a wrong one, but at
least die explanation is in itself reasonable and psychologically tenable.
[First Essay, sec. 3, p. 27.]
The amazing and ingenious tale Nietzsche told about how the transvaluation
of values happened defies fair summary, and is often outrageously
misrepresented. I will not attempt to do justice to it here, but will just draw
attention to its central dieme (widiout judging its truth): the "aristocrats" who
ruled by might over the weak were cunningly tricked ( by the "priests" ) into
adopting the inverted values, and this "slave revolt in morality" turned the
cruelty of the strong against itself, so that the strong were manipulated into
subduing and civilizing themselves.
For with the priests everything becomes more dangerous, not only cures
and remedies, but also arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy, love, lust
to rule, virtue, disease—but it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of
diis essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priesdy form, that
man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul
in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil—and these are die two
basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts!
[First Essay, sec. 6, p. 33.]
Nietzsche's Just So Stories are terrific (old-style and new-style). They are
a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute
history and untrammeled fantasy. If Darwin's imagination was to some degree
handicapped by his English mercantile heritage, Nietzsche's was even
more handicapped by his German intellectual heritage, but those biographical
facts (whatever they are) have no bearing on the current value of the
memes whose birth each attended so brilliantly. Both came up with dangerous
ideas—if I am right, diis is no coincidence—but, whereas Darwin
was ultra-cautious in his expression, Nietzsche indulged in prose so overheated
that it no doubt serves him right that his legion of devotees has
included a disreputable gaggle of unspeakable and uncomprehending Nazis
and other such fans whose perversions of his memes make Spencer's perversions
of Darwin's seem almost innocent. In both cases, we must work to
repair the damage such descendants have inflicted on our meme filters,
which tend to dismiss memes on the basis of guilt by association. Neither
Darwin nor Nietzsche was politically correct, fortunately for us.
Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories 465
(Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is
antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it
eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of the Social Darwinists, an
attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on
the bounty of nature. Few today—but there are a few—would brand all
genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of
eugenics. We should reserve diat term of criticism for the greedy and
pereptory policies, the extremist policies. In chapter 18, we will consider
how we might wisely patrol the memosphere, and what we might do to
protect ourselves from the truly dangerous ideas, but we should keep the
bad example of eugenics firmly in mind when we do so.)
Nietzsche's most important contribution to sociobiology, I think, is his
steadfast application of one of Darwin's own fundamental insights to the
realm of cultural evolution. This is the insight most notoriously overlooked
by the Social Darwinists and by some contemporary sociobiologists. Their
error is sometimes called the "genetic fallacy" (e.g., Hoy 1986): the mistake
of inferring current function or meaning from ancestral function or meaning.
As Darwin (1862, p. 284 ) put it, "Thus throughout nature almost every part
of each living thing has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for
diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and
distinct specific forms." And as Nietzsche put it:
... the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual
employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever
exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted
to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power
superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming
master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation,
an adaptation through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose"
are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. [Second Essay, sec. 12,
P. 77.]
Aside from Nietzsche's characteristic huffing and puffing about some power
subduing and becoming master, this is pure Darwin. Or, as Gould might put
it, all adaptations are exaptations, in cultural evolution as well as in biological
evolution. Nietzsche went on to emphasize another classical Darwinian
theme:
The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its
progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest
route and witii die smallest expenditure of force—but a succession of
more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of
subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transforma-