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

474 ON THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
Like a honey bee colony, Hutterite brotherhoods split when they attain a
large size, with one half remaining at the original site and the other half
moving to a new site that has been preselected and prepared. In preparation
for the split, the colony is divided into two groups that are equal
with respect to number, age, sex, skills and personal compatibility. The
entire colony packs its belongings and one of the lists is drawn by lottery
on the day of the split. The similarity to the genetic rules of meiosis could
hardly be more complete. [Wilson and Sober 1994, p. 604.]
The Darwinian Veil of Ignorance in action! But it is not enough, all by itself,
to ensure group solidarity, since human beings, even those who have lived
their entire lives in a Hutterite community, are not ballistic intentional
systems, but guided intentional systems, and guidance has to be provided on
a daily basis. Wilson and Sober quote Ehrenpreis, one of the early leaders of
the sect: "Again and again we see that man with his present nature finds it
very hard to practice true community." They go on to provide further
quotations in which Ehrenpreis emphasizes just how explicit and energetic
the practices of the Hutterites have to be to counteract this all-too-human
tendency. These declarations make it clear that one way or another, Hutterite
social organization is the effect of cultural practices quite vigorously arrayed
against the very features of human nature Wilson and Sober wish to deny or
downplay: selfishness and openness to reasoning. If group thinking were
really as much a part of human nature as Wilson and Sober would like to
believe, Hutterite parents and elders wouldn't have to say a thing. ( Compare
this to a case in which there truly is a genetic predisposition in our species:
how often have you heard parents cajoling their children to eat more
sweets?)
Wilson and Sober are right to present the Hutterite ideals as the essence of
an organismic organization, but the big difference is that for people— unlike
the cells in our bodies, or the bees in a colony—there is always the option of
opting out. And that, I would think, is the last thing we want to destroy in our
social engineering. The Hutterites disagree, apparently, and so, I gather, do
the hosts of many non-Western memes. 5 Do you like the idea of turning
ourselves and our children into slaves to the summutn bonum of our groups?
That is the direction in which the Hutterites have always been headed, and,
by Wilson and Sober's account, they achieve impressive success, but only at
the cost of prohibiting the free exchange of ideas and discouraging thinking
for oneself (which is to be distinguished from being selfish ). Any stubborn
freethinker is brought before the congre-
5. "To us in Asia, an individual is an ant. To you, he's a child of God. It is an amazing
concept." ( Lee Khan Yew, Senior Minister of Singapore, in response to the outcry over
the sentence of flogging of Michael Fay for vandalism, Boston Globe, April 29,1994, p. 8.)
Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism 475
gation and firmly admonished; "if he persists in his stubbornness and refuses
to listen even to the Church, then there is only one answer to this situation,
and that is to cut him off and exclude him." A totalitarian regime (even a
group totalitarianism) is extremely vulnerable to dissuasion, in almost exactly
the same way an altruistic group is vulnerable to free-riders. That is not
to say that reason is always on the side of defection. It isn't. It's always on the
side of keeping options open, of design revision. This is usually a good thing
but not always, an important fact that has been noted by the economist
Thomas Schelling (1960), the philosopher Derek Parfit (1984), and others, in
their discussions of the conditions under which it would be rational for a
rational agent to render himself (temporarily ) irrational. (For instance, you
may want to render yourself a poor target for extortion: if you can somehow
convince the world that you are impervious to reason, the world will not try
to make you offers you can't refuse.)
There are circumstances—extreme circumstances, as Wilson and Sober
note—when we may reasonably curtail free thinking, but the Hutterites have
to discourage free thinking all the time. They have to discourage reading
whatever books you want, and listening to whomever you want. It is only by
the most careful control of the communication channels that such a pristine
state can be preserved. That is why the organismic solution is a nonsolution
to the problems of human society. The Hutterites are thus themselves a
curious example of greedy reductionism, not because they are individually
greedy—they are apparently just the opposite—but because their solution to
the problem of ethics is so drastically oversimplified. They are, however, an
even better example of the power of memes to infect a group of mutual
communicators in such a way that the whole group turns its efforts to
ensuring the proliferation of those memes at whatever cost to themselves. 5
6. According to Wilson and Sober, the Hutterites have "the highest birth rate of any
known human society," but it would be a mistake to read this as the triumph of Alexander's
reproductive selfishness. It would be a tactical mistake, for one thing: however
many Hutterites there are or have been, there have been many, many more Catholic
monks and nuns, whose life histories would be manifestly hard to explain as instances of
individuals striving, as always, for the reproductive championship. More tellingly, if the
point of the Hutterites example is group reproductive prowess, birth rate is relevant only as
it bears on group birth rate, and we have almost nothing to compare that rate with, since
few if any other human groups, so far as I know, behave that way. Perhaps the Hutterites
have such a high individual birth rate because so many of their children leave or are
expelled and have to be replaced to keep the communities going. We might consider
the truly Machiavellian prospect that this is just what the selfish genes wanted all along!
They found a meme—the Hutterite complex—that served their purposes, and formed a
cabal: the spartan Hutterite communities are really just breeding pens which are kept quite
unattractive so that many of the young will leave, making room for more