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

516 THE FUTURE OF AN IDEA
Court ruling declaring unconstitutional the Florida law prohibiting the sacrificing
of animals in the rituals of the Santeria sect (an Afro-Caribbean
religion incorporating elements of Yoruba traditions and Roman Catholicism)
is a borderline case, at least for many of us. Such rituals are offensive
to many, but the protective mantle of religious tradition secures our tolerance.
We are wise to respect these traditions. It is, after all, just part of
respect for the biosphere.
Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not if it means
tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world.
According to a recent poll, 48 percent of the people in the United States
today believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. And 70 percent
believe that "creation science" should be taught in school alongside evolution.
Some recent writers recommend a policy in which parents would be
able to "opt out" of materials they didn't want their children taught. Should
evolution be taught in the schools? Should arithmetic be taught? Should
history? Misinforming a child is a terrible offense.
A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment
changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. We see in every Christian
subspecies the battle of memes—should women be ordained? should we go
back to the Latin liturgy?—and the same can also be observed in the varieties
of Judaism and Islam. We must have a similar mixture of respect and selfprotective
caution about memes. This is already accepted practice, but we
tend to avert our attention from its implications. We preach freedom of
religion, but only so far. If your religion advocates slavery, or mutilation of
women, or infanticide, or puts a price on Salman Rushdie's head because he
has insulted it, then your religion has a feature that cannot be respected. It
endangers us all.
It is nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no
longer a menace; we can peacefully coexist, with a little wisdom. The same
policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You
are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does
not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to
learn some accommodation. The Hutterite memes are "clever" not to include
any memes about the virtue of destroying outsiders. If they did, we would
have to combat them. We tolerate the Hutterites because they harm only
themselves—though we may well insist that we have the right to impose
some further openness on their schooling of their own children. Other
religious memes are not so benign. The message is clear: those who will not
accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest
and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to
cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for.
Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is
beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on
In Praise of Biodiversity 517
those who blaspheme against a religion ( complete with bounties or rewards
for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is
owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other
incitement to cold-blooded murder. 1
Those of us who lead fulfilling, even exciting, lives should hardly be
shocked to see people in the disadvantaged world—and indeed in the drabber
corners of our own world—turning to fanaticism of one brand or another.
Would you settle docilely for a life of meaningless poverty, knowing what
you know today about the world? The technology of the infosphere has
recently made it conceivable for everybody on the globe to know roughly
what you know (with a lot of distortion). Until we can provide an
environment for all people in which fanaticism doesn't make sense, we can
expect more and more of it. But we don't have to accept it, and we don't have
to respect it. Taking a few tips from Darwinian medicine (Williams and Nesse
1991), we can take steps to conserve what is valuable in every culture
without keeping alive (or virulent) all its weaknesses.
We can appreciate the bellicosity of the Spartans without wanting to reintroduce
it; we can marvel at the systems of atrocities instituted by the
Mayans without for one moment regretting the extinction of those practices.
It must be scholarship, not human game preserves—ethnic or religious states
under dictatorships—that saves superannuated cultural artifacts for posterity.
Attic Greek and Latin are no longer living languages, but scholarship has
preserved the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Petrarch, in the
fourteenth century, bragged about the volumes of Greek philosophy he had in
his personal library; he couldn't read them, because the knowledge of ancient
Greek had all but disappeared from the world in which he lived, but he knew
their value, and strove to restore the knowl-edge that would unlock their
secrets.
Long before there was science, or even philosophy, there were religions.
They have served many purposes (it would be a mistake of greedy reductionism
to look for a single purpose, a single summum bonum which they
1. Many, many Muslims agree, and we must not only listen to them, but do what we can
to protect and support them, for they are bravely trying, from the inside, to reshape the
tradition they cherish into something better, something ethically defensible. That is—or,
rather, ought to be—the message of muliiculturalism, not the patronizing and subtly
racist hypertolerance that "respects" vicious and ignorant doctrines when they are propounded
by officials of non-European states and religions. One might start by spreading
the word about For Rushdie ( Braziller, 1994), a collection of essays by Arab and Muslim
writers, many critical of Rushdie, but all denouncing the unspeakably immoral "fatwa"
death sentence proclaimed by the Ayatollah. Rushdie (1994) has drawn our attention to
the 162 Iranian intellectuals who, with great courage, have signed a declaration in support
of freedom of expression. Let us all distribute the danger by joining hands with them.