Now it is very unlikely that this was the first religious act -- it's just the first one we know about. It makes me wonder when and how religion appeared and developed in our evolving species, and why. In genetic evolution, we accept the idea that Darwinian natural selection is the motor of change, but cultures change or evolve too, and natural selection is merely a kind of adaptation. Novelties that solve problems are kept and elaborated. Early hominids who behaved religiously must have done better in their environments and so the practice grew. So has religious behavior become hard-wired or innate in this process? I don't know, although it does seem pretty near universal. But today I want to explore the possibility that religious behavior has evolved culturally, through an adaptive principle parallel to natural selection in the genetic sphere.
Some scientists have suggested that it was the integration of the formerly separate modules of the brain that provided a neurological platform for human-style self consciousness. As this happened, it was natural for objects in the environment to be treated socially, as beings one could interact with, and gods were born. As that happened, there must have been a leap in the ability to see onesself as a being, and it's not far from that to the idea that the self might continue after death -- hence flower petals.
Of course these early religionists had some silly ideas -- many rationalist UUs would argue that objects are not gods, and quite a few would quibble with the after-life. But we're not asking which religious ideas are right or wrong, but how they developed. As a neo-Darwinist or cultural adaptationist, I believe they enhanced the success of those who held them, and that this furthered their spread and elaboration.
Not only have religious ideas been often wrong; they have often been used in the service of great evils. Let's look at another page from our spiritual history, a less pretty one. A group of warriors sits around a campfire with their terrified bound captive. Their priest pronounces a ritual phrase, plunges a knife ito the captive's chest, and skillfully twists it, pulling out the still-beating heart of the battle captive. The men greedily devour the victim's heart, thinking that they will thus take his spirit into their own. A foolish idea? Certainly, but a religious one, involving ideas about spirit. A grave evil? I think so. But a step on the spiritual journey of our species, part of the very process that has brought us here today.
I have just spent the summer in Europe, and the older I get, the less awe-struck I am by each cathedral and monastery I see over there. The record of the past 2 millenia of Christianity in Europe fills me with cynicism and outrage. You all know what I mean -- many of us became UUs out of disgust at the outrages committed in the name of Christ by Christians. I've been in Bohemia, where 100 years before Luther, groups of feisty reformers like Jan Hus challenged a church that catered to the wealthy and powerful. But the nobles that supported Hus didn't have the clout of those who were to support Luther a century later. They spoke a Slavic language instead of a Western European one, for one thing. And not to put too fine a point on it, they got the crap beat out of them, repeatedly.
In the aftermath of the 30 years war in Bohemia, the principle was cujus regio, cujus religio -- the king or lord determines the religion of a territory. The guy who already skims the top off the products of your labor, who can arrest or kill you when it suits him, also gets to decide how you will worship. All this, and we haven't even touched yet on the experience of Jewish communities, who courageously endured incessant abuse.
And yet the amazing thing is that people continued to worship. What an wonderful testament to the tenacity of the spiritual impulse in homo sapiens. Perhaps this is the best evidence we have that spiritual behavior in humans is innate. Humans will continue to behave spiritually, no matter how much the process is befouled by those who use it to seek power and wealth.
Now the reason this is so confusing is that the process is not driven by rationality or truth -- its motor is unconscious and far from rational. We share with poor old Jan Hus a pre-Darwinian outlook -- he made the tragic mistake of thinking that because his ideas were obviously right, they would prevail. We, like Hus, want to define the development of ideas as synonymous with the search for truth. In fact the evolution of ideas happens just like the evolution of everything else, according to principles of natural selection or adaptation -- what works is kept, the rest is discarded, a fact that Jan may have begun to realize belatedly, as the flames began licking up around his limbs. Since adaptation rather than truth is the motor, when truth happens it's a coincidence; when untruth is what works, it's easy to rationalize.
As if that weren't bad enough, it's also a coincidence when we can recognize the truth, because rationality and knowledge are evolving in the same higgledy-piggledy fashion -- in a very inadequate organ, the human brain. This is a piece of meat which happens to have evolved some extraordinary abilities to make connections. Truth, or knowledge, is a gradually emerging consensus that no one can be sure of. But several new things appear on the human cognitive landscape that make the picture a bit brighter. One is self consciousness, another is the idea, whether real or illusory, that our choices are free, yet another is the idea of universal truth. One wants to include morality here, but that's not really new. Lots of species have the first component of morality: a code of behavior. What's new for us humans is the idea that moral choices are free and connected to truth. That's a step forward, but also fraught with problems. Unfortunately, this idea dawns on a creature still possessed of a baggage of hard-wired primate aggression, so in the early stages of human spiritual evolution [and we may still be in those early stages], we frequently encounter the idea that only one's own group has the truth, and those who disagree should be soundly whacked.
There are two contrary lines of human evolution that collide, in my opinion. On the one hand, our drive toward spirituality includes an urge to connect -- connect with the universe and with each other -- and our yearning to communicate with the universe as a being leads us to communicate more with each other. It unifies. It is as though the neurons of our physical brains were banging on the cranial wall from inside, trying to escape and have congress with other neurons from other brains.
But on the other hand another, darker impulse runs athwart the will to unite. We exist in groups, and we give preference to people in our in-groups. This tendency is actually the older one. In the Pleistocene era, when a distinct hominid line emerged, this was probably very adaptive behavior. Hominid bands with strong in-group bonds, able to mobilize the in-group against threats from outside, including threats from other hominid groups, probably had much better survival rates. This means, alas -- now I'm going to say something here that most UUs disagree with, many disagree strongly, and I hope you'll resist the desire to throw things at me -- this means that the tendency to behave altruistically toward those who are genetically related to us, and aggressively toward those who are not -- and the modern word for this is "racism" -- this tendency is probably an evolved trait. And that means that to some degree it's wired in.
Now before you tar and feather me, allow me to insist that doesn't mean it's good, and it doesn't mean we aren't right to work to eradicate it. In fact I think a solid scientific understanding of where racism lies in the human psyche gives us a lot better handle on how to eradicate it. In fact, this tendency, let's just call it in-group preferment here, is in conflict with the unity drive, and slowly but surely, unity is winning.
In fact, this rather politically incorrect topic brings me to my title. Why have I called the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," an unnatural act? When Darwinian natural selection operates in the genetic sphere its motor is self-interest -- traits appear and are retained if they help genes maximize their own reproductive fitness. Altruism, or self-sacrificing behavior, has been the great puzzle of Darwinian theory. It is now accepted that kin altruism is a genetic process -- helping kin helps the self, genetically speaking. Some now accept the idea of reciprocal altruism -- helping others is advantageous, even genetically, if one may hope to cash in on it later. But cultural evolution extrapolates this genetically hard-wired kin altruism to all kinds of non-kin groups -- we have continually drawn the circle wider within which altruism should be practised. The more progressive among us now draw it to include the whole biosphere. All of us are related, say spiritually evolved hominids, and genetics be damned! The drive to unity, happening mostly in the cultural sphere, is manipulating the genome for its own ends. It is redefining the hard-wired kin altruism trait.
Back in the world of mere biology, however, the golden rule remains quite unnatural. In-group preferment, racism, prevails. One could even invoke the concept of original sin here. Viewed in this light, inequality is not some cultural invention, taught to us by bad guys who seek to pervert our natural goodness. As we evolve spiritually we transcend and negate our natural selfishness, and make the merely human into the humane. We cannot escape the fact that we have a genome, and it has some nasty things in it. But we write cultural software that controls it, shapes it, neutralizes its incipient nastiness, and directs it toward our own self-defined ends. Usually this shaping has taken place unconsciously, often irrationally, and more often than not we attribute it to the activity of a deity. But it may be that we are actually doing it ourselves, or perhaps we want to say that the divine activity is a property of our own evolving spirituality, working in and through us.
Becoming conscious of this process, we humans can choose our direction, define the good within ourselves that we wish to expand upon, target the evils in ourselves that we want to exorcise. This evolutionary view embodies the most radical kind of existentialism -- we are quite literally creating ourselves. Biologists who do evolutionary studies insist that the process has no goal, being a purely natural thing. They're right, but they're only talking about the genetic process. When natural selection operates in culturally behaving humans we give it a direction -- we see ourselves as free beings marching onward, and by seeing it so we make it so.
What about the three Russian writers who spoke to us in the readings? Tolstoy, who talked about the foolishness of Napoleon's wars, is ever the rationalist who is baffled by human evil and irrationality. He very effectively ridicules our foibles, and many UUs will agree with his view that humans must be basically rational, and that any irrationality must be some odd abberation. But I don't find this very plausable, since the abberations are simply too frequent to be abberations. Alas they are the norm. Dostoevsky saw that. He gives us a grim but compelling vision of the underside of the human psyche as quite natural. But Dostoevsky was unwilling to acknowledge Darwinian processes, and saw the only answer as a leap of faith into Orthodox Christianity. Although I love the novels of both, I find their religious solutions unsatisfying. What works for me is the view of Chekhov, who was not outwardly a very religious person, but one who worked selflessly for progress toward a more just world. Chekhov too gave bleak pictures of squalor and disappointment, but he believed in the inexorable progress of the human spirit, often discouragingly slow in the context of an individual lifetime, but ultimately triumphant.
Moving from Chekhov to St. Paul is quite a jump, but I see a connection. The early Christians talked about the parousia, the "kingdom of God," as something that would be fully realized in the future, after the second coming of Christ, but also as something that already exists in preliminary form in the Christian community. I interpret the parousia in neo-Darwinian existentialist fashion -- the kingdom of God is embodied in our own shaping of our spiritual selves and our communities -- our group mind as a spiritually evolving community, if you will. We create ourselves as the transcendent species, true to the god that is evolving within us.
So there is an unbroken line between those Neanderthals, standing around the grave in their skins and loincloths, burying their relative with flower petals, and our meeting here today. But don't think that means we have arrived. Evolution doesn't end -- it can't, by definition. We have much to accomplish, even though we've come a long way. As we renew our commitment to continued progress, let us dedicate the lines of the hymn we have sung to our Neanderthal forebears, spiritual kin with us across the years, early saints in fact: For All the Saints, who from their labors rest, who thee by faith before the world confessed. . . . O blest communion, fellowship divine! We live and struggle, they in glory shine; yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleluia!