In a famous episode from the myth of Troy narrated in Vergil’s Aeneid, the priest Laocoön tries in vain to persuade his fellow citizens –mad with joy and relief on seeing that the Greeks have finally lifted camp and sailed back to their country– not to bring into the city the uncanny wooden contraption their vanished foes have left behind:
equo ne credite, Teucri.
quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
that is,
Do not trust the horse, men of Troy.
Whatever it may be, I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts.
The Trojan Horse is a highly suitable metaphor to illustrate from an evolutionary viewpoint the origins of the malaise of modern individuals, turned into battlefields where genetically inherited primary drives clash with variable force against the need to conform to a prevailing material and social reality extremely at odds with the primitive milieu which gave birth to those impulses.
Indeed, our bodies and minds are living in the 21st century, in a society where, among other changes, practically nobody ever hunts, gathers or grows by themselves what they eat; where the threat of predators (other than humans) has been almost entirely eliminated; where monogamy has triumphed by and large as a compromise solution for the asymmetrical and frequently conflicting demands of either sex; and where all vestiges of belonging to a tribe beyond one’s immediate family have disappeared and most of us live in large cities, surrounded by total strangers. Nevertheless, the “software” we have at hand to navigate this scenario was designed by a blind (or at best short-sighted) programmer called Natural Selection, based on trial and error over hundreds of thousands of years among cave- or forest-dwelling populations confronted with the exactly opposite conditions on a daily basis.
Briefly said, the difference in the speed at which our environment and our minds have changed has left us off balance on a very fundamental level, because an important segment of our programming is now outdated. What’s worse, the primitive drives in our genes are as active as ever, operating like a fifth column within the reasonable and socialized citadel of the “I” we have worked to hard to construct, and tirelessly conspiring to achieve their single purpose: to pass on to the next generation by all means, come hell or high water. The resulting picture, according to Robert Wright, is anything but edifying:
Humans aren’t calculating machines; they’re animals, guided somewhat by conscious reason but also by various other forces. And long-term happiness, however appealing they may find it, is not really what they’re designed to maximize. On the other hand, humans are designed by a calculating machine, a highly rational and coolly detached process. And that machine does design them to maximize a single currency –total genetic proliferation, inclusive fitness. (....) We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population. It’s no wonder that people often seem not to be pursuing any particular goal –happiness, inclusive fitness, whatever– very successfully.
This may sound cold and mechanical, but it’s the way things are from the viewpoint of a discipline that acknowledges no creator other than an impersonal biological process, speaks of “selfish” genes, and pits their project of survival and transmission at all costs against the more socially acceptable plans individuals tend to devise in order to reach happiness, however they may fancy it. The result is an inevitable collision where personal satisfaction usually holds the losing hand –which is one of the reasons why Robert Wright devotes a sizable part of his study to articulating mechanisms that may bring into line the apparently irreconcilable interests of both genes and individuals.
To what extent does the Dharma share in this view? To my mind, significantly in substance but not so much in every single detail. Leaving aside speculation on the origin of this apparent divergence in interests and impulses, the notion of a Trojan Horse is often latent in Buddhist texts, only there it appears under the guise of the three identities (the “unwholesome roots” of aversion, greed, and confusion) who have implanted in the subconscious mind commands that are at odds with the natural and correct order of things. For the Dharma, as the Buddha explained in his famous Parable of the Arrow, it is immaterial to know how, when, why or at those hands we have arrived at this predicament; suffice it to know that there is, within all human beings who have not liberated their own pure nature, a tendency to satisfy certain basic drives that bring pleasure on the short run but in the end produce little but suffering –a realization based on the honest and upfront close examination of one’s own experience that is generally prerequisite for the path of Buddha Dharma. Only by coming to terms with this understanding, which the Buddha called the First Noble Truth of Suffering, do we begin to promote the restoration of our pure natural system.
So, despite partially endorsing its diagnosis of the human condition, the Dharma parts ways with EP in its attack on the problem, which is where the distance between both approaches can be best appreciated. Instead of a rational program meant to harmonize to the highest possible degree the pleasure of the largest number of individuals, as proposed by utilitarianism and embraced by Robert Wright (following Darwin, among others), the Buddha’s way entails taking to the same personal path of purification of the mind that he followed until it is confirmed by an experience beyond the mind itself. And that road begins with a potent and effective, albeit demanding, antidote to the problem: awareness, achieved through the deliberate application of attention to several phases of the mind’s functioning that are generally concealed from our view. This is the Buddha’s great weapon, the universal dissolvent for the chains of obsolete programming that keep us bound and estranged from our own nature: the lucid awareness that comes from right attention and right energy.
The immature, in their ignorance, lose their vigilance,
but the wise guard it as their greatest treasure.
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