Dharma and Evolutionary Psychology VI: the Show Mustn't Go On

By what track can you reach him,
the Buddha, the awakened one,
free from all conditioning?
How can you describe him in human language
–the Buddha, the awakened one,
free from the net of desires and the pollution of passions,
free from all conditioning?

In Blade Runner, the futuristic dystopia that has now become a cult film, a posse of replicants (androids created through genetic engineering to take care of the dirty work for humans) returns to Earth on a desperate mission: to find out who designed them and force him to alter their program so they can live beyond the four miserable years that now inexorably mark the limit of their existence. Though peppered with the usual dashes of violence, romance, and special effects typical of Hollywood studio productions, the movie revolves around issues of great depth: life and death, free will and predestination… in a word, what it means to be human –something about which the last survivor in the rebel commando (Rutger Hauer, featured above) teaches an unexpected lesson to a battered and helpless Harrison Ford in the desolate, rain-swept rooftop where the replicant foray is finally resolved.

I bring up this modern cinematic myth because it almost seems as if Robert Wright had it in mind when fashioning his interpretation of the effect that the discovery of the survival of the fittest as the prime motor of evolution had on Darwin. To anyone who has seen it in action, it is obvious that Nature is the least sentimental thing there is; but this feeling must have been multiplied to horrific proportions for Darwin –who was, let us not forget, a man of grave moral concerns living in the heyday of Victorian England– once he saw that raw, unabashed, and blind natural selection was the mechanism that best explained the development of species. Indeed this theory, increasingly supported by available data, came to enthrone ruthless struggle for survival as the supreme criterion for life: an endless process, devoid of any apparent meaning, fed by the constant death, in fearful numbers and with sickening recurrence, of the weakest organisms across the biological scale, whose sacrifice seemed to have no sense beyond perpetuating a game whereby Nature, trapped in an endless cycle, devours itself so as to be reborn time and again.

It is no surprise that Darwin himself, dismayed like many of his contemporaries at the brutal threat the new view posed to the moral underpinnings of his society, felt undisguised scruples about the new ideological landscape he had ushered in and devoted part of his subsequent efforts to try and mitigate its more dramatic implications (in that sense, Darwin was perhaps the least “Darwinist”, as popularly understood, of all those who embraced his theories). Perhaps that’s why, like the android Roy Batty facing his designer Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner, Robert Wright depicts Darwin virtually confronting his own creator in one of the climactic moments of his ambitious enquiry –except in the naturalist’s case, this creator is not a person but rather an impersonal and relentless process responsible for having created all living organisms on the planet:

It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned its creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin’s moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.

It’s conceivable that Darwin’s values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with each other: “My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death.” And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity. It’s enough to make you feel a little alienated –if not, indeed, out and out rebellious.

Darwin’s rebellion, as interpreted by Wright, basically meant trying to salvage from the shipwreck values with a long moral and religious tradition such as altruism, solidarity, and empathy toward one’s fellow men, shattered by the tidal wave of the recently discovered biological selfishness. Too bad Wright had not read or at least did not take into account the Dhammapada as he wrote these pages, which might have led him to a more qualified and accurate judgment on Darwin’s gesture. Lest this seem an unwarranted sectarian claim based on a glaring anachronism, let us return once again to the Buddha’s own words. In the light of what has been said before, how can we read this description of his own predicament without undermining Darwin’s claim to originality?:

I have gone through many rounds of birth and death,
Looking in vain for the builder of this body.
Heavy indeed is birth and death again and again!
But now I have seen you, housebuilder,
You shall not build this house again.
Its beams are broken; its dome is shattered:
Self-will is extinguished; nirvana is attained.

Here, at long last, we come to the heart of the Buddhist path. Instead of engaging in absurd polemics as to who spotted his creator first, from this vantage point it makes a lot more sense to draw together the new insights revealed by the striking parallels we have reviewed in order to fully understand what’s at stake in the path of Dharma and assess its significance.

Thanks to our previous discussion, we are now in a position to explain the path opened by the Buddha in a manner acceptable to those who tend to be put off by any religious overtone. Let us state it simply thus: Siddhartha Gautama’s great contribution was threefold. First, he discovered the “creator” of our human condition as apparent individuals separate from everything else (in Buddhist terms, the process of dependent origination: the twelve-linked chain responsible for generating the identities, which are a sham and yet constitute the greatest impediment to experimenting our own nature). Second, he confronted this process, probably by recourse among other methods to a self-devised meditation technique called vipassana. And third, he found out how to put an end to this “creation” by means of the systematic integral practice he called the Noble Eightfold Path. Having done all that, he awoke to the truth as it is here and now and became “the Buddha” –the awakened one.

The parallel with Darwin’s findings puts in perspective the full import of these steps –something that Buddhist literature, when not too concerned with making itself properly understood, tersely describes as the path that frees human beings from suffering and leads them to nirvana. The great advantage afforded by EP in this regard is that it exposes on the one hand the magnitude of diverging drives that beset human beings –that half-choking, half-sedating stranglehold of the three unwholesome roots and their grim companion, suffering (dukkha)– while at the same time reducing the grounds for interpreting the release of nirvana as a kind of stupendous cosmic orgasm whereby one gains access in this life to a Buddhist paradise –a fantasy we will do well to undermine.

The main virtue of one who has crossed the river and awakened is that he/she is free from all conditioning, that is, has cleaned his/her mind of obsolete commands that are out of joint with respect to the natural order Buddhists call Dharma and Daoists, Dao. After that, a residue of the old habits may still remain but, basically, as its name indicates, liberation has to do more with letting go than with gaining. What is then left is a natural system that is free to interact with its environment in accord with the real needs of the moment, and nothing more. It’s just that, by comparison, our previous state resembles a puppet subject to the wrenching pulls and spasms caused by what we could describe as psychologically and socially noxious capsules of evolutionary remains distorted in the course of our evolution as a species.

In concluding, let us allow the Buddha himself to answer with his customary sobriety the question posed at the beginning of this section, “How can you describe him in human language –the Buddha, the awakened one”?

He has reached the end of the way; he has crossed the river of life.
All that he had to do is done: he has become one with all life.

Or, to put it in the first person:

One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers
a thousand times a thousand men on the battlefield.
Be victorious over yourself and not over others.
When you attain victory over yourself,
Not even the gods can turn it unto defeat.

I have conquered myself and live in purity

This ends the series of articles on Dharma and Evolutionary Psychology, written with the sincere desire to benefit all beings.

May all be filled with joy and peace.
May all beings everywhere,
The strong and the weak,
The great and the small,
The meek and the powerful,
The short and the long,
The subtle and the gross:
May all beings everywhere,
Both seen and unseen,
Dwelling far off or nearby,
Being, or waiting to become:
May all be filled with lasting joy.

Let no one deceive another,
Let no one anywhere despise another,
Let no one out of anger or resentment
Wish suffering to anyone at all.
Just as a mother with her own life
Protects her child, her only child, from hurt,
So within yourself let grow
A boundless love for all creatures.

Dharma and Evolutionary Psychology III: the Trojan Horse

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.

Dharma and Evolutionary Psychology II: Temptation and the Mechanisms of Addiction

Could it be that the Buddha’s cautions regarding hedonism were unfounded and/or grossly exaggerated? In his support, Robert Wright justifies in logical terms the language we have just seen in the Dhammapada, however backward it may sound, when thus explaining a dilemma inherent in the human condition:

The concept of “evil”, though less metaphysically primitive than, say, “demons”, doesn’t fit easily into a modern scientific worldview. Still, people seem to find it useful and the reason is that it is metaphorically apt. There is indeed a force devoted to enticing us into various pleasures that are (or once were) in our genetic interests but do not bring long-term happiness to us and may bring great suffering to others. You could call that force the ghost of natural selection. More concretely, you could call it our genes (some of our genes, at least). If it will help to actually use the word evil, there’s no reason not to.

What light, if any, does this explanation cast on the Buddha’s attitude toward pleasure? Enough to unveil certain implicit assumptions in his analysis of the unconscious mechanisms at work in the process –something which he didn’t go into in detail in his teachings, perhaps because he deemed it superfluous for an audience like his, brought up in a culture that had long studied and contemplated these matters.

Beyond the experience of pleasure itself, the great danger the Buddha denounces time and again in the Dhammapada is careless distraction, due to the automatic consequences it brings about: the fixed stimulus-response loops we repeat in our minds, which bring about compulsive behavioral patterns that tend to escape our notice.

All human beings are subject to attachment and thirst for pleasure.
Hankering after these, they are caught in the cycle of birth and death
[the constant rebirth in the mind of the “three unwholesome roots” or identities].
Driven by this thirst, they run about frightened like a hunted hare,
suffering more and more.

How could that be? Because in daily life one is often faced with a choice between alternatives, one of which holds a visible and instant reward, while the other offers no apparent recompense; and it is the seductiveness of that reward, in the form of pleasure, which generally leads us to choose the easier path until it becomes a habit. Such is the underlying analysis in the Buddha’s admonishments, which on occasion are compressed to the point of seeming bland truisms unless we care to “unzip” them in a way that makes sense:

Evil deeds, which harm oneself, are easy to do; good deeds are not so easy.

What kind of picture of human motivation emerges from this Buddhist psychology? As loaded with Christian connotations as it may sound, it too hinges on the dicey concept of temptation. There is no need, however, to understand the term in a religious sense: all that “temptation” really means is that human experience often occurs in the form of a crossroads, with one option that promises instant gratification but is sterile or even harmful in the long run, and another that is difficult and presents no obvious recompense but is correct and subtly nourishing for oneself and others. Whether we are on a spiritual path or not, this predicament constitutes a meaningful part of human experience in all cultures and eras.

According to this view, were are enmeshed in the psychological dynamics of our various addictions and the great danger the Buddha warns against is living heedlessly on auto-pilot, because this particular pilot has very clear ideas of its own that nevertheless seldom promote our long-term well-being –and, furthermore, has access to a veritable arsenal of candies with which to entice us on our road to perdition and then keep us numbed out in our ill-fated detour. This pilot, who is really nothing but an impersonal process, is what Buddhism personifies in the figure called Mara, whose mastery over our lives has devastating consequences:

The compulsive urges of the thoughtless grow like a creeper.
They jump like a monkey from one life to another, looking for fruit in the forest.
When these urges drive us, sorrow spreads like wild grass.

Contrary to what is often claimed, the problem for Dharma is not so much desire as such but craving, due to the compulsive element it contains. There is in craving something external that overwhelms and subdues its host, so to speak, to its wishes; it does not tolerate opposition well nor does it gladly suffer questioning or deferral. In fact, it’s an unwholesome inertia that drags us to those behaviors we have reinforced through assiduous practice, turning them into ever deeper ruts which become increasingly difficult to break away from. Whether we call it “Mara” like Buddhists do or “the ghost of natural selection” like the Darwinists, it is a typical example of a vicious circle in which each wrong step increases the likelihood that the next step will also being incorrect –and thus a good example of how mundane karma works:

If a man is tossed about by doubts, full of strong passions,
And yearning only for what is delightful,
his thirst will grow more and more,
and he will indeed make his fetters strong.
Like a spider caught in its own web is a person driven by fierce cravings.

So this, in a nutshell and in plain English, is what the Buddha is saying: beware of the subconscious programming that leads you to seek pleasure, because in the end it does not defend your interests but others that are alien to you, harmful to your ultimate well-being, and moreover invalid in the overall scheme of things.

Is the Buddha’s message more acceptable when clothed in these terms? Hopefully, yes, insofar as it is more understandable. In the end, the great advantage of applying an evolutionary approach to the Buddhist perspective is, in my opinion, that it makes moralizing superfluous; it is enough to explain temptation as a set of instructions reinforced in the human mind through repetition (that is, conditioned) along the many millennia of our evolution as a species, despite being prompted by and adjusted to circumstances widely different from those we enjoy today. That, in large measure, is the tragedy of the modern human being: that the material and social conditions we live in have superseded our genetic programming, and yet that obsolete program is still up and running: a seemingly inexhaustible source of friction and suffering for all, men and women, elderly and young, rich and poor; in a word, for all human beings, precisely because they are human.