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changed has left us off balance on a very fundamental level, because an important segment of our programming is now outdated.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.