Finally getting my library card here in Livingston I picked up Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. I’ve been looking into philosophical systems for a Darwinian world. The dangerous idea is that all the complexity of our world is the result of blind, simple, mathmatical forces. He believes that the priciples of evolution extend out into fields of culture and ethics. He argues strongly against that there are things that are above our ability to understand, that are sacred by virtue of their mystery and unquestionable goodness. He attacks other evolutionary theorist who he feels let their Marxist leanings try and temper the full extent of Darwin’s theory.
Personally I think that the main failure for Marxism to cope and move on to the future and why it has failed in the past is that it holds a supernatural view of human nature. It wants to put humanity above evolution. Ultimately there is nothing special about us physically. Our minds are. Without sentient beings everything else in the cosmos would be absolutely unremarkable because only beings like us find existence remarkable. But our minds need not hold our form. Our mind too, it needs to be stressed, is the product of many mindless machines all working together.
Dennett doesn’t feel this is cause for despair. I don’t either. Ultimately ethics and morality works if it causes us to continue their practice. Some practices my propagate for only their own “reason” but most will be practiced because they benefit its practitioners. Isn’t that the basis of morality, that it produces a good? Can something be truly good if it brings only pain to its practitioners? There is an idea in religion that God is not defined by good but God defines good. Hence if God hates fags you should to even if their is no good reason to do so. Such blind obedience can only produce evil.
Unlike Richard Dawkins, Dennett doesn’t feel that religion is a kind of intellectual virus that plagues mankind. In an ignorant world religion kept society together enough for us to develop all our great new ideas. Like the Gnostics believed, the creator of the universe and of man and his mind is a blind god, Samael, the Demiurge. The Demiurge begot man, man begot God, God begot scientific method. The scientific method is the best device we have to find the truth, but will the Truth set us free?
