I’ve been reading Darwin’s two major books lately. My reading has been done with an eye toward what Darwin might think about love.
I’m somewhat surprised by what I’ve found. Given what Darwin’s critics and followers have been saying, one might get the impression that the theory of evolution dooms love. I’m finding quite the contrary.
It is true that in On the Origin of Species, Darwin emphasizes the competitive side of evolution. Natural selection is the engine of history. And Darwin tends to speak in terms of individuals and their struggle to survive.
But even in this book, Darwin has a fundamental sense of value at play in his writing. Time and again words like “advantage,” “profitability,” “adaptation,” and “improvement” crop up. Those are words that suggest well-being. And my argument has for sometime been that love is the intentional response to others to promote well-being. If the theory of evolution entails the possibility for increased well-being, its compatibility with love seems quite plausible.
But Darwin’s second most important book, The Descent of Man, surprised me even more for its emphasis upon love in relationships and community. The basis for morals, says Darwin, is the social nature of existence. “The so-called moral sense is aboriginally derived from the social instincts,” he says. “Social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services to them.” In fact, says Darwin, the social instincts, with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Morality is not an entirely emergent feature found only in humans, says Darwin. Continuity exists between humans and nonhumans here as well: all social animals have some sense of right and wrong.
Animals perform many services for one another. The most common is warning of danger. Animals also serve one another though parental care. And they often sympathize with each other’s distress. Darwin concludes his discussion by saying that the differences between “man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc, of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in an well-developed condition, in the lower animals.”
Darwin speculates about how morality – in the sense of acting for the good others at a cost to oneself – might arisen in the first place and then continued to be maintained. He guesses, for instance, that self-sacrificial love emerged in the parent-child relationship. Parents might act self-sacrificially so that their offspring might survive or thrive.
Darwin recognizes that groups comprised of altruists can out compete groups dominated by egoists. This is a theme that David Sloan Wilson and Elliot Sober have been championing lately.
Darwin also suggests that people are altruistic because of the reputational gain they hope to receive. People act in moral ways because of the praise or blame they expect to receive.
Darwin’s emphasis upon the social nature of love and morality needs to be heard today. Too often we speak of love as if it emerges in a vacuum. Darwin reminds us that what is a loving act or attitude is largely determined by the community and context.
Darwin’s these explanations for the emergence and maintenance of morality seem partly true. But I don’t think Darwin captures well all motivations and influences of love.
I don’t think Darwin helps us much, in fact, with understanding the role of theology for morality. He unfortunately thinks that belief in God functions more or less in the way that societal opinions influence one’s moral choices. “With the more civilized races,” writes Darwin, “the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advancement of morality.” Belief in God is not “innate or instinctive in man.”
In fact, says Darwin, “the idea of a universal and beneficent Creator of the universe does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.” Darwin’s point seems to be that belief in God arises in highly civilized societies as a grand form of praise or blame. Such praise and blame writ large is a form of natural selection’s development of morals.
Instead of seeing belief in God as kind of cosmic moral deterrent, I wish Darwin would have conceived of God as an essential part of the community. God might be better understood to be an actual being who acts in nature. In fact, God might be seen as the Ultimate Persuader who calls creatures – both human and nonhuman – to love in ways that promote overall well-being.
This vision of God that I propose Darwin should have embraced would not undermine Darwin’s basic evolutionary scheme. But it would plug a huge hole in Darwin’s theory of the evolution of morality. And it seems to provide a more plausible overall explanation for why love ought to be our mode of operation today.
At least that’s what I’ve been thinking as I read Darwin these days . . .
Thomas Jay Oord
Northwest Nazarene University
Thomas Jay Oord is the author or editor of several books, including Science of Love and The Altruism Reader.
