“Evolution” refers to change occurring over time, typically in a positive direction. As Darwin envisioned it, species changed (gradually) over time to enhance their ability to survive. These days the word is commonly used for any change that seems to be for the better. Not everyone, of course, agrees on what’s “better.” When President Obama says that his views of gay marriage are evolving, he means that he is becoming more tolerant and accepting. Not everyone, including members of the Westboro Baptist Church, however, would agree that’s a change for the better.
One of my favorite writers, Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that violence has declined over time and that we (humans) are currently enjoying the most peaceful time in all of human history. It’s a long book, and it makes a good case for the evolution of ideas based primarily on treating others as we would have them treat us. When we look around at what’s happening in the world these days—from Ferguson, Missouri, to recent events in Gaza and the Ukraine—it is hard to see whether we are living in “the best of times.”
However much we have evolved in some ways (think about changes in modes of transportation, for example), in other ways we haven’t changed that much. In terms of the evolution of ideas, not everyone has the same idea about what ideas are “evolved” and which are primitive. One of the things that has been said about the Islamists, for example, is that they have “fourteenth-century thinking and twenty-first-century weapons.” It has also been said that the current conflict between the Shia and the Sunni is the Islamic equivalent of the wars between the Protestants and the Catholics in fourteenth-century Europe. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift satirized the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics by comparing it to going to war over which end of a soft-boiled egg to open first, the Big End or the Little End.
It’s relatively easy, of course, to look back in history and see that wars have often been fought for foolish reasons. It is not always easy, however, to look at our more recent past with the same degree of understanding. Some are still arguing, for example, that slavery—and especially slavery as practiced in the States prior to the 1860s—was a good thing for the slaves: if they hadn’t been brought here and “given” work on the plantations, they would have starved to death in “heathen” Africa. Such a view ignores the reality of slavery, which denies the fundamental rights and personhood of the enslaved, and most of us have “evolved” beyond that kind of thinking. The question is how far beyond have a majority of us come.
I decided on “Embracing Reality” as the title for this blog because we need more of it. Too much of what we believe is based on vested interests. Ask yourself “what’s real” and “who profits.” When others are working hard to sell you on an idea, it is almost always because they will profit. Is there a significant difference between the mutual denigration of Protestants and Catholics in the Fourteenth Century, the current mutual denigration of Shia and Sunni, and the mutual denigration of Christians and Muslims common today? To what degree do the texts held as sacred embodiments of everlasting truth actually depict what is? Many Christians believe that the Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman, but two of God’s favorites, Kings Solomon and David, had numerous wives and concubines. That was true for most rich men in most ancient cultures. Onan’s sin was his failure to impregnate his dead brother’s wife. (It was another case of “follow the money.”)
Why do we read some ancient literature (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Beowulf, for example) as metaphor, recognizing that they all came out of an oral tradition, with a number of poets memorizing and retelling the stories for generations before they finally made it into written form. The same is true, of course, for most of the Bible, including the stories about Jesus, and the Koran. Less well known is that the early manuscripts had to be copied by hand, and different scribes changed the original texts in a variety of ways. Some of the changes may have been accidental, a result of misreading or misremembering, and some may have been deliberate, to shore up “evidence” supporting a particular viewpoint or to increase the political power of the Church. We have four versions of the life of Christ (by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and they all seem to have been written about 100 years following the death of Jesus. One hundred years allows for a lot of telling and retelling.
To enjoy a good play or movie, you have to be prepared to “suspend disbelief.” If you continually tell yourself that “it isn’t real,” the story loses its power to entertain. When we really want to understand, however, we need to suspend belief and focus on what’s real. Does it really make a difference whether soft-boiled eggs are opened at the Big End or the Little End? If you have any doubts, you could test. That’s easy to do with eggs because no one has a vested interest in the outcome. It may not be so easy to do with rates of taxation, birth control, abortion, same-sex (and other kinds of) marriage, and setting boundaries for electoral districts. That’s where evolution comes in.
“Evolution” implies a willingness to look at the evidence before deciding what to think and believe. We are “evolving” when we are able to consider the evidence more important than a belief. It was difficult for the Church to accept what Copernicus and Galileo knew: the Earth is in orbit around the Sun. It took the Church about 500 years to apologize to Galileo for false imprisonment. It shouldn’t take us that long to decide that “equal protection under the law” means “equal protection under the law” regardless of sexual orientation or skin color. It shouldn’t take us that long to figure out that people of color are not being treated fairly by our criminal justice system. It shouldn’t take us that long to decide that even if human activity is not the main contributor to global climate change, it is still up to us to do something about it if we want life as we have known it to continue. It shouldn’t take us that long to decide that crops that have been genetically modified to withstand stronger herbicides and insecticides are killing bees, birds, and butterflies and that we’ll be in bad shape without them.
The only thing stopping us from evolving in positive directions are vested interests in outmoded beliefs.
