Before the month is over, we will have a service centered on the popular hymn that begins, Spirit of Life, come unto me. Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion." And so forth. For some of us, that image of a spirit of life is a wonderful metaphor, a way of describing something that we would have go on in us. But for others of us, the image is more literal, of a spirit outside ourselves that we bid come to us, one that exists outside the human mind.

One might call these outlooks the empirical and the transcendentalist, which are just the words used in the chapter on ethics and religion by the biologist and popular writer Edward O. Wilson in his latest book, called Consilience. Wilson does his best to present both sides of the argument when it comes to a question like, Do "moral guidelines exist outside the human mind," or are they entirely "contrivances of the human mind"? [238]

But he is solidly himself in the camp of the empiricists, unabashedly so, though he has the winsome habit of repeatedly reminding the reader that he could be wrong, and he is equally diligent in pointing out that some of his views are largely unproven, or questionable for reasons he’ll then cite himself.

But along with that care goes a drive to make his arguments as strongly and plainly as can be done, with no apologies for their being out of fashion in many circles these days. In fact, it is a pleasure about the book, and about Wilson in general, that he speaks so forthrightly, and poetically as well. But those among us who are enamored of such current trends as postmodernism, deconstructivism, New Age spirituality, neo-Transcendentalism, multicul-turalism of the more extreme sort, or any such antagonism toward the Enligh-tenment, science, or objective truth, might want to check their blood pressure before proceeding. (He even has an unkind word to say about existentialists of the Kierkegaard and Sartre sort, of which I could be counted one.)

I had occasion to hear him speak this past spring at a four-day conference I was attending on Judaism and the Natural World, held at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. I was there because I had been invited as an adjunct member of the Divinity School faculty and because I could, as I was on sabbatical; Wilson was there to describe the current environmental crisis as a scientist. And then there were about a hundred distinguished Jewish scholars and environmental activists from all across the country.

I’ll just mention three things about that talk. One, Wilson was as winsome in person as he is in print, and as he is in interviews, articles, and the accompanying photographs, in which he is always wearing this winsome little grin. Two, what he talked about was his grave assessment of the current global situation, which one can also find in the last chapter of Consilience. It is duly frightening, if not very novel. What was novel was that, three, as the hour was about to end, the subject of religion came up, he perked up and said he had a lot to say about that in his new book, but the hour was over.

So I bought the book, read it, and it’s true, he does have the chapter I mentioned earlier on ethics and religion. But he also presents several more general points of view that are just as religiously challenging as his specific consideration of faith and spiritual practice.

I have already mentioned several such. It has become commonplace of late to hear the Enlightenment disparaged as a bad thing that happened there back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Wilson’s having none of that. "By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified." [45] "If we ask whose ideas were the seeds of the dominant ethic and shared hopes of contemporary humanity, whose resulted in the most material advancement in history, whose were the first of their kind and today enjoy the most emulation, then in that sense the Enlightenment, despite the erosion of its original vision and despite the shakiness of some of its premises, has been the principal inspiration not just of Western high culture but, increasingly, of the entire world." [22]

In fact, Wilson believes that "the Enlightenment thinkers … got it mostly right the first time," before the Romantic Revolution of the early 19th century set back their gains. "The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance…. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially in the natural sciences." [8]

Those of you who keep up with public discussions that go on at this level know that Wilson is boldly defending positions that are elsewhere on the defensive. Even I balk when it comes to human progress, and I already told you how winsome I think he is. But I think it is a welcome challenge to some current conventional thinking to hear Wilson profess "a belief in the unity of the sciences -- a conviction … that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." [4]

Science, he writes, "is driven by the faith that if we dream,, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow become clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will prove to be connected and make sense." [12]

The ride has just begun. Because when he affirms the Enlightenment’s faith in "the intrinsic unity of knowledge," he too means all knowledge. "The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities," he writes. "The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship." [8]

All knowledge has a unity that is apparent in the natural sciences, as in physics, biology, or chemistry, which is why there are so many interdiscipli-nary departments, like biochemistry or neuro-physics. Indeed, the fact of something seeming true when seen from several such perspectives is strong grounds for its being true. That is what consilience means. The word was first proposed in 1840, to refer to "a ‘jumping over’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a groundwork of explanation." [8] Wilson contends that "Units and processes of a discipline that conform with solidly verified evidence in other disciplines have proved consistently superior in theory and practice to units and processes that do not conform." [198]

But in departments at Harvard other than those of the scientific sort in which he has taught since 1955, Wilson sees atomization. He thinks that all the humanities would benefit mightily by uniting with the natural sciences, and seeking consilience like and with them. "If social scientists choose to select rigorous theory as their ultimate goal, as have the natural scientists, they will succeed to the extent they [align] their explanations with those of the natural sciences." [190]

Wilson has his eyes not only on the social sciences like economics and sociology, but on the humanities. Remember, in his Enlightenment vision of truth, it is all of a piece, art history or history or comparative religion or ethics. They all need to join in the effort for consilience, for results that accord with the natural sciences.

And the natural sciences know some things, truths that other disciplines need to engage with and come to concur with. For Wilson, the greatest of those truths is natural selection, the likely fact that humans evolved the brains we have over many a pre-historic millennia and the theory that our cultures evolve by succeeding or dying out in just the same way.

He has a couple ideas about how the process works, neither of which I can do justice to here and now (and maybe anywhere ever). One is called gene-culture co-evolution, the notion that neither culture nor heredity determines anything alone, including human behavior; rather, there is an interaction between them [137-8].

The other is the notion that the contribution that heredity makes to the interaction is a set of epigenetic rules, comprising "the full range of inherited regularities of development in anatomy, physiology, cognition, and behavior." [150] They are "the innate propensities to learn certain options in the first place and then to select particular ones among them" [205], "the inherited regularities of mental development that compose human nature." [217]

 He means it: that is what human nature is. "It’s not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is … the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another…." [164] For Wilson, human nature is genetically based, and he has examples to offer, like the universal fear of snakes or the universal taboo against incest.

 These were helpful lessons that got passed along in the genes of people who survived, people who were neither killed by snakes nor subject to the genetic disadvantages of incestuous conception. Other dimensions of human nature, ways that we are --  along with everyone else descended from our common ancestors in eastern Africa -- include our taste preferences, an inclination to personify inanimate objects, the ability to offer and understand facial clues to mood, and to some degree, our perception of colors.

 How far would he push this genetic disposition? Well -- although as so often, he politely allows that he may be wrong -- he does suggest that "the coevolution of genes and culture has woven not just a part but all of the rich fabric of human social behavior." [180]

 For Wilson, the ability to make this connection, to see the consilience, to understand our behavior as linked to the genes we have inherited, in co-evolutionary league with the cultures that have survived, is a critical step in establishing a link that recognizes all disciplines, all attempts to understand human behavior, as branches on a tree whose trunk is the natural sciences.

 For Wilson, all aspects of human culture need to be understood as activities of the mind, as matters of psychology that can be traced back to the biology of the brain, that itself is a matter of physics. [55, 266] "Belief in the intrinsic unity of knowledge," he writes, "rides ultimately on the hypothesis that every mental process has a physical grounding and is consistent with the natural sciences." [96]

 So if we want to study philosophy, anthropology, or art, we need to be wondering why humans respond as they do, out of what inherited prepositions, as altered by the circumstances of their particular personal and cultural histories. At a time when the very existence of a common human nature is held in doubt by many, who credit culture with a commanding role, Wilson insists that there is one we inherit, one that may no longer always serve us well, but one we had better acknowledge and study.

 Wilson himself can say it more eloquently and with a great sense of excitement: "Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains." [43]

Having put you through so prosaic a recounting of the arguments that Wilson makes, I thought before closing I might offer a few more of the finer examples of what his faith sounds like when fully dressed up in its poetry and passion. And with these, we finally get more directly to matters of his own religious faith, which turns out to be, not surprisingly, a powerful faith in science, "the accumulation of humanity organized, objective knowledge, the first medium devised to unite people everywhere in common understanding."

In the very next sentence he says, "You say that science cannot explain spiritual phenomena"  and he answers, "Why not? … There is no apparent reason why [advances in the analysis of complex operations of the mind] cannot in time provide a material account of the emotions and ratiocination that compose spiritual thought [for] precepts and religious faith are entirely material products of the mind." [246]

 He knows about such faith, and at one point stands up for the importance of its power. He was raised a Baptist in the south. But he started having doubts in college, and when he discovered evolution, he recounts, "a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled." [4]

 "I drifted away from the church, not definitely agnostic or atheist, just Baptist no more.

 "Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large….

 "Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course…. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. Its central tenet, as Einstein knew, is the unification of knowledge." [6-7]

 Those words come near the beginning of the book. At nearly the end, he returns to theme. "People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another…. If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species.… The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality as discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realize that Homo sapiens is far more than a congeries of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved." [264-5]

 Well I know that it’s time for me to say, "and so may it be," and a part of me feels just that way; but of course, Unitarian Universalist that I am, a part of me is thinking, "Yes, but on the other hand…." But maybe that’s the point: a part of me is thinking, and hopefully a part of each of you as well. And to that I can say, "and so may it be, now and forever." Amen.
 
 
 
 

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