Grandpa Bonobo Leaves the Anthill

From Genes To Culture

This chapter described how biological processes are expressed as culture. I was impressed not by what Wilson said in this chapter but by what he did not say, by his lack of concern for happiness. Happiness, like love, is a challenge to materialism. Wilson considers predictive power to be the goal of science. But was happiness increasing proportionally with scientific knowledge? Would greater happiness accrue as predictive power accumulated? He never addressed these supremely important questions.

Page 137 The problem of "the two cultures" referred to a polarization between natural sciences and arts/humanities which developed at that time. Wilson could not begin to understand the cause of that schism and apparently he was not alone. He referred to a famous essay by one C.P. Snow titled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Snow, who in an ironic twist taught at Christ College, attributed this split to overspecialization of the educated elite. But they did not see what lay behind this overspecialization, they did not understand that the unifying Center was not being attended to. Overspecialization did not merely result from an increasing quantity or precision of knowledge. It was a symptom of the end of the cycle.In those years the Beloved walked on ahead, giving humanity a distance to catch up. For a fleeting moment some thought they were alone.

On the pebbles of genetics Wilson built his church. He did not understand reincarnation, the third narrative in the Theme of Creation, and that the building blocks of culture are essentially sanskaric, not genetic.

• Culture is the composite expression of reincarnating souls.
• Genetics are to culture what pigments are to a painting.

The Awakener unified the knowledge of the Eastern and Western traditions, the compassionate responsibility and scientific power of the West, the dust-like resignation and faith of the East. Wilson did not consider the doctrine of reincarnation important enough to bother rejecting. Everyone lives once, is the supreme director of that single chance, their only hope adaptive genetic inheritance.

Wilson's passion play regarding culture was to effect a marriage. There is genetics and there is culture. They shall marry and become one and that one is genetics. Genetics can give its name to culture, culture cannot give its name to genetics. Effecting this marriage was a very tall order in view of the fact that the arts and literature could never lose their heart to a pheromone. We no longer categorize knowledge as they did. Wilson accused people of faith of being afraid to admit that their religion was a crutch. In truth, he was afraid to ask the obvious questions about evolutionary history. Why did the human brain increase four-fold a few hundred thousand years ago when the species was surviving with a smaller brain and the demands of the human environment did not increase four-fold? Why did the fossil record fail to support darwinian macroevolution? The obvious answer is that survival is not the only purpose of creation.

Wilson promotes the union of genetics and culture by cooking up some anti-scientific mumbo-jumbo called "gene-culture co-evolution." The Awakener consolidated the knowledge that evolution provided human consciousness, which leads to reincarnation across human lives, which provides for cultural variation and eventually leads to involution, and then to the Goal. Evolution and reincarnation are sequential steps on the soul's journey to the Oversoul. Evolution is the consolidation of natural sanskaras, which results in human consciousness. Once human consciousness is attained, the rate of evolutionary change slows dramatically. Reincarnation is the consolidation of unnatural sanskaras which results in different gross forms and circumstances over and over until the journey is complete. Evolution is essentially an additive process, reincarnation is a process of gathering and expending in life after life.

Regarding both forms and the states of consciousness associated with the forms, there is no regression. Regarding culture, there are cycles but not absolute regression.

Once the soul sojourns as stone consciousness it never returns to gas consciousness,
  metal consciousness never returns to stone consciousness,
    vegetable consciousness never returns to metal consciousness,
      worm, insect and reptile consciousness never returns to vegetable consciousness,
fish consciousness never returns to worm consciousness,
  bird consciousness never returns to fish consciousness,
    animal consciousness never returns to bird consciousness
      human consciousness never reverts to animal consciousness.

Each kingdom experiences intimations of the next and expresses forms of love associated with the previous kingdom. For example humans, especially in earlier incarnations, experience predominantly instinctual love of animal sanskaras, but the human form and human consciousness in its entirety, does not regress. This is why human consciousness contains the intimation of God consciousness, because that is next. The second narrative of creation (evolution) proceeds through natural sanskaras, the third narrative of creation (reincarnation) proceeds through natural and unnatural sanskaras, the fourth narrative (involution) unwinds all sanskaras.

Cultural diversity gained the momentum of unnatural sanskaras many thousands of years after the evolution of human consciousness was completed. Cultural diversity is very unlike genetics. Compared with the straight plodding gait of the groom of genetic evolution, culture is a butterfly, a coquette. One day she is happy and bright, another moody and violent. In one place she appears pious and grave, another she is a gay vixen. She is a creature of cycles, mood swings, and if you catch her at a bad time, watch out.

Between 1929, four years into the Silence (and the year Wilson was born), and 1999, twenty years into the Manifestation, the Old Humanity saw more cultural change than in any other seventy year period. Social conventions, morals, religion, arts, music, the very definition of human life was revolutionized, so much so that people of different generations could barely sustain a conversation. Relative to these cultural changes between 1929 and 1998, human genetics and epigenetics did not change at all. Yet Wilson attributed the vast societal changes all over the planet to genetics. This is like saying you can use the same ingredients to make a four-dimensional ghazal and a taco.

In order to shore up this ridiculous theory Wilson proposed a "genetic leash" made of a substance like flubber (Baba loved flubber) with amazing elasticity. This wondrous genetic leash adjusted itself to the right lengths to span genetics and culture. In primitive, preliterate jungle gatherings, the enchanted leash was short, as there was small distance between genetics and culture. In scientific-technological societies the magic leash automatically lengthened to span the greater distance between genetics and culture. The leash existed without a substrate of genetics, so it could not be explained within the constraints of the materialist world view. What really happened between preliterate and scientific-technological societies was the passage of thousands of generations of incarnations. The resulting increase in knowledge combined with the accumulation of unnatural sanskaras caused these cultures to become scientific and more unnatural. These effects intensified during Wilson's life because it was an avataric cycle.

We now know at least a little about the way natural and unnatural sanskaras advance in service of the soul's journey home to God. Darwin's theory of natural selection was useful. The Awakener placed it at the center stage of intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, a challenge to pious ignorance, and preparation for the knowledge He was soon to provide. Once consciousness reaches the human form it faces unnatural sanskaras. Evolution is no longer the primary vehicle of advancing the soul's journey. Reincarnation takes over. Before human consciousness, evolution is the vehicle of variegation, at the arising of human consciousness reincarnation becomes the vehicle of variegation.

As Wilson moves farther from natural science his theories become fantastic. The mustard seed of materialism can move any theoretical mountain.

To build his case Wilson admitted was "tortuous," he takes us back once more to our primitive and drugged-out shaman. As the shaman moves about the jungle his genetics interact with his genetically determined culture to control and direct his behavior. It is significant that Wilson repeatedly uses Jivaro the snake-sensitized Amazonian shaman to illustrate the genetic determination of culture, rather than a contemporary, say, Mr. Smith the Presbyterian banker from Pittsburgh, Old Humanityio. Ancient cultures were more directly controlled by animal sanskaras than are recent cultures because they followed fewer cycles of reincarnation. Of course on an individual level, we cannot rule out that Mr. Smith may yet need an incarnation in the Amazon. Enough crooked banking just might land him in an unpleasant place in his next life, but Wilson's assertion that culture evolves through natural selection in the same way that genetics evolves is beyond tortuous, it is a flight of fancy. They had an adage, 'If the only tool you have is a hammer you treat everything as if it were a nail'. The most important tool Wilson had was the theory of evolution and he hit everything over the head with it, especially God.

It seems Dr. Wilson did not get out of the anthill much.

We are sorely aware that our recent ancestors, the Old Americans, inflicted upon the world one of the most degenerate cultures in human history. New York is a synonym for degeneracy. The lewdness of Old America is a clicheé.In fact, artists of the time were especially abusive to sacred images. They celebrated their own genitals as theater, popular music sounded like hell when Satan stubs his toe. We marvel at how they bore it. Culture holds up a mirror to civilization, and what one saw in that mirror in 1998 we do not mention before our young. Culturally, the Old Americans were to the Europeans as the Romans were to the Greeks—richer, braver, stronger, better engineers, more legalistic and aggressive, but, with a few exceptions like jazz music, they were intransigent vulgarians. If for no other reason, their emphasis on money made them so. The Old American civilization never produced high culture equivalent to its scientific, technological and engineering achievements. By the 20th century, God surrenderance had burned low. Science remained relatively productive. Why? Perhaps because mathematical ability is more discrete and independent of social conditioning than many other cognitive abilities. Knowledge based on mathematics was less devastated by the intensification of unnaturalness at the end of the cycle. And after 1969, much of science was wasted upon militarism and fulsome commercialism. But especially artistic and moral culture, was pulled down into the end-of-cycle vortex.

Language-based arts were invented later than music and visual arts. Among all the arts, poetry and playwriting thrive when there is spiritual unity. The great poets of the Old Humanity, illuminated like Hafiz and Rumi, or unilluminated like Milton and Brabazon, the great playwrights, the Greeks, and the English appear at moments of cultural unity. During the Great Purification much of the literature and poetry in Old America was self-obsessed trash.

Professor Wilson, if your world view were correct, and if all the God-based religions of the world were merely the result of human need for myth and dogma, if Christ and all the other Avatars were gifted, charismatic leaders who made false claims and deceived billions of people, if creation had no purpose, wouldn't you say the Prime Mover was being tricky?

Page 141 After a lengthy explanation of the infinite variety produced by genetic evolution, Wilson again decorates with divinity. His consciousness thoroughly Christianized (much to his spiritual advantage) he colorizes with a Christian palette. He explains that God would not have thoroughly salted the earth with evidence of evolution if He did not want us to figure it out.

Who wants to deny the obvious? Wilson begrudgingly points out that when it comes to culture the sum of all religion, beliefs, myths, morals, art, literature and all other systematic knowledge, Homo sapiens lead the pack among species. Wilson makes language-based culture seem like a detail. Recall the holy of holies of scientific materialism was that creation and evolution are non-purposive. They were reluctant to say anything that would suggest that human beings were an essential advance above apes. It would have been apostasy to recognize the obvious, that when human consciousness arose, God's wish to know Self entered a wondrous and wholly different dimension of curiosity, creativity, possibility, freedom, and love.

After reluctantly admitting that humans are brighter than Grandpa Bonobo, Wilson discussed the sanskaric impressions of language and culture among primates, though not in those terms. We understand well that the consciousness at each twist of evolution must possess some potentiality for the next. If not, how else could the impressions of consciousness advance? There must be some metalness in stone consciousness for metal consciousness to arise, some vegetableness in metal consciousness for vegetable consciousness to arise, some worm consciousness in vegetable consciousness, and so on. Eventually God consciousness overtakes human consciousness and the Goal is achieved.

Page 144 The righteousness of that appellation is elusive. Wilson is thunderstruck at how good humans are at talking human. Why, they start acting like humans from birth!

Page 145 Wilson could not account for the sudden extreme acceleration in the rate of cultural change after ages of backwardness. Right history, wrong mystery. The acceleration of change intimates God has something special in mind. Another reason why the term evolution is misapplied to culture. The evolution of consciousness provided progressively complex, but highly different forms of matter, as God willed increasingly accurate answers to the question Who Am I? God wished to experience Self as hydrogen gas and as a flying fish and as a horse, and every form betwixt until human consciousness, which offers the ultimate possibility of Truth. Who Am I? I Am God. Evolution is a continuous flux of reorganization from the quantum level on up. Homo sapiens will keep physically evolving. Baba informed us that in a billion years human beings will be 5 inches tall and very brainy.

The different cultures are much less different than the different gross forms. Culture is the ever varying amalgam of universal aspects of human life including religion, beliefs, morals, music, art, literature, science and technology and all other systematic knowledge. Every civilization, society and group brings its own forms, modes, styles, and conventions to these same aspects of life. Cultural change is not reorganization on the molecular level, it is a flux of human universals. For example, if a Roman senator of the year 1 and an American senator of the year 1 spent an evening together having dinner at either's residence, they might not have a taste for each other's food, they would wear very different apparel, provide different music, and be discomfited by the absence or presence of slaves. Perhaps the only important thing they had in common was belonging to a senate that was considering invading some weaker nation. But they could get through the evening, fed, amused and perhaps with some incipient mutual admiration. On the other hand, if two members of different evolutionary kingdoms, a lichen and a monkey, spend some time in each other's company, there's just no meeting of the minds.

The term culture is misleading. Wilson latched onto the word because his scientolatry required a word to represent many very different aspects of human consciousness all attributed to genetics. He cites the very recent exponential growth of this heterogeneous mass of consciousness called culture. Notice that he refers especially to the recent explosion in technological knowledge. As a supra-rationalist, this aspect of consciousness would be very important to him, although a case could be made that the tools of a civilization represent the lowest class of cultural objects. No such explosions took place in other, arguably higher, aspects of American culture. Poetry and playwriting, so important to us, were eclipsed by technology and coarser entertainments during the Great Purification.

Also, when Wilson used the term cultural evolution, and gave the number of patents as an example, he incorrectly conveyed a sense of overall progress. Yet each of the very different aspects of culture—religion, philosophy, arts, athletics, science, technology—follow their own somewhat independent cycles. Indeed, advances in one aspect of culture may correlate with retrogression in another. Again, we notice that when Wilson referred to this evolution of culture, he did not recognize spiritual progress. While undoubtedly the Old Americans had an increase in possessions and even of bodily health and life expectancy, were they happier? Did their culture bring happiness to humanity in general? Science was beneficial to human happiness. But if their love for God had grown along with their scientific knowledge as ours has, would they have been happier still? This question is not amenable to the reductionist model, and in any case, Wilson would have said no.

Wilson uses the old one-tool trick of reductionism to search for the basic unit of culture. Surprise! He discovers it is a genetic phenomenon called a meme. He traces this term to Richard Dawkins and Dawkins apologia for selfishness. This work was a noxious example of lending literary glamour to human racism. Dawkins was a materialist, intensely anti-compassion, and energized by the anti-life fallacy of that era.

As I write about these past efforts to understand life, my eyes scan over the canyons and come to rest on my prize. Tembi Trimbak calls it my baby, my original treepaper copy of "Creation, Evolution, Reincarnation, Involution and Realization according to Meher Baba dated 1961. I see the third turning, the maharajah, the senorita, the Bedouin, the ballerina, the dignified Chinese sage, the rough and ready cowboy. They represent the cultures of Old Humanity that the wayfaring soul experiences, man and woman, East and West, rich and poor, brilliant and dull, high and overlooked. The vortex at the end of the cycle caused cultural diversity to decrease. We are less diverse than they were. Our languages, customs styles and beliefs are more universal.

We still cannot see into past lives, but we have a deepened intuitive sense of the great parade. This makes our lives easier. In the Old Humanity, accepting reincarnation tended to make people fatalistic and impassive. (The Christianoform peoples were invigorated by the early removal of reincarnation theory from their doctrines. Two short centuries after Christ, Origen's On First Principles was deemed heretical because of its implied acceptance of reincarnation.) The Awakener removed negative connotations of accepting reincarnation. For us it provides a liberating detachment, but they keenly identified with the characteristics of the present incarnation and suffered greatly because of it. This overattachment to the incarnation lent a desperate, compulsive tone to their lives. They felt they had to experience everything, be everything, and relinquish nothing. This was especially true for the late Old Americans who had the technology and material power to gratify personal desires.

Wilson continues his genes to culture hobby horse, discussing the genes-environment interaction as the source of all human variation, and with respect to that particular chicken-and-egg Wilson has made his mind up as to which came first. Lest we become patronizing, let's remember that of all the kinds of scientific knowledge exploding into consciousness during Wilson's lifetime, among the most revolutionary was knowledge about human genetics. And we benefit from that knowledge everyday. During his hour upon earth, scientific knowledge, and especially knowledge of genetics, outpaced spiritual progress. But like the race between the tortoise and the hare, the balance between material and spiritual knowledge has been restored and we are able to use this knowledge for happiness, without denying human identity to any soul from conception to natural death.

Faith is the Independent Element of Universal Culture.

Page 160 As an historian of spiritual and religious history I am more interested in their description of culture than Wilson's number-pecking about genetics vs. environment. To satisfy my own curiosity I subdivided these 67 cultural universals into five categories:

 

 

Universal Categories

Category	Number
God, theology & divinity (faith)	12
Family, social & community relations	25
Important general Knowledge	9
Food, clothing, shelter, medicine & health	17
Major public achievements	4

Let's use the term faith to summarize all the universal cultural consciousness which pertains to God. Faith consciousness is fundamentally different from the other universals, which involve gross body phenomena and satisfy gross body needs—they are social, nutritive, sexual, aesthetic, or materially productive. Except for faith all universals satisfy some need that comes and goes, like hunger, loneliness, desire for pleasing stimulation. Except for faith consciousness the need arises, is gratified and arises again, whereas God consciousness is continuous, it cannot be gratified in the same way as body-based needs. What material benefit is there in this mental perception of the ineffable? What is bodily gratification? Faith is the only universal consciousness that is not enhanced by body health, vigor, vitality, talent, intellect or any other aspect of gross body fitness. Faith alone is not based in the gross body.

>The Awakener used to say of the capacity to love God, strong mind, strong heart, body doesn't matter. Scientific materialism places faith in gross body function, but God consciousness is something special. It is the only independent aspect of human consciousness. It is continuous. The heart relates to God all alone, for free, all the time, everywhere, independent of sickness or health, poverty or wealth; transcendent consciousness cannot be stolen, borrowed, it cannot be prevented or forcibly changed, because it arises from a source independent of the material world.

The Universality Tautology: the only thing everybody has in common is genetics therefore cultural universality is proof of a genetic causation of culture.

But I suppose we are all closed minded in our own way. For me the only universality is God, so the universality of God consciousness proves God.

Faith is empirical evidence of God. It undermines the assertion that God is a brain-based genetic effect. The scientific materialists of the Great Purification ignored an ocean of empirical evidence of God's presence. We all find what we seek and we seek what we must according to the momentum of sanskaras. I am always seeking God and always finding Him, some of the people of those times, the scientists and intellectuals, were seeking to deny God, and find only the phenomenal world.

Page 162 Wilson proceeds with the Universal culture tautology, describing the cultural similarity of widely separated civilizations that had no contact with one another as making the case for genetic causality. Not the only time Wilson uses "tortuous" to describe his own theory. Why would a scientist devote himself to proving a tortured theory? Blind faith. He wanted something to believe in.

Page 163 The unconquerable adversary of scientific materialism is love. God's love is the source of all love. God's whim to break out of infinite beyond into infinite everything is infinite breaking out of self, which is love. Wilson knew his nemesis was love. Love threatened scientolatry and the church he was trying to build. Welcome to the wonderful, wacky world of blind faith. If the first step to truth is calling something by its right name, the first step to fallacy is calling something by its wrong name. Scientific materialism called love by the term altruism in order to shape it into a brain-mediated genetic effect. By doing so the sociobiologists guaranteed permanent irrelevance to humanity. When they had formulated the "problem of altruism" they were posing a dry, academic problem, a theoretical complication in a model, born on paper and solved on paper. Love was reduced to altruism not to find truth but to circumvent it. When Wilson decided he solved the problem of altruism once and for all, he was not sitting with a grieving mother in an emergency room at three A.M., he was not at a rural bedside tending the wounds of the child who had jumped into the village fire to save her brother, he was not spending time with the guy who lunged at the shooter. His theory provided nothing which would alleviate their suffering, strengthen or illuminate their love.

For the overwhelming majority of humanity, theoretical models of altruism were worthless, they knew nothing of such theories, or even of their existence. And recall, despite Wilson's deification of scientists, they were chasing numbers not happiness. If their predictions obtained, their job was done, happiness not withstanding. That is how it looks to me. Science was extraordinarily beneficial to humanity. Scientific materialism as a philosophy was harmful because it was prejudiced against natural faith, which has always been the standard condition of the heart and the basis of charity. Wilson studied self-sacrifice theoretically, but his model did not understand love on individual level, it lumped people together in order to generalize about their genetics. But one has the impression that the sociobiologists of the Great Purification were not walking the trail of their own tears when they analyzed altruism. They did their impersonal job of theory-making and when enpugh of them agreed with themselves, they moved on.

Page 164 This new phase was arguably even more useless than research on altruism, because it is theorizing about a theoretical concept. Theory about altruism might conceivably have led to educational materials to encourage selfless behavior, although I know of no evidence that it did. But nobody is going to say, "I'd like to help, but I have to check my epigenetic behavior matrix." This is what we know better than they did: knowledge is useless without love, reason unbalances the mind without love. The body fails, prophecy shifts, learning falters, knowledge may mislead, love never fails. After jamming the peg altruism into its precut place, Wilson seems to brush the dust off his clothes, pause briefly for self-congratulation, and then writes now it is time to tackle gene-culture evolution.

Tautology Cosmology. Consilience amounts to finding the relevant tautology for the subject at hand. For the natural sciences it was "science can answer every question because every question is essentially scientific." The tautology behind Ariadne's Thread is "all roads lead to physical science because that's the only place roads can go." For the mind the tautology is "it comes from the brain because the brain generates the mind." For culture it is "culture is universal therefore it is genetic because genetics are universal.

We can skip over much of his recitation of the universality of culture because its only point is the universality of genetics, which is undeniable. Genetics are universal, but they are not ultimate. Wilson's reference to the science-making business is historically interesting:

That poignant paragraph reveals symptoms of the two great self-destructive waves engulfing the Old Americans. Money and sex. When we think of the Old Americans of the Great Purification we immediately think of their obsession with sex. Follow the spearhead of sex consciousness? It is hard for us to imagine they actually believed focusing on sex would bring happiness, especially when one considers the condition of the larger world. Wilson goes on to point out that there is money in sex research, thereby completing the picture of their unnaturalness. The cardinal rule: thou shalt find the money. All their choices were haunted by money. That devil followed them everywhere. It's amazing that they were able to achieve what they did, but their energy was tremendous. They had the energy of naughty, clever children.

Wilson's universe is without purpose, a closed self-sustaining circumlocution. It is because it is. The purpose of scientolatry is to shed the light of tautology on those dangerous shaded spots that seem to suggest the universe does have a some purpose and human beings are essentially different from babbling apes.

 

 

In answering this key question in a way that fit his theory, all of his six real cases of cultural universals were at the level of stinks, thrusts and gropes. "These and other nonverbal signals are ideal subjects for understanding the co-evolution of genes and culture." Why are body odor and tongue thrusts such keys to culture? Does poetry come from the underarm? Nonverbal signals are ideal subjects for misunderstanding human possibility and reducing human beings to the status of clever animals.

Wilson closed this chapter with the call of scientolatry, to submit to genetics as ultimate source and destination, and to the dominion of scientific materialism over cultural wisdom and insight.

Page 177 We thank God the subservience of culture to science was never effected, the knowledge of evolution assumed its rightful place in the larger knowledge of God. We thank God that science and culture have been strengthened to work together like two hands in service to the Reality of the Beloved.