A Little Background
I haven’t been posting much over recent weeks because of a mild cold or sinus infection followed by a volunteer project at my parish. I’ve returned to serious reading and have started to write again, beginning with this brief introduction to what will be a series of essays describing my Christian understanding of sociobiology, which I believe to be potentially a plausible way of describing the sacramental nature which men have in potential and can develop by proper responses to God and His Creation. The volunteer project has ended and I’ll be easing into my old schedule of studying and writing over the next few days.
Reading the works of others and occasionally rereading my own works is a key part of my way of exploring Creation from a Christian viewpoint. Often, it’s seemed that God’s way of drawing me forward is to lead me to books which raise important questions or provide ways of answering questions I’m already dealing with. It’s been remarkable how often I’ve drawn a nearly forgotten book out of a box in my storage or have simply picked a book from the library shelf thinking to divert myself. I’ll soon find out I’m reading that particular book at the right time to advance my thoughts in a fruitful way. So it is that I found reading Abraham Heschel’s God in Search of Man: a Philosophy of Judaism and E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition at the same time. This might seem the recipe for cognitive dissonance, but, along with Wilson’s On Human Nature—which I have just started, I’ve found myself cultivating some pretty fertile soil.
As background, the reader can read Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies and More on Matter as Frozen Soul.
Can Sociobiology Help Us to Understand Man?
Sociobiologists have discovered that overcrowding will often lead to the breakdown of natural hierarchical structures, that is, to the breakdown of ritualized hierarchical behavior, in social animals. When this happens, something akin to what a political scientists call a tyranny might develop. Certainly, there will be at least a movement toward, into or through, a radical state of disorder, whether or not a Napoleon is there to reestablish some sort of order.
The best empirical results in the study of the effects of overcrowding are based on observations of animals in the wild and also controlled populations such as cats in overcrowded cages but seem to be in good agreement with history and with ongoing breakdowns in order in many countries. The sense of overcrowding for a particular population will have a strong genetic foundation perhaps modified by human selection in the case of pets or farm animals and perhaps even modified by particular conditions even in the wild. In some species, animals and family groups living in a region might tolerate each other’s nearness when food is plentiful but they’ll desire more space, perhaps even in location of dens for sleeping and raising young, when food is harder to obtain. Others such as baboons will demand foraging space during the day but will cluster in groups for protection against predators.
Regular readers of my blog or readers of any of my books will realize I have little patience for any reductionistic ways of thought, materialistic or idealistic—though it’s often a good way of understanding much about the concrete particulars of even a state so sublime as motherhood. Reductionism is fine as a methodology which provides material for further analysis and contemplation.
I understand created being as lying on a spectrum of abstract being, ultimately the thoughts God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation, to concrete, thing-like being. This view of created being is what led me, mostly seriously but partly tongue-in-cheek, to describe thing-like being as frozen soul. Consequently, it bothers me not the least to think of genes and glands and neurons as being, in some sense, manifestations of what we might very loosely call raw moral-stuff, however crudely and imperfectly manifested it might be in mortal men, let alone sharks.
Let me finish this short introduction by providing a short answer to one question. Why do I write that the sociobiological viewpoint can give us a sacramental way of understanding human nature?
We human beings are at least creatures of flesh-and-blood. What we are beyond that is a matter of our personal development which is itself something of a result of the exploration into human possibilities. Some of us aren’t bothered by this sort of connection to very concrete, thing-like being. I, in particular, am not bothered because I think of the concrete levels of being are shaped from the stuff of more abstract levels, that stuff is shaped from the stuff of still more abstract levels.
I think our bodies are not merely flesh-and-blood, though we have to consider our flesh-and-blood natures before we can understand more. I also don’t believe our bodies are united with souls composed of different stuff from thing-like being. Our bodies can be better considered as frozen soul, the concrete tip of an iceberg which is mostly abstract being not directly accessible to perception or measurement or experimentation. But, and this is a big but, the abstract which lies ever in what has been shaped from it becomes apparent in the concrete when we explore and analyze that concrete being in proper ways. With a disciplined effort, we can see the frozen soul in the mother so tenderly taking her newborn to her breast. In that baby beginning to suck and to perhaps pinch with toothless gums, we can see that which is a human animal being introduced to the first of many communities it will encounter and sometimes join.
If we pay attention to all of created being—living and nonliving alike, we can start to see God united with man, the Body of Christ with all its human members united with the Son of God Himself in perfect union with Father and Holy Spirit.
The great task of modern man is to learn how to write and speak and think and act so that we can truly understand ourselves and our various communities as participants in a story being told by God, the story of the birth and development of the Body of Christ. We must make these ways of writing and speaking and thinking and acting our own so that we truly become members of the Body of Christ. Sociobiological ways of thought, though sometimes presented in an anti-theistic manner, can help us to accomplish this great task of becoming God-centered members of the Body of Christ by understanding ourselves as intending such, that is, as growing into those proper roles.