On fiction and beetles – Manvir Singh in The New Yorker:

‘Adding to the internal tension was something I’d observed among my beetles: the spectre of evolved selfishness. What looked like coöperation was, I discovered, laced with sexual conflict. The female beetles, when they had a size advantage, ejected their male partners; the males evidently stuck around less to help than to insure future mating opportunities. Where I first saw biparental collaboration was instead a complicated waltz of organisms seeking to perpetuate their own interests. Was I one of them—another gene machine bent on favoring itself? I had, to that point, considered myself a mostly decent person, moved by empathy and committed to self-expression. Was all this actually vanity and delusion, selfishness masquerading as morality? The prospect was unsettling. So I hid away in a one-room library that smelled faintly of old textbooks and the alcohol used to preserve animal specimens, and there I started to work out a response. We’re evolved organisms, I figured, but we’re also an intelligent, cultural species capable of living by ideals that transcend our egoistic origins. What emerged from my musings was a personal ideology, at the core of which was an appreciation of creation—including artistic and scientific work. Even an awkward scribble, I supposed, expresses an incomprehensibly epic causal history, which includes a maker, the maker’s parents, the quality of the air in the room, and so on, until it expands to encompass the entire universe. Goodness could be reclaimed, I thought. I would draw and write and do science but as acts of memorialization—the duties of an apostle of being. I called the ideology Celebrationism, and, early in 2012, I started to codify it in a manic, sprawling novel of that name.’

(…)

‘After college, I spent a year in Copenhagen, where I studied social insects by day and worked on “Celebrationism” the rest of the time. Reassured of the virtue of intellectual and artistic work, I soon concluded that fictional wizards provided the best model for a life. As I wrote to my friend Cory, “They’re wise, eccentric, colorful, so knowledgeable about some of the most esoteric subjects, lone wolves in a sense, but all of their life experience constantly comes together in an exalting way every time they do something.” When, the following year, I started a Ph.D. in human evolutionary biology at Harvard, I saw the decision as in service of my Celebrationist creed. I could devote myself to meditating on the opportune swerves that produced us.’

(…)

‘We help people, yes, but the decision to give is influenced by innumerable selfish considerations, including how close we are to a recipient, whether they’ve helped us before, how physically attractive they are, whether they seem responsible for their misfortune, and who might be watching. A Martian observer might, accordingly, have expected Singer’s arguments to focus less on the horrific conditions of overcrowded pig farms and instead to appeal to our hedonic urges—more along the lines of “Veganism makes you sexy” or “People who protest animal experimentation have more friends and nicer houses than their apathetic rivals.”’

(…)

‘To start a Ph.D. at a major research university is to have proximity to countless intellectual currents, and I began to drift through the scholarly worlds on campus, which is how I found Moshe Hoffman. Moshe is intense. A curly-haired game theorist with a scalpel-like ability to dissect arguments and identify their logical flaws, Moshe was raised in an Orthodox Hasidic community in Los Angeles. He grew up wearing a kippah and spending half of each school day studying the Talmud and other religious texts until, at the age of fifteen, he forsook his faith. He had a chance conversation with an atheist classmate, then picked up Richard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene.” The book exposed him to game theory and evolutionary biology, setting him on a lifelong quest to solve the puzzles of human behavior.’

(…)

‘Moshe argued that humans deal with this dilemma by adopting moral principles. Through learning or natural selection, or some combination, we’ve developed a paradoxical strategy for making friends. We devote ourselves to moral ends in order to garner trust. Which morals we espouse depend on whose trust we are courting. He demonstrated this through a series of game-theoretic models, but you don’t need the math to get it. Everything that characterizes a life lived by moral principles—consistently abiding by them, valuing prosocial ends, refusing to consider costs and benefits, and maintaining that these principles exist for a transcendental reason—seems perfectly engineered to make a person look trustworthy.’

(…)

‘An impulse can exist because of its evolutionary utility but still be heartfelt. The love I feel for my spouse functions to propagate my genes, but that doesn’t lessen the strength of my devotion.’

(…)

‘How does one exist in a post-moral world? What do we do when the desire to be good is exposed as a self-serving performance and moral beliefs are recast as merely brain stuff? I responded by turning to a kind of nihilism, yet this is far from the only reaction. We could follow the Mentawai, favoring the language of transaction over virtue. Or we can carry on as if nothing has changed. Richard Joyce, in his new book, “Morality: From Error to Fiction,” advocates such an approach. His “moral fictionalism” entails maintaining our current way of talking while recognizing that a major benefit of this language is that it makes you likable, despite referring to nothing real. If you behave the way I did in grad school, going on about the theatre of morality, you will, he suggests, only attract censure and wariness. Better to blend in.
Intellectually, I find the proposal hard to swallow. The idea of cosplaying moral commitment for social acceptance would surely magnify whatever dissonance I already feel. Still, a decade after my first meeting with Moshe, experience forces me to acknowledge Joyce’s larger point. It’s easy to inhabit the fiction.’

(…)

‘I have moral intuitions, sometimes impassioned ones. I try to do right by people, and, on most days, I think I do an O.K. job. I dream on.’

Read the article here.

The illusion of heartbreak or other heartfelt emotions doesn’t imply that it is all only evolutionary utility.

Even if love is a self-serving performance, we can still admire our own fiction.

Our morality doesn’t refer to anything real, but it helps us to believe that we are basically O.K.

In other words: God might be dead, but we found a replacement.