Universal Acid

34. UNIVERSAL ACID

Did you ever hear of universal acid? This fantasy used to amuse me and some of my schoolboy friends. I have no idea whether we invented or inherited it, along with Spanish fly and saltpeter, as a part of an underground youth culture. Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! But what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea—Darwin’s idea—bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.1

Many Darwin-dreaders missed the point (deliberately?) when I introduced this image of Darwin’s dangerous idea in 1995. I went to some lengths to reassure my readers that after the universal acid swept through their favorite topics—ethics, art, culture, religion, humor, and yes, even consciousness—what would be left behind would be just as wonderful, even more wonderful in many regards, but subtly transformed. Darwin’s idea is a revolutionary idea, no doubt about it, but it does not destroy what we value in all these things; it puts them on better foundations, and unites them gracefully with the rest of knowledge. For centuries “the arts and humanities” have been considered not just separate from the sciences but somehow protected from the invasive examinations science engages in, but this traditional isolation is not the best way to preserve what we love. Trying to hide our treasures behind a veil of mystery prevents us from finding a proper anchoring for them in the physical world. It is a common-enough mistake, especially in philosophy.

When people sense that something they love is under threat, their first reaction is to build an “impenetrable” wall, a Maginot Line—and just to be extra safe they decide to enclose a bit more territory, a buffer zone, inside its fortifications. It seems like a good, prudent idea. It seems to protect us from the awful slippery slope, the insidious thin edge of the wedge, and as everyone knows, if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Dig the moat! Build the wall! And as far out as you can afford. But this policy typically burdens the defenders with a brittle, extravagant (implausible, indefensible) set of dogmas that cannot be defended rationally—and hence must be defended, in the end, with desperate clawing and shouting. In philosophy, this strategic choice often shows up as absolutism of one kind or another: the sanctity of (human) life is infinite; at the core of great art lies divine and inexplicable genius; consciousness is a problem too hard for us mere mortals to understand; and—one of my favorite targets—what I call hysterical realism: there are always deeper facts that settle the puzzle cases of meaning. These facts are real, really real, even if we are systematically unable to discover them. This is a tempting idea, in part because it appeals to our sense of proper human modesty. Who are we to say that there just aren’t any facts to settle these issues? Einstein’s notorious resistance to the indeterminacy of quantum physics is an august example of the appeal of this idea. “God does not play dice!” was his heartfelt but ultimately unreasonable ground for resistance. And, when you get right down to it, who are we—or who is Einstein—to say that God doesn’t play dice? This is probably not the way to deal with such issues. Evolutionary thinking is a fine antidote to this kind of hysterical realism.

---

1 Some commentators have thought that my comparison of Darwin’s idea to universal acid was inspired by DNA, which is, after all, deoxyribonucleic acid, but I mean something more universal: DNA is not the only medium of evolution on our planet, and who knows what other instances of evolution there are throughout the universe?