The Grand Coherence, Chapter 12. Sociobiology, the Sexes, and Human Nature

This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.

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Now, as we saw before, to apply the Golden Rule, you need some understanding of human nature, to provide a basis for generalizing from your own situation to that of others. At the highest level, that means that in living and loving people by the Golden Rule, we must remember, sometimes at least, their potential, and the future glory that we may hope will be revealed in them, and we might need to help them become saints and heroes. More often, doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, involves meeting simple needs: a meal, a job to pay the bills by, a roof over their heads. Greater than this is to discern a person’s story and the potential glory in it, and to help them rise to become their best selves, but a lower level also should not be neglected. You should not forget, of course, in your zeal to help your neighbor become a saint or a hero, to attend to his immediate needs for food and shelter. Human beings are soul and body, and our theory of human nature, by which we project ourselves into others' situations to discern what is good to do for them, should not leave out of account the fact that for the time being we are incarnate and mortal, endowed with a whole package of instincts adapted to help us survive and reproduce, so as to make our selfish genes preserve or expand their market share in the gene pool. Yet it's very tricky to integrate the selfish genes into one's theory of human nature without seeming to undermine human dignity. So I beg the reader's patience once again, as I come at it a rather long way around.

Have you ever thought about paint manufacture? It’s kind of gross. Oil. Chemicals. Pollution. Heat. Pots bubbling. Some of this stuff even landfills refuse to accept. You’d better not drink it! Think about that next time you’re in an art museum. Or don’t. Would the paintings still be beautiful if you knew what they were made of? Yuck!

With that in mind, consider the following parable about two art critics. The first learns about how color choices were driven by paint availability, and gets fascinated. He starts writing more and more about colors and the chemistry underlying them, and the history of paint manufacture and how it affected the price and style of art, until pretty soon his art criticism is more about the paint than the pictures. A second art critic, disgusted by this, seeks a purer art criticism. He tries to banish vulgar expressions like “brush stroke” and “canvas.” He never mentions whether a painting is oil or watercolor. He focuses more and more on the “mind’s eye,” and tries to understand what the painter was envisioning. Pretty soon, he gives readers the impression that the only thing that matters is what the painter was thinking, and the whole business of smearing chemicals on sheepskins is a vulgar and unfortunate necessity. Wouldn’t it be nice, he once lets it slip, if we could see directly into the painter’s thoughts? Then we wouldn’t need to paint. He comes to regard painting as a clumsy and dirty workaround for humans’ tragic incapacity for telepathy.

Of course, I think both of these art critics are on the wrong track. There are more important things about a painting than the paint, but the paint isn’t irrelevant or accidental either. Some part of a painting's beauty does arise from the mere colors of the paint, and much more from the interaction of the painter's skill with the paint itself. The resulting paintings may be more beautiful than anything that was in the mind's eye of the painter. A good art critic should know that there's much more to a painting of a meadow in springtime, say, than the paint, while not disdaining to talk about the brush strokes by which the painter made the wildflowers come to life on the canvas, and maybe now and then even crediting some of the beauty of the painting to the paint itself, which allowed the painter to perfectly capture the color of buttercups or fireweed. The painter brings new meaning and purpose out of his materials, without leaving those materials behind.

Now let's turn from the painting of the meadow to the real meadow. It's a spring morning, the sun is bright and warm, the sky is blue, and the only sound is the soft buzzing of the bees as they ply their trade among the gorgeous flowers. The rustling of a gentle breeze makes the flowers sway and dance. All the life and loveliness weaves a spell of peace that makes the human spirit breathe a great sigh of relief and then melt into a hymn of gratitude. 

But alas, a certain botanist knows better than to believe in that feeling of peace. He knows all too well that the meadow has a dark and terrible secret. The flowers are at war. Under the earth, their roots are clutching and clawing and crowding each other, desperate to steal a little of the scarce water from their rivals. A few inches up, the stems shoot out leaves like swords, battling to gobble up a little more of the precious sunlight, and trying to shade other plants in order to starve them of it and to kill them. Even now, all around the naive painter who is delightedly painting the meadow, many plants are dying for lack of light or water or soil nutrients because other plants have seized too much. As for the flowers, with their garish, eye-catching colors like neon signs on a busy city street, they are fighting for the attention of the pollinators. Some will win the fight, get plenty of attention, spread their seed, and their genes will win greater market share in the next generation. Others will not be so lucky. Outshone and eclipsed, they will fail to be mated, and the rest of their lives will be futile, followed by the death of their lineages, slain by more successful flowers, who will have more room to expand the empires of their own selfish genes because of those they have extinguished. This botanist almost envies the lies of the painter, who shows a meadow that is all beauty and no death, which the botanist, alas, knows too much to believe in anymore. The painter does a service by helping people to see, but even more, by blinding them to the truth that every fiber of nature is stained with the mark of Cain.

Well, that can't be right! Even if the botany is true, somehow we need to avoid falling into the trap of looking at meadows this way. There's some sort of fallacy of inappropriate personification here. It's not sad when a flower lineage dies as it would be when a human lineage dies, because flowers can't feel sorrow. And it's not a flaw in meadows to be alive, with all that entails of transience and genetic competition. The sad botanist's error is akin to the too transcendentalist art critic: he feels an aversion to the necessary material basis of the thing he admires. As the painting derives its distinctive permanence from the way that oil paints stick to a canvas, so the meadow and the flowers derived their distinctive permanence from an ecological equilibrium sustained by genetic competition. Without the selfish genes at work preserving themselves, the flowers wouldn't spring out of the ground when the snow melts again and again, nor produce their brilliant colors to impress the pollinators. It's part of the glory of nature to mingle permanence and change in this special way, and we can thank the selfish genes not only for the flowers, but for knowing that when they wilt and fall, the parting is not forever, for they will return. We need to learn not to find genetic competition repugnant so that it spoils the beauty of nature for us. Like oil paints, while it has an unlovely side to it, it is a necessary part of something beautiful.

Now consider a mother and a baby. The mother is transported with delight at the baby's every movement and sound, and even more, if anything, when the baby is peacefully asleep. She provides for the baby's every need, far more eagerly and urgently than for her own. She loves it with a perfect giving love, wanting it to be happy and to flourish, asking nothing in return. And the baby feels perfect trust in its mother. Her presence makes all fear vanish. It turns to her in every need, and loves to feel the warmth of her body. What could be more wonderful? 

And yet it's their selfish genes that are making them behave this way, as one battle in their endless war for market share in the gene pool. The baby is the means by which the mother's selfish genes will invade the next generation. The more the baby flourishes, the likelier it is to produce more offspring. The baby's selfish genes, too, make it trust the mother because of this conspiracy of genetic interests, knowing that it can look to her for an outpouring of support and help because it is the propagator of her genes. 

Also, their genetic interests are not perfectly aligned, after all. There may be current or potential siblings in the picture, in whom the baby will have a certain kinship interest but who are also rivals for the attention of the mother. The baby may cry, sometimes, not because it has real needs but simply in a tug-of-war for the mother's attention against siblings or suitors. As the child grows, the occasional impulse to exaggerate its needs to compete for the mother's attention will be interspersed with impulses to impress the mother and show her that it is fit and promising, worth investing in. And so the child will demand attention, and want to show things that impress, from an instinct to dissuade the mother from neglect, or in the worst case, abandonment. The mother-love instinct will wax and wane, under the influence of the selfish genes, and sometimes, when a child seems hopelessly unfit, or when desperate times call her own survival into question, it may vanish altogether.

This is a little different from the case of the flowers, because unlike flowers, mothers and children are moral agents, and it is right to feel repugnance about some of the things that mother-love, or the different love of a child for a mother, may sometimes urge people to do. Even so, we need to get past the repugnance that arises merely from the personification of the selfish genes. Again, genetic competition is the key to our instincts, and it's a necessary part of how living things, including us, mingle continuity and change through the mechanism of ecological equilibrium. But humans also have reason and conscience. We are, as CS Lewis puts it, "amphibians," simultaneously inhabiting a spiritual and a material plane, and the full panoply of instincts with which we are endowed arise from and are consistent with the general basis of life. 

Instincts enable the generations to keep rolling, teaching us so many things that we need in order to mature and mate and raise offspring. To learn all those things by reason would be too laborious and unreliable. We need our instincts. But instincts are amoral in themselves. CS Lewis compared them to the keys on a piano, all of which are right and wrong at different moments. Goodness is like a melody played on that piano, which tells us when to activate each instinct and when to silence it. 

We are probably right to admire and approve of the mother doting on a baby, for her instinctive affections would seem to be aligned with the Golden Rule. The baby is her neighbor, and she is loving it as herself, doing for it what she would want to be done for her, if she were a baby. Yet even so, it's not quite certain whether she's doing the right thing. If the mother happens to be the only scientist on earth with the genius to develop a vaccine which would save a billion people from a plague, but in an ecstasy of mother-love she has abandoned her laboratory and will let all the people die, then she is doing wrong. (She should hire a wet-nurse and get back to the lab.) Even the mother-love instinct is not always good. 

In general, reason must govern instinct. We ought to treat our instincts the way we treat domestic animals. We admire the courage, and even the potential ferocity, of our dogs, but we keep them on leash much of the time, so that it can't break out at the wrong moment. We admire our horses and love to watch them run free, but often we put bits in their mouths and saddles on their backs and goad them with stirrups, making them carry us whither we will. We give our chickens grain and let them stretch around the barnyard eating bugs, but we don't let them sit on eggs that we want to eat. Sometimes we encourage instincts. We deliberately breed animals, and we throw frisbees for our dogs to satisfy their instincts to chase. But often, we suppress them. 

We all treat our own instincts in the same way, at least to some extent. We appease the feeding instinct, and sometimes actively encourage it, but often we suppress it, because we're in a business meeting, or all the nearby food is someone else's property, or we're on a diet. Likewise, we all know that sexual instincts are sometimes innocent and sometimes dangerous, and need to be diligently regulated. And to what end should they be regulated? The Golden Rule. And that brings instinct in again, because we should appease and appeal to the instincts of others as we would have our own instincts appealed to and appeased. 

That's a sufficiently pedestrian conclusion, but its application can be rather difficult, and we're likely to get tripped up constantly by that same kind of unhelpful repugnance that we kept running into when we studied painting and meadows and mother-love. Only that sort of repugnance tends to be especially strong in sexual matters.

And so, as a way of getting around the repugnance to establish the general point about how the Golden Rule should deal with instincts, let's start with something less touchy: food. 

Our natural appetites for food are shaped by the need of Stone Age man to get the right amount and kind of nourishment to survive. Certain ingredients, such as sugar, salt, and fat, must have been hard to come by in the Stone Age, relative to what the body found useful. So it made sense for the selfish genes to adopt a policy of basically eating as much sugar, salt, and fat as they could get. Stock up!

In modern conditions, this instinct is maladaptive. Sugar, salt, and fat are now easily and reliably available. The risk to the body is far less of going without than of eating too much. But the selfish genes are hopelessly out of date, and keep urging us to eat as if we were primitive hunter-gatherers enjoying a temporary abundance but likely to face famine soon. As a result, most of us, in the contemporary United States at least, are fatter than we should be, many have high blood pressure, and our health care system has a lot of expensive work to do cleaning up after our poor eating choices. 

With that in mind, how should you feed a group of people, in accordance of the Golden Rule? It will make some difference, of course, whether you're catering a party of your friends, or running a catering business for strangers, or volunteering at a soup kitchen, or running a restaurant, or working as the army cook for a regiment, but certain principles are in common nonetheless. 

People need to eat, for starters, so in feeding hungry people who wouldn't otherwise have food readily available, you're obviously more or less doing unto them as you would have them do unto you in their place, and thereby following the Golden Rule. 

But what kind of food should you prepare? Hopefully, something they'll like. Hopefully, something that's good for them, that is, for their health. But people's tastes differ so much. Their dietary needs for staying healthy different quite a bit, too. 

Up to a point, it's good to give them options. Obviously, if nothing else, they have the option of not eating everything on their plate. For those with big appetites, you can let them take seconds, or set up an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can have a menu, and let them order. But options are expensive in money and/or time, and also demand work on the part of the people being fed. They have to read the menu and make their order, or walk the buffet line and scoop food onto their plates. So you can't take the options strategy too far. If you're feeding other people, you'll probably to some extent choose what they eat. 

Culture may provide a good deal of help in coordinating expectations, but there are a lot of different eating practices within a culture like that of the contemporary United States, and your guests may be from the other side of the world, from a culture whose cuisine you know nothing about. 

Is there nonetheless any general advice that can be given about how to feed a crowd?

There is, because underneath all this cultural and individual variation, there are biological commonalities. People need proteins and carbohydrates and fiber. They need foods that aren't too tough or chewy for human teeth to render swallowable. And so forth. But interesting nuances surround this question of salt, sugar, and fat. For we want these foods more than we should. That's part of human nature. And so, if you simply want to please a strange palate, something like potato chips or pastries or candy that panders to these primitive cravings is very likely to satisfy people's need to munch. If you're engaged in more sophisticated cookery, you should still oil your pans and apply the salt, and sweeten things as needed, to reliably give pleasure. On the other hand, use too much salt, sugar, and fat, and you may be doing your customers a disservice, even as you please their palates, by making them fat or rotting their teeth or giving them high blood pressure.

And so your policy in feeding people should probably involve a balance between their immediate needs and long-term investment in their health. If you're going to be feeding them regularly, or if the meal is of a routine character and they're not under any particular stress, then it might be loving of you to make sure what they're giving them to eat is fairly healthy, and keeps the salt, sugar, and fat to sustainable or even sparing quantities. If, on the other hand, they've just been through some hellish experience, so that this is really no time to be practicing willpower, then you might do better to load them up with comfort food, supplying them with potato chips and candy bars and soda to relax them and calm their nerves.

These are hardly infallible generalizations, but to reject this sort of reasoning altogether, and feel completely helpless to feed anyone unless you are fully aware of their nutritional history and detailed preferences, would clearly be a mistake. We can feed the hungry, even hungry strangers, and we can do it better or worse. Some general principles of human physiology are helpful in that, and part of that involves understanding the peculiar way in which human appetites are maladapted to modern conditions, so that the lives of many people are a continual battle of willpower against their propensity to overindulge. We should feed people in ways that take that into account.

Now sex, which is necessary to the survival of the human species, isn't exactly more important than food, which is necessary to the survival not only of the species but of each individual from day to day. But it's much more complicated. The strength of the desires arising from sex probably isn't greater then the strength of the desire for food and the maxima of both of these cravings, but the appetite for food is much more easily sated. The quantity of food needed for health is quite moderate. Our Stone Age instincts, thinking we're in a moment of temporary plenty and ought to hoard food in our bodies against a rainy day, may drive us to eat a good deal more than what is necessary for health, but even so, they're soon sated, for even in the Stone Age it wouldn't have been adaptive for one man to eat enough food for ten. But if his selfish genes don't want him to guzzle ten meals at a sitting, they certainly do want him to keep ten wives in a harem. Sexual appetites naturally have an unbounded and insatiable character, for very clear evolutionary reasons. In modern conditions, it's possible to satisfy the appetite for food pretty satisfactorily, but the appetite for sex must be sternly governed if it's not to drive us mad.

So let's turn to the sociobiology of sex, and extract a few basic generalizations that we can use to understand human nature.

Let's start with the most basic question: What is gender? Why is the human race divided into male and female? What determines gender? How are men and women different? 

People always knew that men and women had not only different genitalia, which usually remained hidden, but also different body shapes, voices and behaviors, in ways that were sometimes subtle but cumulatively large and unmistakable. Now science has revealed a pervasive difference in every cell of male and female bodies that provides a very clear and objective basis for all these differences: DNA. One of the chromosomes in human DNA is the sex chromosome. Sex chromosomes come in two types: X and Y. Women usually have two X chromosomes. Men usually have one X and one Y. Sometimes the number of chromosomes accidentally differs, but sex always seems to be well defined, e.g., a man with two X and one Y chromosome may have slightly feminine characteristics in some ways but is still definitely a man. DNA is distributed in cells throughout the human body, so every part of a male is definitely male, and every part of a female is definitely female, at the level of chromosomes. 

That's really all that needed, by the way, to refute the follies of transgenderism. The physiological and instinctive differences between men and women arise from DNA, and male and female DNA are innate and immutable. "Sex change" surgery doesn't change a person's sex, it's just a form of mutilation.

The selfish genes, once well adapted, are absurdly out of date today. They're inherited from long, long ago. Probably all of human history, that is, all the time that has elapsed since men invented the craft of writing, hasn’t been long enough to alter the gene pool very much. In that sense, we are not really suited to city life. Perhaps we are not even suited to farm life. What sociobiologists sometimes call “the environment of evolutionary adaptation” was probably the prehistoric hunter-gatherer band lacking farming or metal tools, or in short, the Stone Age. We lived in that condition for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, and that’s probably the last time the selfish genes had leisure to learn the lessons of survival and inscribe them into our genes. We are Stone Age men and women, dressed up in modern clothes and modern customs, but still with Stone Age instincts. The physiologies of men and women differ substantially because men and women needed different traits to pull their weight economically and compete for mating opportunities in the Stone Age, and the instincts that shape their preferences and behaviors differ for the same reason.

Men’s sexual instincts are shaped, in mating, by the selfish genes' goal of maximizing quantity of mates, since men's reproductive potential is almost unlimited if they can secure enough mates. That makes them relatively risk-loving, since spectacular success in the Stone Age could have a huge reproductive payoff, if a man became a tribal leader and harem master. Women, by contrast, have an instinct to seek quality in mates. Since every child will require a lot of investment from her, she doesn’t want to get pregnant unless the child will have a promising genetic inheritance from its father, or economic support, and preferably both. Women also tend to have a peculiar alertness, and a propensity for watching and worrying, because they and their children are especially vulnerable. They are naturally more risk-averse than men.

Another contrast between the sexes is that male jealousy looks to the past, while female jealousy looks to the future. A man’s selfish genes want his mate (a) not to be secretly pregnant with another man’s child, and (b) to feel attachment to him and no one else. A woman’s selfish genes want long-term male parental investment from any man who impregnates her. Male sexual jealousy cares above all about physical fidelity, since any breach of that compromises his certainty of his paternity of any children his wife bears. It can get murderous. Female sexual jealousy cares more about affection, since she needs his ongoing attachment and resources to raise her offspring.

The general pattern that males seek quantity and females quality in mates applies to many species, but among humans in particular, it seems that a sexual division of labor emerged early on, whereby men were hunters and women were gatherers. This seems like a wise economic arrangement for a typical foraging band. It would yield a balanced diet of meat and plant matter, and women could combine gathering herbs with looking after children, while men did the more strenuous and dangerous work of roaming far in search of wild game. And this arrangement persisted for so long that people had time to adapt to it, with men acquiring the characteristics that made them successful hunters, and women the characteristics that made them successful gatherers. Men and women have inherited a propensity for hunter-gatherer specialization from their prehistoric ancestors, and despite an interlude of civilization that has occurred since that time, we still have instincts suited to it. 

For example, why do women love shopping? 

Of course, that’s not an absolute law, only a strong generalization, but it holds true regularly enough to be worth living by. If a man wants to please his wife, letting her go shopping with her girlfriends while he watches the kids is likely to succeed. If a woman wants to please her husband, she probably shouldn’t drag him along while she ambles through the mall admiring the merchandise. Some modern Westerners will have a knee-jerk impulse to dismiss such generalizations as “stereotypes,” but frankly, that’s not a very helpful word to have in one’s active vocabulary. “Stereotype” basically means a generalization, combined with a gratuitous pejorative connotation that objects to generalization as such. But we need generalizations to navigate our world. 

We considered the example of how to feed a crowd. Now let's think about how to entertain a crowd. Suppose a group of people, including both men and women, are in the United States on some sort of intercultural exchange, and a friend of yours who is supposed to host them unexpectedly needs an urgent surgery. You're asked to help out. You have these people on your hands for a day, and you're supposed to give them a little fun, but you know hardly anything about their culture or what they like. And while they know a little bit of English, it's not enough to conduct a searching inquiry about what they'd enjoy most. Your best bet might be to borrow some insights from sociobiology, and take the women shopping and the men to a ball game, an arcade, or an action movie. Shopping appeals to women's gathering instinct, from the human race's old hunter-gatherer days. Sports, video games, and action movies appeal to men's hunter instincts. You'll be practicing the Golden Rule, doing unto the men and women in your care as you would be done by, if you had the endowments of instincts that they had. Sociobiology gives you a reasonable basis for guessing what they like.

Let me conclude this chapter with a few not very serious examples that illustrate the method of reasoning that I'm advocating. 

First, there's an old custom by which men open doors for women, as part of "chivalry," in a kind of trivialized sense of the word. It seems a little odd, not to say silly, because women's strength, in general, is very sufficient for opening doors. They don't really need men to do it for them. On the other hand, it seems pretty innocuous, so if anyone has a preference in favor of the practice, it might be worth indulging. What does my "Golden Rule plus sociobiology" method to say about it?

Well, I can see why it happens. Men enjoy showing off their strength to women. It's instinctive. Women enjoy being cared for, attended to, protected by men. So this little ritual of opening doors is calculated to please both instincts. It's irrational because women don't really need the service involved. But in another sense, it's smart to get the pleasure of appeasing people's instincts at such negligible cost.

I think the Golden Rule could go either way on this one. You might love your neighbor by indulging the gratifying gesture, or by not wasting time and effort on a needless service. Of course, if a man knows that a particular woman really likes having doors opened, or finds it annoying to have doors opened for her, he should probably make sure to do it, or avoid it, respectively. Likewise, if a woman knows that a particular man enjoys opening doors for women, or dislikes it, she should wait for him to open it, or quickly open it herself, respectively. But in general, chivalrous door opening is a way of interacting either with strangers, or if with acquaintances, probably infrequently enough that you won't know their idiosyncratic preferences. Anyway, keeping track of preferences is far more mentally expensive, so to speak, than adopting a uniform policy one way or the other. Does the Golden Rule make a difference? If a man instinctively enjoys opening doors for women, he might do it for the fun of it, or as a way of meeting women or making a good impression. But this is just where the Golden Rule is helpful, for a man is more likely to enjoy opening doors for young and beautiful women, but older women, and plain or awkward women, will probably enjoy the attention as much or more, so the Golden Rule will make sure he is attentive to them, too.

As another example, should husbands take special care to bring their wives flowers and to do special things for them on their anniversaries? Sociobiology shows why women value these little things more than seems rational. Women's selfish genes fear abandonment by mates, and appreciate any sign of ongoing affection and attachment from their husbands. In the midst of civilization, with all the power of language and culture at her disposal, a woman will probably have much better grounds for confidence that her husband will stay with her than his bringing of flowers or remembering of anniversaries. And the flowers and anniversary dates may not affect her conscious belief in her husband's ongoing attachment and fidelity at all. Nonetheless, the simple visible signs that he thinks of her when he's gone and looks for things she would like, and that he's counting and valuing the time that their relationship continues, will thrill her selfish genes and her instincts and give her pleasure.

Against this, giving flowers and celebrating anniversaries might be a little irrational. Perhaps the money spent on flowers could buy more lasting decorations, resulting in a more beautiful dwelling over time. Perhaps there would be more suitable evenings for a date than an anniversary, which might have bad weather. A husband might know that his wife trusts him without the flowers and anniversaries and doesn't care for the old rituals. Yet does he, really? Did they discuss it? If she disclaimed an interest in flowers and anniversaries, was she sincere? Or was she trying to relieve him of guilt for forgetfulness or poverty? If she was sincere, does she know herself? Would she find that the flowers and anniversary celebrations which she never wished for actually bring her great pleasure? 

Let's take a third case, a rather more important one this time. A woman of marriageable age wants to become a writer, and dedicates herself intensely to efforts to craft a good novel or book of poetry, while ignoring her looks, fending off a suitor or two, and disclaiming interest in marriage for the foreseeable future. Her relations are concerned. Shouldn't they intervene and pressure to sideline the writing dream and focus on trying to get married?

While this example is more important and difficult than the doors, flowers, and anniversaries, there is the same conflict of reason versus instinct. Writing is rational. A woman who has had great benefit from reading over the course of her life might well think she can best serve humanity by writing a book or a poem or an article. But reason vs. instinct is nuanced, for it's also rational to want to marry and form a family and procreate. The pleasures that her mere instincts afford her by meeting men or dressing to impress them are less rational, and less important, than the pursuit of truth or the praise of virtue through good writing. They may also be less pleasurable, from her perspective. Yet if she encouraged them and yielded to their desires a little more, what they would try to arrange for her, namely to attach a good man to her by the bonds of sexual love, which reason would amplify by the promises of marriage, might be more valuable than anything she will accomplish by writing.

And so her relations might practice the Golden Rule by seeking to influence her in either direction. They might show love both to her and to her future readers by encouraging her writing. But they might show love both to her and to her future children by discouraging her obsession with writing and trying to interest her in men and in marriage. It depends a good deal on how much promise she shows as a writer, and how well her personality seems likely to cope with the loneliness if she turns down marriage for writing's sake. Of course, if she's a good writer, that may be the best way in the long run for her to find a good match, someone who values her for the best of who she is. But no matter how great her genius as a writer, and no matter how rational her suitors, it will almost certainly improve her odds of getting married if she gets in the habit of dressing pretty. And it's not only for her benefit but for theirs. It would be a shame if her neglect of her appearance eventually puts a man in the position of falling in love with her mind and wanting to share his life with her, yet feeling unable to marry her because his complete lack of attraction to her body makes him unable to perform basic marital obligations.

One last light example before we turn to more serious matters. There is a long tradition of society intentionally using the charms of women to motivate men to do great deeds. I learned in a movie set in Ireland of a custom whereby the women of a village hung their bonnets at the finish line of a horse race, for the men to catch as they crossed it, the point being that the man who arrived first could have his pick of them and show his favor to any woman he chose, while those following had to choose among an increasingly narrow selection. In medieval tournaments, jousting knights would wear the colors of women who are watching, as if to fight for them. On modern football fields, female cheerleaders, rather scantily clad, adorn the margins of the field, stirring the crowd to excitement. Why does this happen? Should we approve of it? Should we try to end such customs, or on the contrary, should we invent more ways of using feminine charms to stir men to achievement?

To the last question, I don't see why not, up to a point at least. Medieval tournaments, though glorious, were perhaps a little too violent to deserve full approval, and cheerleaders, though fun, are a little too scantily clad and may provoke too much lust, but I like the Irish horse race with the women's bonnets to be claimed as prizes for showing favor, and clever event planners could surely come up with many other ways of leveraging men's interest in impressing women to make them do fine things for their sake, once the principle is agreed upon, that both genders would, by and large, find pleasing. 

I have said all these cases are relatively unimportant, but they're not absolutely unimportant. To be indifferent to whether men are gallant and considerate and ambitious and brave in order to impress women, and whether women make themselves beautiful and pure and kind in order to impress men, is a little like being indifferent to whether a meadow is full of colorful wildflowers. A meadow of nothing but grass might be just as useful for some purposes, such as grazing dairy cows. But the extra beauty of the wildflowers is a glory that should be valued over and above the merely utilitarian or economic value of a meadow. In the same way, the human race might manage to reproduce itself from one generation to the next without any of these arts and practices which heighten the appeal of each sex to the other, but some beauty and glory would be lost.

Above all, a key takeaway from this chapter is that it's important to avoid the trap of finding sociobiology as a basis for understanding human nature repugnant and offensive. It's an old trap. Many thinkers have, in one way or another, set the spiritual aspect of human nature in opposition to the body, and regarded the latter as a thing to be a little ashamed of and to minimize. But that's the wrong attitude to take. It's a kind of pride, which is too disdainful of all sorts of innocent pleasure. Human beings are made to be bodily as well as spiritual creatures, with instincts as well as reason, and we shouldn't rebel against that. Genetic competition is the paint with which God has painted the picture we call life on the canvas of physical nature, and we are part of that picture, even as we also bear a divine spark of rationality and transcendence that sets us apart from the rest of living nature. 

Genetic competition has many manifestations, and some of them are glorious and well worth enjoying. It can make fools of us, but it can also make us wise. We must tame and govern our instincts, but it's not best practice, in general, to try to kill them. We can reject instinctive impulses and pleasures because they would interfere with some rational plan of action or of life to which we are committed, but I think it's always a mistake to think it's beneath our dignity to yield to instinctive impulses and pleasures as such, simply because they belong to our animal nature and are native to a lower level of reality than that of reason. The occasional woman who is offended when men open doors for her or compliment her appearance is making this mistake.

All the examples we've considered thus far involved a degree of tension or opposition between instinct and reason, and consequently the conclusions are ambivalent. We didn't really settle any of the questions that were raised. But that's because we're dealing with debatable etcetera of sexual ethics, matters of taste and almost of fashion. When we come to the core questions of Christian sexual ethics, the arguments will play out very differently, as I will prove in the next chapter, which is the most narrow and practical chapter of the book.