Evolution or Emergence: Freedom and Paradox on a Saturated Beach

by Joseph Kirby

In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains why he has no time to waste explaining away ancient myths in terms of the latest scientific discoveries:

I have not time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that. […] Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon [the king of monsters], or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature.” (230a)

In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard calls this question “the Absolute Paradox,” the frontier to which thinking cannot help but arrive but also cannot possibly solve. Basically, we must know the answer to this question in order to determine which way of life is wise and which way is foolish, but it is impossible for human thinking to provide this answer. Something interesting occurs, however, when we filter the debate over the theory of evolution through the lens of this ancient riddle. It turns out that both sides actually agree on one fundamental point: that the theory of evolution, if true, dispels the Paradox, proves that human beings are really just complicated animals.

What if this agreement between science and religion is a mistake?

What if the Paradox cannot be proven one way or another, by either science or religion, because it is referring to the open-ended character of reality, human freedom, the fact that we are obliged to choose which of these two possibilities we are going to presuppose with our words and deeds? What if, in other words, we are free to decide whether our actions will imply that humans are really just savage beasts, or whether our actions will imply that humans bear the image of a divine and gentle nature that has been distorted by a life of injustice? If this is the case, the traditional job of religious discourse would have been to inspire those of us still wavering between the two poles of this Paradox to shape our lives in light of the latter presupposition. Modern science, meanwhile, would not have disproven religion so much as rendered some of this traditional rhetoric less persuasive – which, unfortunately, has made it very difficult for many people to believe that this second option is actually a rational possibility.

The problem with our current intellectual climate is simple: pious people are striving to persuade both themselves and others of the divine path by refuting the theory of evolution, but this is only making the problem worse. This rhetorical strategy just confirms the supposedly “scientific” mind in its mistaken belief that there is a dichotomy between the rationality of science and the irrationality of religion, that evolution has indisputably proven the beast and that anyone who says otherwise is a superstitious fool running from the truth. The way out of this dismal situation is simple: we must show the “scientific” mind and the pious mind that there is no dichotomy whatsoever between the scientific theory of evolution and the ontological claim that human beings are free to choose which ontology they will presuppose.

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Imagine a long empty beach. A single family arrives to have a picnic. A second family arrives, then a third. If the families are mutual strangers, it is unlikely that the new arrivals will sit immediately beside the people already there. Instead, they are more likely to go to some empty spot on the shore, leaving a respectful buffer between themselves and their neighbors – as when strangers fill the space of a subway car or men saturate a wall of urinals. There is no planning involved in this; space fills evenly, according to a logic similar to the diffusion of a gas. But when a tenth, a twentieth, a fiftieth family arrives, something different begins to happen. Forced into proximity, the interaction between the families must become more complex: paths from the back of the beach to the edge of the surf need demarcation; places for the disposal of waste, the procurement of provisions, the playing of sports, reading, swimming, need to be assigned; someone gets sick, so the families decide to establish a clinic; a fight breaks out so they decide to establish a police service and a judicial system to arbitrate disputes; more and more families continue to arrive, so a wall is built around the entire area to forestall the need for even stricter regulations; eventually, they establish a formal political institution for deciding how such regulations will be made.

Paths, clinics, judges, walls, politics – when there was only one family, none of these forms could possibly have existed. More importantly, however, it would also have been impossible to predict exactly what form these institutions would eventually take when the beach became saturated. This is a paradigm example of how complexity emerges: the material elements (individual families) that coagulate into a more complex form (political organization) do not determine the characteristics of that form. Moreover, conducting minute scientific observation of a single family, a single human, a single human cell, (a human genome, a hydrogen atom), will never allow us to predict what kind of political organization might eventually emerge on a saturated beach.

The supposedly “scientific” vision of reality usually takes physics, the science of the simplest bits of matter, as the paradigm for explaining how complex organizations emerge. This beach-story moves in the opposite direction: the obviously unpredictable emergence of political organization out of a field of families, this negotiation between the necessity of fixed law and the freedom to choose how law will be fixed, is seen as the paradigm for how all complex organization emerges. For example, when our universe was a vast and undifferentiated cloud of hydrogen and helium gas, it would have been impossible to foresee what rules would eventually come to govern the interactions between higher order elements. Until gravity concentrated these elements into coherent points (stars) and the pressure of this saturation gave rise to nuclear fusion and the formation of the periodic table, chemistry would be as non-existent as was political organization when the beach was populated by only a single family. The relationship between physics and chemistry, in other words, is parallel to the relationship between culture and politics, between one family and a space saturated with families that organize themselves in progressively more complex arrangements. The universe is not the temporal development of a logical structure already inherent in some ur-cloud of primordial atoms. It is the temporal unfolding of radical newness – and now, as the knife edge of this roughly 14 billion year old process, human beings are responsible for choosing how the ontologically unprecedented technological, political, and cultural layers of reality will come into being.

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What does all this have to do with freedom and the Absolute Paradox? Let us begin with some sensible ontological humility: as human beings, we do not know whether and to what extent our actions are fundamentally free or fundamentally determined. From here, we can make an obvious point about the relationship between thought and action, philosophy and life: even though we do not know which ontological position is true, we are still obliged to live, and living means making (what at least appear to be) decisions. This is where the Paradox comes in: the decisions we make will inevitably presuppose one or the other ontological possibility. And now the crux: the more our decisions presuppose that humans are really just savage beasts, the more the world will come to appear that way to us; alternatively, the more our decisions presuppose that we are free to decide our fate, the more we will understand that we live in the context of a fundamental ontological choice between determinism and freedom. The theory of evolution, in this context, is being misappropriated by people who have made the wrong ontological choice as proof that there was never a choice to make. It appears, to them, that this is the only possibility. This thought experiment is an attempt to present how evolution appears from the other ontological possibility – not, of course, as some self-contradictory proof of freedom, but simply to point out that freedom is just as much a possibility today as it was for the people who lived prior to the advent of modern science.

I have found the opening of Genesis useful for understanding how all this relates to the real world. The beach, of course, is the earth today, saturated with families, engaged in the process of deciding where to put the paths and walls. As in the beginning, however, when the earth was a formless void covered in darkness, so has the earth become again, a formless cloud of greed, fear, anger, hatred, and lust. Like the god of Genesis, our job is to move over the face of this darkness, both as it manifests in our own lives and as it manifests in the world at large, and speak the words that will help it to move from death to life, from chaos to creation, words that will help usher in the next layers of universal complexity – society, technology, politics – in ways that lead to the flourishing of all life.

Joseph Kirby is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Christian Studies, focusing on the philosophy of religion, politics, and ecology.

First photo used from http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/, public domain. Second photo by Philip Capper used from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maketu_beach_picnic.jpg. Third photo by NASA, public domain.

Building with a Borrowed Axe

“The trouble with the academic imitator is not that he depends upon traditions, but that the latter have not entered into his mind; into the structures of his own ways of seeing and making.”

               -- John Dewey, Art as Experience, 277.

Overwhelmed by the clamor of the newly industrialized American life, Henry David Thoreau retreated to simple quill and quiet in a cabin on the banks of Walden Pond with nothing but a borrowed axe on Independence Day, July 4, 1845 (Walden, 70). Thoreau, like many other 19th century Americans, fought to find his feet on the unfamiliar industrial ground. He lamented the passing of real work, and with it real satisfaction, seeing hidden in the eyes of Americans a quiet desperation. “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed under what are called the games and amusements of mankind,” says Thoreau. “There is no play in them, for this comes after work” (18). Thoreau and many others at the time, felt a deep sense that something real was being lost or covered over by culture and technology.

This desperation drove Thoreau into the woods to find consolation in the “bravery of minks and muskrats” (18). Learning to depend only on the work of his own hands and the company of his own thoughts was, for Thoreau, a process of self-discovery, self-mastery, and self-reliance. For two and a half years, Thoreau lived in a cabin built with his own two hands and an axe his neighbour lent him. The ambitious solitude of Thoreau’s project is admirable and puts to shame many of our sustainability efforts and our meager attempts to make things from scratch and “off the grid.”

A reproduction of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond
in Concord, Massachussetts.

And yet Henry David Thoreau built with a borrowed axe. “It is difficult to begin without borrowing,” he admits (40).

I think Thoreau represents an essential dynamic in culture, one that seems always present and necessary at some level. In every generation, there are always those in Western society who feel that something important is being lost or covered over. Whether we label them “hippy” or “emo” or “hipster” or whatever else, each of these movements represents people who are dissatisfied with the pressure to conform to the cultural status quo that dictates what individuality ought to look like. These movements, just like the American transcendentalists, can illuminate oppressive structures hidden in culture, and we would do well to pay attention to them rather than dismiss them outright.

However, we should also acknowledge that it is all too easy to forget that our individuality does not emerge out of nothing. No matter how self-reliant we think we are, we can’t get around the fact that we begin by borrowing. Each of us was each born into a culture, a language, and a tradition, and we cannot select our identities prior to our immersion in these. We can resist the pressures of the culture we find ourselves in. But even so, we can’t get around the fact that we are acting in response to something that already exists. Our identities are always anchored in one way or another, for better or worse, to the communities we find ourselves already in. In these communities, we are inescapably bound to one another, creating and changing each other through how we interact.

The point here is a Heideggerian one. We owe the core of who we are to the world into which we were born. We were thrown into a way of life from the moment we opened our eyes, a way that orients us in the world and gives us a certain fluency in our being-in-the-world. We learn a language that allows us to express our innovative ideas, and it’s impossible to have any individuality and freedom of self-expression unless we are already indebted to the culture into which we are born and raised. Unless we have borrowed an axe, so to speak, we cannot begin building our individuality.

The deep desire for self-reliance that was made explicit in the American transcendentalists like Thoreau is still with us today, I think, in the way authenticity is so highly valued. It represents a legitimate concern that we be keenly aware and critical of the sorts of pressures that society exerts on us and the ambient noise that subtly shapes the way we think. At the same time, though, this desire for self-reliance grows out of a certain way of thinking about individuality that locates our individual uniqueness and our core selves somewhere deep inside ourselves, closed off from the world and from others. Coming to terms with our belonging to one another and to the culture into which we were born allows us to cultivate who we want to be in an authentic way that moves from simple self-reliance to other-reliance, to an ontology of dependence.

So it seems to me that the search for authenticity, or its fetishization according to some, is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it contributes to a self-aware critique of the culture that shapes us, built on an ontology of dependence rather than the blind pursuit of self-reliant novelty. Authentic individuality, built with a borrowed axe, makes way for a new kind of self-reliance that is not just about our inner selves and is inseparable from our dependence upon one another.

Matthew E. Johnson is a junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, focusing his philosophical studies on hermeneutics, aesthetics, discourse, and issues surrounding individual and group identity.

Photo used from http://blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat/2011/06/07/henry-david-thoreau/

In Preparation for Holiday Hibernation: Highlights from Fall 2013

But when the hard winter comes, the river-animal tamer, then even the most quick-witted must learn mistrust; and verily, not only the blockheads then say, ‘Does not everything stand still?’

‘At bottom everything stands still’—that is truly a winter doctrine, a good thing for sterile times, a fine comfort for hibernators and hearth-squatters.

–Zarathustra in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 201.

Thanks, Nietzsche the Grinch, for trying to ruin Christmas peace with your yuletide cynicism.

At the risk of being a “blockhead,” I must admit that I am very much looking forward to hibernating by the fire for a week or two over the holidays. It’s been a successful semester on Ground Motive, and it’s time for some serious hearth-squatting stillness. Before collapsing in a heap of holiday cheer, it’s worth reveling in the accomplishments of the past few months.

Here are some of the high points of the fall semester on Ground Motive.

The DooyAward

I’m excited to announce that the first Herman Dooyeweerd Award for the Best Blog Post (better known as the DooyAward) has been awarded to Stefan Knibbe, author of “Rhetoric, The Other, and Boycotting Ender’s Game.” The award takes into consideration the quality of the content, the effectiveness of tone and delivery, and the overall reach, including shares, views, and comments. Stefan’s article weighs in with some insightful comments on a controversial topic with grace and a respectful tone. Regardless of whether or not you’re interested in Ender’s Game, this post delivers a compelling case for compassion and the power of stories. Congratulations, Stefan!

Honorable Mentions

Most Viewed: Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Hermeneutic Circle

Outlining some parallels between the great detective’s crime fighting strategies and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, this installment of Ground Motive’s Popular Mythology series seems to have struck a chord with readers and takes the lead on the number of page views. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the long awaited third season of the British TV series Sherlock starts up in the new year!

Most Comments: When I Think of Things that Make You Feel That Way

ICS Junior Member and prolific author of the philosophy blog Re(-)petitions Dean Dettloff made an appearance on Ground Motive with beautiful insights from an unlikely place. Posted just in time for Thanksgiving, Dean looked to the hip-hop duo Blackalicious for helpful advice on how to live in gratitude despite our consumerist culture.

Best Guest Post: Perspectives from a Park Bench

Angie Hocking’s reflections on her ongoing street ministry at Church of the Redeemer in Toronto were both thought-provoking and haunting. This guest post holds up the mirror to us as readers in those times when we get too wrapped up in our own world and find it all too easy to forget that we share in a common humanity with all people, regardless of social status, income, or lifestyle.

Most Mentions of Assassins: The Search for Colombian “Q”: Discovering the Hidden Source of a Spirituality of Hope

Hector Acero-Ferrer, ICS Junior Member and born Colombian, shares a unique perspective on interreligious dialogue as a Colombian living in Canada. He explores the question of why Colombian Catholicism sometimes looks so much different from the Canadian variety. What are the hidden forces that shape religious tradition?

Most Controversial: Memes, Tradition, and Building a Culture According to Richard Dawkins

This post’s use of Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes and its surprising potential benefits for a robust understanding of human freedom raised a red flag for some readers. Because one of Ground Motive’s primary aims is to spark conversations about important topics in philosophy, religion, and social ethics, a controversial article represents an opportunity. So if you have an opinion on this article, don’t hesitate to add your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Post with the Deepest Thoughts: What Buddhist Meditation Taught Me About Sin

In a moving reflection on spirituality and embodiment, PhD candidate Joseph Kirby suggests that Buddhist meditation and Christian spirituality might be deepened by one another. Perhaps engaging in such interreligious dialogue makes us realize the profound similarities we share with others by simply being embodied human beings.

Best Post About the Upcoming Conference Are We There Yet? Economic Justice and the Common Good (thereyet.ca): Economic Justice and…family reunions?

Don’t forget to mark your new 2014 calendars for the upcoming conference in Edmonton on May 12 and 13! It’s going to be a fascinating couple of days that will challenge you and make you think. Take a look at this post for some information on why this conference is so important and what makes it unique.

Best Post about Free Stuff: Building a World Where Knowledge is Free

This semester, the Institute for Christian Studies launched their Open Repository, full of previously hidden gems of research and scholarship. In celebration of Open Access Week, this article, along with an interview with ICS’s librarian Isabella Guthrie-McNaughton, highlights the benefits and difficulties of moving towards an open access model of publishing.

Most Thought-Provoking Interview: Don’t Be a Hero

As the first post of the semester, this interview may not have received the airtime it deserved. In this post, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, author of The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good, recounts his experiences in Christian activism and cautions against its tendency toward valuing heroism over real-world concern for real people. He goes on to suggest alternate ways of thinking about how to approach Christian activism in this excerpt and in the second installment as well.

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Thanks to everyone who contributed to Ground Motive this semester. It has been an exhilarating season of fresh insights and fruitful conversation. As we head into 2014, the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics eagerly anticipates a new year of innovative research and inspiring ideas.

The Search for Colombian "Q": Discovering the Hidden Source of a Spirituality of Hope

By Hector Acero Ferrer

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to share some of my interfaith experiences in a session of a Muslim-Christian dialogue run by two very active interfaith organizations in Toronto. In the panel where I participated, youth and young adults were asked to talk about their particular encounters with other faith traditions in the context of a secularizing, globalized world. Since I was born and raised in Colombia, I was supposed to give an overview of the situation in Latin America, providing some context for my personal experience and for the way in which interfaith dialogue is done outside of Canada. As I started to think about the topic I panicked, as I had the same reaction many Canadians have when they hear the terms “interfaith” and “Latin America” in the same sentence: what can I possibly tell a group of Torontonians about interfaith when my own experience in the topic is so limited?

This was the first time I reflected upon the fact that I had appropriated a stereotype without further consideration: I assumed that Roman Catholicism was an overarching attribute of Latin American culture and, more to the point, that my own circumstances had isolated me from the input of other faith traditions. Although concerned about these prejudices and unfounded generalizations (especially coming from someone who claims to take philosophy and religion seriously), I began my analysis confidently, aware that it is common to all Colombians –every single one of them- to overgeneralize and exaggerate. In this process I found out that diverse faith traditions are still alive in Colombian territories, finding expression through radical Christian theologies, different forms of mystical spirituality, and an ongoing, insistent call to social transformation.

In order to further explore the encounter of faith traditions in Colombia, I should probably begin by mentioning Colombia’s current socio-political environment. Similar to many other nations in the so-called “Developing World,” Colombia is a country where many layers of conflicts and crises stem out of a single social contradiction: how is it possible to be so poor when we are so rich in all the resources that the world needs the most? This is not a new question, or one exclusive to this region, but it is certainly a concern that has oriented the “Colombian-experience” from the time of the Spanish colonial rule.

Claiming to be 90% Roman Catholic, Colombia is "officially" consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the birthplace of Liberation Theology (Conference of Latin American Bishops of 1968), and the location of the first office of the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas. Colombia is also the country where thanks to the traffic of drugs the meaning of "full of grace" and "full of sin" have collided, where the shrine for "Our Lady of the Assassins" is not only the content of a movie but a crude, escalating reality, and where the current well-being of its peoples is exchanged as the mortgage for an afterlife justice.

Although all of these seem to be extensions of the Roman Catholic worldview imported to the Americas by the Spanish colonizers, it is possible to argue that there is a plurality of faith traditions that have found their way into current faith expressions. When comparing the way Roman Catholicism is lived in Toronto to my experience at home I cannot avoid concluding that there is a source to my interpretation of Christianity, a second set of beliefs and practices that informed the ritualistic experiences in which I was raised, one that did not correspond to the Western worldview. In a similar way that Biblical scholars postulate “Q” as the missing source of information for the synoptic gospels, I was led to postulate a “Q” source in the Colombian case, a source identifiable with not only one, but a multiplicity of aboriginal worldviews.

Colombians’ strong emphasis on motherhood and the role of women in organized religion, the significance of rituals surrounding death, marriages, and welcomes, and the understanding of the church as an organization that should start the building of the Kingdom here on earth are not necessarily the foundational pillars of Canadian Roman Catholicism. It seems to me that all these are indicative of the profound multicultural context in which Latin American Catholicism continues to develop. What the Spaniard “Conquistadores” encountered in the lands now called Central and South American was a plethora of faith traditions (some of them more ancient than Christianity) that infused Romanism and produced a Catholicism with a renewed spirituality and strength, which we can trace all the way to Pope Francis,

“God makes God-self felt in the heart of each person. God also respects the culture of all people. Each nation picks up that vision of God and translates it in accordance with the culture, and elaborates, purifies and gives it a system[…] God moves everyone to seek God and to discover God through creation[…] God encounters us; God reveals God-self to us, God shows us the way and accompanies us[…]” (Bergoglio 2010, p,19)

The call to action, the profound concern for the poor, and the special attention to hospitality are all elements that the aboriginal peoples cherished and imprinted in the following generations of natives, blacks, criollos, and Spaniards in Latin American lands. It is now widely accepted that the cultural interchange that occurred during the colonization process of the Americas happened in more than one direction; what is not usually discussed is that the exchange is still alive after many generations. This very rich encounter continues informing Colombians silently on new ways of living out the gospel of Christ, of remaining hopeful, and of holding each other in trust as members of the same human community. Isn’t this interfaith at its best?

Hector Acero Ferrer is a junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, currently focusing his research on philosophy of language and philosophy of religion.

Memes, Tradition, and Building a Culture According to Richard Dawkins

These days, the internet is filled with memes. Everywhere we look online, we find some sort of viral picture of an ugly cat or a celebrity’s face that someone has written a new caption for or put their own spin on. Memes are everywhere in our online experience, and to be honest, they can be hilarious. However lighthearted it may be, this internet phenomenon illustrates a deeper dynamic that is always at play between an individual and culture. Though most of the time it is implicit and goes unnoticed, our individual creativity (or our ability to put a new spin on an internet meme) depends on our imitation of the culture we are already immersed in—without the “memes” that are embedded deep within our culture and language, we would not have any materials with which to create new ideas. Every innovation puts a new spin on an old meme.

In broad strokes, a meme is a self-replicating idea that propagates itself by means of individuals who take it up through imitation and transmit it to others who do the same. The term “meme” comes from the evolutionary biology of Richard Dawkins’ early work The Selfish Gene, in which he derives the term from the Greek root denoting imitation and uses it to describe a non-biological mode of evolution. In doing so, Dawkins shows a surprising resistance to thinking of human behaviour as simply the flow of genes and biological drives. He claims that though genes are an excellent example of self-replicating units (replicators), and much of human and animal behaviour can be described in terms of how genes compete for survival, there is no reason to think that genes as such have a monopoly on replicator status. “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet,” Dawkins suggests. “It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture” (192).

Significantly, Dawkins makes the strong (but, as he notes, speculative) claim that once memes enter into an evolutionary process through human culture, human behaviour no longer answers directly to biological evolution. In fact, the flow of memes in culture may have a noticeable effect on the flow of genes in a population. To illustrate this, Dawkins describes religious celibacy as a meme that affects what genes enter into the gene pool. In this case, the meme, not the gene, is the primary determiner of natural selection.

With an evolutionary theory of memes, Dawkins puts forward a hypothesis describing culture formation, in which a wide variety of ideas (memes) compete for the attention of the individuals who propagate them. This explains how traditions, culture, and perhaps even language come about. For Dawkins, a persistent institution or tradition such as a church consists of a nexus of memes that reinforce one another: “Perhaps we could regard an organized church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition, as a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes” (197). So a cultural institution, a way of life, or a set of practices gets set up, in this account, as a self-reinforcing meme-complex. In this way, such a position makes it easy to tell a story of how culture came to be the way it is, without reducing it to competition between genes.

Despite Dawkins’ latent hostility toward religious institutions (evident in the fact that almost all of his examples of memes border on a critique of the legitimacy of truth claims of religious people), his speculative theory of memes represents an important insight that is (surprisingly) resonant with aspects of the work of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and is important for thinking about ethical responsibility and culture.

In a somewhat militant and over-zealous tone, Dawkins ends his discussion of memes with what I find to be a key insight that deserves unpacking (and maybe a bit of rhetorical defusing):

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination…We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (The Selfish Gene, 201).

What Dawkins is getting at here is not all that different from Heidegger’s discussion of our thrownness into being with others and our inescapable cultural heritage. In an odd way, Heidegger makes precisely the same case in Being and Time as Dawkins does in the quote above. Heidegger explains,

“The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself discloses the actual factical possibilities of authentic existing in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness takes over as thrown. Resolute coming back to thrownness involves handing oneself over to traditional possibilities, although not necessarily as traditional ones” (Being and Time, 365).

For Heidegger, “thrownness” means that we (Dasein) are already placed in a world even before we stop to think about the fact that we are a self at all. We’re fundamentally constituted by the world and by the rhythms of regular life that we see around us every day (which Heidegger calls “the they”). So in the spirit of Heidegger and in terms of Dawkins’ memes, we might say that our social lives are built out of the meme pool of our culture. Our individuality and self-expression is only possible by means of the meme materials available through everyday life in our culture.

One of Heidegger’s main concerns in Being and Time is that, though we are thoroughly constituted by our cultural heritage to the extent that we can only understand ourselves in its terms, we are not fully determined by it. When we revisit our thrownness into our culture and tradition in a “resolute” way, we hold ourselves distinct from it while being dependent on it for being an individual in the first place. In this way, we are able to hold ourselves at a critical distance from it, which gives us the ability to approach it with creativity rather than simply continuing on in its predetermined trajectory. When a person comes to grasp his or her individuality and takes responsibility for it apart from the pressures of “the they,” Heidegger says that this person has entered into authenticity.

To unpack the ethical implications of authenticity, Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, social critic, and contemporary of Heidegger, offers a perspective that allows us to consider the relevance of both Heidegger’s and Dawkins’ sense that we are not slaves to genes and memes. Arendt considers it imperative that, after the devastation of World War II, we come to grips with the fact that we are not fully determined by our culture, that we are paving our own path rather than one set out for us from which we cannot deviate. “[E]ach new generation,” says Arendt, “indeed every human being as he inserts himself between infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.” (Between Past and Future, 13).

It seems to me that Arendt would echo Richard Dawkins idea, and perhaps even his passion, that we not consider ourselves dominated by the genes and the memes that constitute us. We have the freedom and the responsibility to build our own future because we are not predetermined by the workings of our bodies or our society. Though we owe our existence to genes and memes, the fact that we are not slaves to either of them means that we share in an ethical responsibility for shaping the future together.

Matthew E. Johnson is a junior member at the Institute for Christian Studies, focusing his philosophical studies on hermeneutics, aesthetics, and discourse.