May the Force Breed with You

In my last entry (“Rational Religion”), I shared my conviction that our civilization needs to find a new path to spirituality, which is purged of myth, superstition, empty rituals, and intellectual chicanery, but is not, as a consequence of this purging, sterile, artificial, or dryly intellectual.  The new path, I believe, would have to inspire, and provide higher guidance to one’s life whenever reason comes up short (and perhaps even overrule reason).  What would such a religion look like?  What would its adherents be like, and, perhaps even more importantly, what would be the qualities possessed by its holy men and women?

Every religion, every culture, and every tribe seems to have its holy people, whether these be saints, priests, mystics, spiritual teachers, medicine men, shamans, or witch doctors.  Usually, these are people who have simply answered a personal call to a higher vocation, although in some cases they do seem to possess unusual abilities as well, either as the result of some form of disciplined practice, or simply because they were endowed with special gifts from birth.  Occasionally, as with the Levites of the Old Testament, there is an entire priestly tribe.  In fiction – particularly science fiction – this idea of a race of spiritual adepts appears often, in the form of persons who have psychic abilities because they come from a family line along which these abilities were passed down, from generation to generation.

When I was in my twenties, I began to wonder if it might be possible to create such a priestly tribe.  Could a colony of people set up the conditions under which they not only cultivated a high level of spiritual advancement through natural means (disciplined study and practice), but also augmented this through hereditary means, by ensuring that their descendents had a greater inherent capacity for developing and exercising spiritual proclivities?  The idea fascinated me, and, as only a young and naïve idealist can do, I set about crafting a design for making it possible.

First there was the natural cultivation.  For me, this would simply mean that my colony (or “cult”, or “intentional community”) would dedicate themselves to discovering genuine means for elevating one’s consciousness, and do so both by studying the existing religious and mystical traditions of the world, with a critical eye, distilling truth from fable and empty ritual, and also through independent, open-minded exploration.  I suspect that the most fertile sources for this project from existing traditions would come from Zen, Yoga, and elements of the mystical traditions among each of the major religions, but that is just my own personal bias.  This tribe would have no autocratic spiritual head – no “pope” – and it would have no sacred book, either.  Instead, ideas and practices that had the most merit would survive naturally, as future generations continued to preserve the inspirations and discoveries of certain luminaries among them simply because of their demonstrated merit and effectiveness.

And what of hereditary cultivation?  How did I plan to create a tribe of wizards?  To make this possible, I envisioned a sort of benign eugenics that involved two things: polygamy and sexual selection.  The idea boiled down to these two precepts: every man and woman would be allowed to produce no more than one child of his or her own gender, and every man would be entitled to have more than one wife.

Here’s how it would work in practice:  Suppose each man in the community has three wives.  (Whether this is a rigid ratio, or simply an average among the colony, is immaterial.)  Each wife would be entitled to have one daughter.  The man would similarly be entitled to produce a son, but here is where the eugenics comes in.  Prior to deciding which of his wives will bear the man’s son, each of them must be tested for their “psychic” abilities.  (What this means in practice I’m not really sure:  Telepathy?  Telekinesis?  Clairvoyance?  A combination, with perhaps different weightings assigned to each ability?  Such things would have to be determined by the tribe beforehand, along with suitable tests for measurement, and the appropriate definition might change over the generations, as different abilities were eventually determined to be more relevant, and more important, for the fundamental project of the colony.)  The wife who scored the highest on this test would bear the man’s son, in addition to the daughter that she had already been allowed to conceive with him.  Now since the son in turn will be able to take three wives in the next generation, it becomes clear that his mother, who was the most psychically gifted among his father’s three wives, will be distributing her genetic “footprint” among a much larger posterity than her husband’s two other wives.  This is so because her son will father four children (including a son for the succeeding generation), her daughter will bear either one or two children, while the other two wives’ daughters will each only bear one or two children.  So her genetic posterity passed on to the next generation of the tribe will be at a minimum 25% higher than that of her husband’s two other wives combined, or as much as 3 times higher than theirs collectively.

There are of course some practical complications with this plan, which might cause persons some discomfort to consider.  What of polygamy, for example?  Is this really consistent with a group of people committed to a communal spiritual life?  The idea didn’t bother me at the time (especially if I would one day be one of the founding members of this tribe), because of course there is at least one religion that did practice polygamy in America for an extended period of time, and it didn’t seem to interfere with the fundamental practice of the religion.  And I remembered reading a quote from a woman who had lived under such an arrangement, who said (perhaps jokingly) that she found it was much easier to live with a man when he had to divide his time among two other women.  And so I convinced myself that polygamy would not interfere with the success of my colony.  The other potentially discomforting feature of this plan is sexual selection, as it brings to mind the terrible practice of female infanticide that is so common these days in third world countries.  It is little consolation to say that in my model there would be many more females than males, if any sort of abortion or infanticide is still required.  At the time that I was conducting this little thought experiment, though, I happened to read somewhere that there are certain conditions (whether involving timing, or food intake, or something else, I can’t remember) that make a woman more likely to conceive a child of one particular gender rather than another.  And so again I satisfied myself that my tribe would be able to work this little technicality out without having to resort to brute measures.  (Still another complication might be that the policy of one son per father, and one daughter per mother, would prevent the colony from expanding, because the reproductive rate would not be high enough.  But this policy is not essential to make the general hereditary scheme work.  The only essential part of the mechanism is that the right to produce male offspring is conferred upon specific mothers, based on the criteria established by the tribe.)

Having worked out this model, while on a summer break from college, I decided to run a simulation on my new personal computer (a novelty back in the 1980s), to see how fast my colony would develop the desired traits that would enhance their psychic abilities.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the trait would become widespread among the tribe within a matter of just a few generations – not only if the trait existed on one particular gene, but even if more than one gene located on separate chromosomes had to appear simultaneously in a single person before the gift could manifest itself.  Overjoyed at this discovery, I was ready to go out and fulfill my duty of becoming one of the founding patriarchs of this new priestly tribe, and seek out several women who might be willing to join me in my noble and holy endeavor.  (I fancied that for my own little “harem”, I would try to choose a woman from each of the major races of peoples, so that the tribe would suitably represent, from the very start, a representative cross section of humanity.)

There were of course some technicalities to attend to.  The commune, or intentional community, would have to have certain codes and rules to abide by, to ensure that the primary mission of spiritual development was being carried out, and these would have to include some form of governance structure.  To prevent inbreeding over time, and excessive isolation from society at large, converts would always be accepted (and of course members would be allowed to leave the community), though as a condition of entry any prospective convert would have to demonstrate a commitment to abide by the rules, demands, and practices of the community.  (This in itself would constitute a form of natural selection, as converts willing to abide by these potentially demanding codes would probably have a greater innate capacity to engage in committed study and intellectual/spiritual development.)  And, in order for the hereditary plan to succeed, it would be prudent to only extend the right of polygamy to males who were born within the tribe, while male converts would be limited to having only a single wife.  As the community grew and expanded over succeeding generations, it would invariably have to branch out and form separate communities, and a level of autonomy would have to be accepted among these, yet some form of productive interaction and exchange (of both people and ideas) between them would have to be encouraged and fostered.  But these details, I imagined, could easily be worked out as the community (or communities) took shape.

Still, as I contemplated the outcome of this project more carefully, I began to realize that potentially serious problems could emerge.  A society in which women outnumbered men by three to one might produce a pernicious “peacock” mentality among the men: an excessive sense of self-worth and entitlement that could engender some unpleasant behavioral characteristics.  And the selective breeding program could result in unintended consequences in the form of genetic traits that are rare in the general population, such as six fingers on each hand, or other mental and physical abnormalities, or a greater susceptibility to certain genetic diseases.  If the program produced a people with abilities that were significantly superior to those of the general population, this could tempt them to develop an unduly exalted sense of themselves, manifesting itself in some form of racism.  Conversely, rather than revering this priestly tribe, and relying upon them for spiritual guidance and counseling, the general population might come to distrust them and fear them because of their special abilities, and even wish to destroy them, like the mutants in the X-Men movies.  And, too, there would always be the risk of a particularly gifted member “going rogue”, and embarking on a malicious path of self-aggrandizement and personal hegemony, like the evil Emperor and Darth Vader characters in the Star Wars movies.

            But ultimately, I realized that there was a much more fundamental flaw in my plan, and that is that it simply couldn’t work.  The program of selective breeding would not produce the results that I intended.  Here is why – I call it the “paradox of the psychic rabbit”:

            Suppose, in nature, that a rabbit was born with innate psychic abilities along the lines that I hoped to select for in my tribe.  It had a “sixth sense” that allowed it to sense when a predator was nearby, and would therefore remain in its burrow, until its intuition told it that the danger had passed.  Now by the conventional laws of natural selection, such a rabbit would invariably have a survival advantage over other rabbits, and would be much more likely to live long enough to produce several offspring.  Within a few generations, this particular trait, with its immense survival advantage, would become widespread among all rabbits.  Consequently, any natural predators in the food chain that depended upon these rabbits to survive would die out, and rabbits would be left with no natural enemies (and probably ultimately die out themselves as a consequence, when overpopulation stripped them of their own food supply).  Of course, if one of the predators came to be endowed with the same psychic trait, it might neutralize the advantage held by its prey.  Then, for the same reason that the trait became widespread in the rabbits, it would become widespread in the predators as well.  Each and every day, a sort of psychic game of potential move and countermove would play out in the minds of these creatures – both predator and prey – before they ever stepped out of their burrows or dens.  We would have an entire animal kingdom of clairvoyants, telepaths, and possibly even creatures with psychokinetic powers, because any of these abilities would confer an immense survival advantage upon the bearer, and hence would become widespread in just a few generations.  Now, anecdotal stories about animals fleeing the site of an earthquake or other natural disaster on the eve of the event notwithstanding, I think it is safe to say that we do not see evidence of widespread psychic powers among the animal kingdom.  And if such a trait would confer an immense survival advantage on a wild animal, it would have certainly done at least as much for any human being so endowed in our prehistoric past, and so, if it was a heritable trait, we all would have been heavily gifted with these abilities by now.

            Sadly, I was forced to concede that psychic abilities cannot possibly exist as a heritable trait which can be passed on genetically, else it would already have happened long ago.  This means that if they do genuinely occur among human beings, then it must be the result of some spiritual practice or discipline, or else a consequence of some external set of circumstances that galvanized an ability which actually is innate within all of us.  Or, as professional magicians and illusionists have been contending for centuries, these abilities have never genuinely existed, and those who claim to have possessed them have invariably been quacks, frauds, confidence men, or lunatics.

            Ah, the shattered dreams of youth.  Having faced these sobering facts during that particular summer, so many years ago, I solemnly put away my hopes of being the patriarch of a modern Levite tribe, and resigned myself to the fact that I would have to return to college and my (more earth-bound) studies when the new term commenced.  My belief in the need for a new, rational religion has survived the decades, but any fantasies about a priestly tribe perished with that psychic rabbit.