Darkness Visible

In a season 2 episode (“Darkness Visible”) of La Femme Nikita, Michael and Nikita are dispatched to a war-torn area of the Balkans. In the course of their mission they run across a couple orphaned children–a young boy and his younger sister.

Nikita’s maternal instinct kicks in. She tells Michael they can’t leave the children behind to fend for themselves. Nikita functions as Michael’s conscience. He’s the realist, she’s the idealist.

He’s not hard-hearted. But, to survive in Section One, he’s learned to suppress his feelings. He’s more ruthless than Nikita, but less ruthless than Operations or Madeline. Nikita revives and accentuates his emotional and moral conflict.

From both a Christian standpoint and a Darwinian standpoint, how we feel about children is programmed. The feeling is involuntary and irrepressible. We see them as cute, helpless, defenseless. They need us, and we have a felt need to protect them and provide for them.

Yet our feelings, while involuntary, do not compel us to act accordingly. That makes a logical, and sometimes practical, difference, in how we act. A Christian believes that God programmed these feelings. A Darwinian believes that natural selection programmed these feelings.

Should we act on these feelings or not? Believing you know the source of your feelings makes a difference in whether or not you choose to act on your feelings.

There’s a reason Michael is prepared to leave the children behind, to suffer and die–as the case may be. Left to his own devices, Michael’s survival instinct trump’s Nikita’s maternal instinct.

If he lets his feelings jeopardize the success of the mission, then his superiors (Operations, Madeline) will put him in “abeyance” and have him “canceled.”

From a Darwinian standpoint, Michael can say to himself, “I want to save these children. I can’t help myself. I can’t control how I feel. But I know I was conditioned to feel this way by natural selection. While natural selection can make me feel a certain way, it can’t oblige me to act accordingly. Natural selection is amoral. My paternal instinct is like a phobia: I can’t change it, but I can ignore it. Why should I risk my own skin for their sake? Although it pains me to leave them behind, I must steel myself against the illusion.”

From a Darwinian standpoint, our instincts lack the force of moral imperatives. We can override them. And nothing constrains us to obey our feelings–except the misguided sense that we should care. It’s a trick of the mind. Evolutionary brainwashing.

Now, just as our feelings are predetermined from a Darwinian standpoint, our feelings are predetermined from a Christian standpoint.

Up to a point, Michael, if he were a Christian, could say much the same thing: “I want to save these children. I can’t help myself. I can’t control how I feel. But I know I was conditioned to feel this way by God.”

Yet here is where the two positions part company. Both are deterministic, but they have opposing consequences.

If my protective feelings for children were programmed into me by God, then I should honor my feelings. These feelings are the moral result of a moral agent.

These are feelings I ought to have. It’s built into the way in which God designed the human race. These feelings have an obligatory force.

Both the Christian and the Darwinian are aware of their preconditioning. For the Darwinian, consciousness of his programming is an opportunity to disaffirm his programming; for the Christian, consciousness of his programming is an opportunity to reaffirm his programming.

Both the Christian and the Darwinian can resist their paternal (or maternal) instincts. But the Christian has no motivation to do so. To the contrary, the realization that his paternal feelings are God-given is a ratification of his feelings. An incentive to embrace his duty–in the confidence that supreme wisdom is the architect of his parental instinct.

For the Darwinian, enlightenment logically leads to amorality. For the Christian, enlightenment logically leads to virtue. For the Darwinian, lucidity is the foe of morality; for the Christian, lucidity is the friend of morality.

In secular ethics, parents sacrifice their children (abortion, infanticide) for the parents’ welfare. In Christian ethics, parents sacrifice themselves for their children’s welfare.

Nietzsche was right about the respective moral consequences of Christian ethics and secular ethics.