Today our culture is thoroughly afflicted with a transcendental sickness. Remember the blatant propaganda for NASA in the film Contact? The bad guys in that film were the ones who were too realistic and actually wanted to cut funding for a space project. Anytime I criticize the billions of dollars wasted on NASA space systems, I hear one of three basic retorts: 1) Where is your childlike sense of curiosity and wonder?; 2) how can you deny the many life-enhancing inventions that come from such research?; and finally, 3) don’t you believe in the progress of science?

To question the value of the space program is to risk being seen as a spoilsport, since the space program is an irresistible blend of childlike Spielbergian wonder and adult go-getter business acumen. I remember seeing an episode of All in the Family where a black gentleman complained about the moon launches, saying the money should be spent on the poor here on earth. One all too rarely hears such discourse these days. Instead, the media, the cyber punks, gurus like Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler, along with the creators of Contact, are all itching with space lust, eager to leave the body behind and escape the burdens of daily life on earth. While many of these efforts for space are blatantly materialist and scientific, there is a fervent spirituality lurking about them. Although I loathe indulging in trendy adjectives, the root can be none other than a "toxic" spirituality.

It is no coincidence that the Heaven’s Gate cult with its mass suicides occurred at the same time as the explosions in quantum physics, the Human Genome Project and the computer-wired culture. Further, what struck me about the fringe cult was its eerie similarity with mainstream Christianity. Both acknowledge (despite Christianity’s de rigueur condemnation of Heaven’s Gate’s brainwashings and suicides) a common, underlying Gnostic doctrine. In short, the cult’s ideas were just fine—only its methods were perverted.

All the parallels become clear upon examination. Both your friendly Christian church down the street and Heaven’s Gate share a common hierarchy of doctrines, wherein body is lesser than spirit, matter is nothing and spirit all, and the physical world is an illusory trick of the mind. Both believe the soul is immortal, but that bodily passions are suspect and should be controlled (though the Heaven’s Gate cult took this to an extreme with its practice of castration). Further, these parallels can be seen in American culture beyond the Christian church: behind our collective, macho rooting for John Glenn’s trek back into space lurks the underlying desire to abandon earth and home and, most of all, those burdens of sexual drives, medical emergencies and mortality—our bodies.

In the 60s, people made fun of Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification programs, but her efforts addressed basic concerns of infrastructure, which are more important than what NASA has achieved. In our movement from the realm of necessity to that of unexamined technology, we have forgotten to ask ourselves certain questions: What is our quality of life on earth? Is our earth beautiful? Is it habitable? Is there squalor? How is our water table? Is our drinking water safe? And how do we conduct our agriculture? These are all infrastructural and foundational matters, and consequently, they must be addressed before the onslaught of superstructure and what is generally referred to as cultural concerns—art, news, education and leisure.

But what does all of this have to do with Darwinism and religion? On the surface, Darwinism and its current modern offshoot, evolutionary psychology, appear to be earthbound, rooted in the realm of necessity, clearly an improvement over the prescientific (spiritual) doctrines. Darwinism is the first fully humane, non-elitist doctrine. But it comes by its humanity and egalitarianism at a price paid by any paradigm or world view that claims to be objectively verifiable, totalizing and "holistic." In short, evolutionary psychology genuinely toys, on the surface, with the real blood and soil (no fascist allusions intended!) and root of things, but under the surface has the same transcendental sickness of any "toxic" spiritualism.

My first encounter with one of this field’s rising stars, birth order champion Frank Sulloway, took place in a posh nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. Author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives (Pantheon Books, 1996), Sulloway fits all the stereotypes of nerdom to a "T." With the moustache of a Fed, unpressed button-down shirt, and out-of-date, threadbare tweed jacket several sizes too large, he looked every bit the part of the academician or civil servant.

In a nutshell, Sulloway’s theory proposes that birth order explains everything—from revolutions in science and culture to the behavioral tendencies inherent within each generation, and even whole epochs. Simply put, firstborn children tend to follow closely the values and aspirations of their parents. Since they got most of the goodies in life, they have little incentive to rebel, and they grow up well-aware of where their bread is buttered. In contrast, later-borns are bound to rebel and question. Indeed, important contributions, innovations or inventions more than likely originate from a later-born person.

So far this theory has been supported by Sulloway’s testing, not to mention historical data too numerous to be ignored. Freud, Darwin and Marx are all later-borns. So, too, are the leaders and early followers of the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, Darwinian evolution, Marxism, atheism and materialism. Conversely enough, reactionaries against these movements and theories are also overwhelmingly firstborns. When asked in one questionnaire what famous historical figure they would most like to meet, firstborns’ top picks included Abraham Lincoln and Billy Graham, while later-borns chose Einstein and Hitler.

Talking with Sulloway, I confessed my skepticism in science and the empirical theory of truth that all science necessarily traffics in. His response was a predictable defense of the scientific method bequeathed to us by Francis Bacon in the 1600s. "This process is so painstakingly slow and so humble," he stated. "We never say anything is a fact until it is tested so many times over and until we are absolutely sure. The process takes years."

It seems every new season, a new evolutionary psychologist is touted by the media. His or her books hit the bestseller list and become the talk of both Oprah and The New Yorker. In Survival of the Prettiest—The Science of Beauty (Doubleday, 1999) Nancy Etcoff successfully demolishes Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. Beauty, and more explicitly, the male sexual objectification of women, is universal and genetic. More importantly, beauty is a fact of nature. With slight cultural modifications and historical changes through time, there are certain physical universals that attract people sexually to one another: the beauty fact.

Another recent contender is Judith Rich Harris. Her controversial look at the development of children, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1998), drives a stake into the already aging body of Freudianism. This is no easy task because, whether we know it or want to admit it, we all are Freudians now. And I mean all: the Christian psychologist who traces homosexuality back to some inappropriate sexual experience in childhood or to an imperfect mommy or daddy; Gloria Steinem, who hates Freud because he covered up or denied childhood sexual abuse (to even worry about the effect of such behavior on children is Freudian in its core sensibility); anyone who traces an adult neurosis or psychosis to some childhood trauma; anyone who purports to cure mental issues by dealing with childhood—all these folks are indebted to the master. Freud was really the first who looked at human problems through the lens of the narrative influence of childhood on adulthood.

Well, the king has just been dethroned, and maybe someday Brazelton, Bradshaw, Susan Forward and company will be out of a gig. Put simply, Harris relies on an accurately compartmentalized account of the brain. She wages rightful war on trendy holism. We don’t have one core self. What we learn in one context (childhood experience with parents) only applies later on in the adult years to the same context (how grown offspring treat their aging parents).

I like Harris. Her argument is wonderfully counterintuitive, and like most counterintuitive ideas, probably largely true, since most of what passed for common sense—sometimes for thousands of years—has later been proven to be nonsense (i.e., the earth is the center of the universe, is flat, etc.). All recent brain research shows that the brain works like a Marxist-anarcho-syndicalist community. There is no center, no hierarchy, just a bunch of diffused information working in a vertical fashion. What we learn in one context, we have great trouble applying to a "separate" context. Harris’ theory is also completely logical. Parents represent what the kids must outgrow, paradoxically enough; peers (with whom the kids will be spending most of their time) represent the future. This is both reassuring and terrifying; reassuring because parents can feel less guilty and be less narcissistic about whether they are good parents or not, but terrifying because the child is liable to copy whatever delinquent or aberrant behavior his/her friends are engaging in. Sound familiar?

Harris’ theory also explains why human history never progresses, but keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over: "Researchers in California have been studying a sample of unconventional families since the mid-1970s. Some of the parents are hippies and live in communes; others have ‘open marriages’; still others are single mothers of the Murphy Brown variety. The children are as bright, as healthy, and as well adjusted as children who live in more conventional families."

Studies of twins separated at birth show them making similar choices and behaving in remarkably similar ways over and over again. One household might consist of a sexual abuser, alcoholic dad and the other of a family straight out of Norman Rockwell, but perversely, this wouldn’t make a difference for the twins. Where you see the most differences is in those cases where the neighborhood cultures are different. As Harris’ own refrain puts it, "It’s the neighborhood, not the family." (An added bonus to Harris’ book is the inclusion of an ongoing debate [in the form of exchanged letters and data comparisons] between Harris and our old friend Frank Sulloway over the question of birth order.)

But what has all of this to do with religion or science? To understand it geographically, there are basically two groups of beliefs that most people fall into. In one category—surely the smallest minority—rests the hardcore scientific materialists or secular humanists. These folks are agnostic and/or atheist, often left-leaning and/or civil libertarian, and frequently accept and support forms of sexuality outside the norm. They like the ACLU but tend to dislike the NRA. This group would include most scientists, such as the late Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, as well as pundits like Wendy Kaminer, Barbara Ehrenreich and Steve Allen. These folks accept Darwinian evolution. Like birth order guru Frank Sulloway, they worship at the altar of rationality and proof.

The other category would be the spiritualist camp. This includes most of the world’s population. In the U.S. this camp has a dangerous dominance over any other authority. Only nine percent of Americans believe in strict Darwinian theory; all the rest believe in either pure creationism or some kind of God-influenced evolution. Also, in the U.S., enlightenment principles and secular humanism are being replaced by a coalition of soft and hard spiritualities. Witness, for example, the spectacle of Al Gore running around preaching that people need faith in God as if it were love and friendship, or even food, clothing and shelter.

These people in the spiritualist camp believe there is an immaterial power, a god or supernatural energy that is ahistorical, universal, infinite and timeless. This energy, they claim, is what really runs things. At one time the spiritualist camp was made up primarily of mainstream denominational churches. Today the spiritualist camp consists of two branches (sketched here as the hard and softcore), and they tend to be hostile towards each other. "Hard" spiritualists would be your fire-and-brimstone types—Trent Lott, Gary Bauer and James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, as well as all manner of TV evangelists. All Christian Right Protestants and Islamic, Judaic and Catholic fundamentalists also fit into this camp.

The "soft" spiritualist camp is by far the largest, with millions of bestselling authors springing from its folds with books like The Celestine Prophecy, Mutant Message from Down Under and Conversations with God. Their ranks also include institutions like the Esalen, Omega and Interfaith institutes, as well as psychic healers, past-life regression therapists and channelers, and celebrities such as Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra and John Gray. Some cultural products and producers occupy a fence between the hard and soft spiritualities—writers Ann Lamott, Madeline L’Engle, Robert Schuller and Billy Graham among them, as well as any number of 12-step programs.

There has been a push to reintroduce school prayer and to include the ten commandments in school as part of a universal law. People talk of being genetically hardwired to believe in God, and Christian new physicists talk of computers ushering in the second coming of Christ. Most frightening and telling of all, Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, that irreversible march to map all of our DNA, is an evangelical Christian and belongs to an evangelical church organization called American Scientific Affiliation. Perhaps the convergence of Darwin and Jesus is not so inadvertent after all.

Imagine you turn on your TV and a preacher in a polyester suit comes at you with his Bible and tells you not to masturbate or engage in gay sex because it angers God. The preacher has no proof for this outside the Bible, but if we lived in the Middle Ages, you could be burned for heresy if you disagreed with him. In the end all the preacher has is a book and a handful of claims by a being no one ever really hears or sees—a being we call God.

On the other camp, a scientist comes at you in his Dacron/cotton blend lab coat. Instead of wielding an ancient book, he brings you charts and graphs with human statistics, proofs that have been verified and repeated a million times. Who could argue with whatever he says? He has the burden of proof that is called the scientific method. But what if the scientist and preacher joined forces?

I think both sides are basically wrong. Not that I think God doesn’t exist—I neither know nor care whether or not He exists, and I think it foolish to carry on a crusade against belief in the manner of the secular humanists. And it’s not that I don’t accept the foundations of evolution or the usefulness of science—I do. What I object to is the hegemonic domination of both the materialist and spiritualist forces together to program our systems of thought, reproduction, production, food, energy, agriculture, art and popular culture in the name of some invisible, universal and moral code, or unity. I anticipate the convergence of Christ and Darwin will be a new form of mental fascism that will imprison the earth, and it will begin in the United States. We cheer the meeting of the scientist and the preacher at the table, not knowing that it is a repeat of the Hitler/Stalin pact writ large.

Having played the bad prophet of doom, let’s look at a better alternative to what most of the world believes. Called pluralism, this doctrine rejects a center to the universe that meets at an apex or in any unified consciousness. It may use science and religion, but only as tools on a concrete level. Pluralism would never purport to synthesize wisdom or facts into a whole. Not only is this an impossibility, but any attempts to do so have resulted—and will always result—in some sort of totalitarianism.

Is our hunger for meaning and values so prevalent that we must have absolute principles for all places and all peoples at all times? I think not. Pluralism is not relativism. It doesn’t—unlike relativism—claim that everything is equal and that we can’t have standards. Some things lack value, while other things have a great deal of value; there is good and there is evil. What Pluralism does is refuse to choose one item as supremely valuable above all others. It prefers the earthly over the transcendental; situational ethics over absolutist ethics; and in the manner of certain feminist thinkers, it prefers concrete relational connections over the sort of male-dominated, abstract laws that are held (over people) to be a priori, or decontextualized. These preferences make possible the horizontal ebb and flow of competing, often incommensurable, yet equally legitimate values.

Unlike the world’s religions, all forms of spiritualism and materialistic scientisms, pluralism also recognizes that there will always be losses in life, never unilateral progress. Why? Because one always gives up a little good for the sake of overall improvement. Because sometimes good and evil interpenetrate each other, lurking side by side within a single soul or a single community. And more poignantly, because most of our conflicts come down to conflicts between equally valuable goods.

Isaiah Berlin, one of the fathers of a 20th century variant of pluralism, liked to use the example of tension between equality and freedom. Too much freedom and you get Dickensian sweatshops and rampant abuse. Too much equality and you get Soviet Russia. To increase equality, one must lessen the freedom of the rich, for example. Yet, both freedom and equality are goods in and of themselves. Pluralism holds most matters in life are like this. Since there is no ultimate center to our universe, there is no absolute reason to accept one good over another. Tradeoffs and compromise become, upon such an account, not only occasional irritations, but part of daily life, the actual order of things.

Finally, the denial of purely pleasurable activities (i.e., aesthetic ones) that don’t have big cosmic meanings is a denial of our humanity. Humans have been trying to move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Such a move requires the adoption of pluralism. What stands in the way are the monistic world views of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and, most recently, secular humanism and scientific materialism.