Of Burns and Dawkins: Some Interesting Connections
Some meditations on 'To a Mouse', 'Unweaving the Rainbow', Charles Darwin, and the philosophies of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Peter Singer.
I missed a trick on Monday. I should have read aloud some Robert Burns poems, given that Burns Night, the annual Scottish celebration of our most famous bard, was just last week. Alas, I had already recorded my reading from Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow (1998).1 But when I was wondering what to write about, the conjunction in my mind of Dawkins and Burns led to inspiration. I noticed some interesting connections between Burns’ famous poem ‘To a Mouse’ and the Dawkinsian worldview. While these connections are almost certainly accidental, I think they are meaningful, and they, and the meditations they inspired, are the subject of this little essay. (Incidentally, isn’t serendipity scary? How many connections do we fail to make and how many opportunities do we miss due to sheer, blind chance?)
Poor earth-born companions
‘To A Mouse’ was written in 1785 and published in 1786. Its subtitle gives us some context: “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.” What follows is a regretful lament for destroying the mouse’s home and scaring it away. Burns was one of the earliest Romantics, or perhaps a proto-Romantic, but he was also a man of the Enlightenment, well-versed in the philosophical works of his day (belying the popular characterisation of Burns as a simple ploughman poet, a characterisation he himself encouraged). ‘Mouse’, in my view, is an elegant synthesis of Enlightenment sensibility and moral philosophy with Romantic emotionalism.
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
Here we have high emotion and attentiveness to nature: Burns the Romantic in full flow. It might seem like Burns is being a little hysterical. You scared a mouse? So what? It’ll build another nest somewhere else, won’t it? But he is making some pretty serious philosophical (and Enlightened) points.2 He contrasts rapacious humanity with sweet nature, before undermining that very distinction when he identifies himself as the mouse’s “poor, earth-born companion,/An’ fellow-mortal!” To a man who knew his Adam Smith, this act of identification with the other was surely no accident. Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) (a book Burns had very likely read) that sympathy for others arises through the work of the imagination: that is, we imaginatively identify ourselves with others to feel what it is like to be in their situation.
‘Mouse’ is all about such sympathetic identification. Burns imagines that the little mouse
…saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
His accidental depredation is made even worse by the fact that “That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble/Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!” Burns quite clearly feels the pain of the mouse; even if he doesn’t know how the mouse actually feels (and despite the difficulty of knowing whether or not mice can, in fact, feel or think in this way), he uses his own imagination to put himself in the mouse’s place. How would he, or you, feel if a clumsy, trundling giant knocked over your warm house in the middle of winter? In Burns’ poem, Enlightenment moral philosophy and the Romantic attachment to nature and feeling are quite apparent.
But there is another Smithian concept at play here. For the cosmopolitan Smith, as for modern philosophers like Peter Singer, the circle of sympathy (or empathy or moral concern) extends far beyond ourselves and our immediate kin and neighbours. From family and community to nation and then all of humanity, our moral sense has grown over time. And for Burns, like Singer, the circle of sympathy should be expanded to encompass non-human animals, too (see Singer’s The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology for a classic elucidation of this view). For Burns, a humble mouse is no less worthy of moral concern than a man. On the fields of an Ayrshire farm, Burns saw a world in a “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie.”3
The closing stanzas of ‘Mouse’ reaffirm the point:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
“The best laid schemes” go awry for mice as they do for men. Burns’ Enlightenment Romanticism also suggests, then, a certain radicalism. It isn’t just that Burns’ concern about the negative effects of human activity on nature might, at a stretch, be seen to anticipate modern environmentalism, but that Burns sees mice and men as literally being fellows—both “earth-born” mortals, both equally subject to the changing winds of an indifferently capricious world. And in this, there is a link to Charles Darwin, and through Darwin to Dawkins: Darwin showed us that we aren’t just related to animals, but that we are animals (specifically, apes), and Dawkins, Darwin’s most doughty modern champion, has constantly emphasised that point.
In fact, Dawkins has often aligned himself with Singer’s championing of the rights of animals. And in 2014 he wrote an essay lamenting the effects of fireworks on dogs. Dawkins even cites the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, in that essay, who was also one of the earliest to argue for the rights of animals (and who was an inspiration to Singer):
[A]lthough the reasoning power and intelligence of nonhuman animals is far inferior to ours, this famous statement by the great moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham is as valid as it was in 1823:
“. . . a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
The ability to suffer—feel pain or fear—doesn’t depend on reasoning or intelligence. An Einstein is no more capable of feeling pain or fear than a Sarah Palin. And there’s no obvious reason to suppose that a dog or a badger is less capable of suffering pain or fear than any human.4
I posit, then, that there is a clear affinity, to greater and lesser degrees, between the Enlightenment Romanticism of Burns’ poetry and the moral philosophies and/or ontologies of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Charles Darwin, Peter Singer, and Richard Dawkins. How fitting, then, that the main theme of Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow is that science and poetry (broadly conceived) should not be enemies but, rather, the closest of friends, handmaidens to each other, both enlighteners of the world and both standing as humanity’s highest achievements.
But Burns was even more insightful than he knew. As that final stanza shows, he was well aware that, linked as we humans are to our fellow animals, there are also deep differences between us. And here too, I believe, lies a Dawkinsian connection.
Supreme simulators
In Unweaving, Dawkins discusses the brain’s powers of simulation,
from constrained virtual reality, where the brain simulates a model of what the sense organs are telling it, to unconstrained virtual reality, in which the brain simulates things that are not actually there at the time—imagination, daydreaming, ‘what if?’ calculations about hypothetical futures.
Recall Burns’ point that for the mouse, as for men, “foresight may be vain.” In Dawkinsian terms, Burns seems to agree that we animals simulate the world. Perhaps it is going too far to suggest that Burns is also making the point that what we see and hear and feel are constructs of the brain rather than raw reality, but the simulation point, broadly speaking, is perhaps, just, apparent in ‘Mouse.’ But recall also Burns’ closing stanza: the mouse’s consciousness is limited to “the present”—while humans fret about the past and the future as well. This might be a contradiction, for how can the mouse have foresight but only be aware of the present? But I think the general point is that the mouse’s consciousness is narrower in many ways than the man’s. As Dawkins goes on to say:
We can take the virtual reality software in our heads and emancipate it from the tyranny of simulating only utilitarian reality. We can imagine worlds that might be, as well as those that are. We can simulate possible futures as well as ancestral pasts. With the aid of external memories and symbol-manipulating artifacts—paper and pens, abacuses and computers—we are in a position to construct a working model of the universe and run it in our heads before we die.
We can get outside the universe. I mean in the sense of putting a model of the universe inside our skulls. Not a superstitious, small-minded, parochial model filled with spirits and hobgoblins, astrology and magic, glittering with fake crocks of gold where the rainbow ends. A big model, worthy of the reality that regulates, updates and tempers it; a model of stars and great distances, where Einstein's noble spacetime curve upstages the curve of Yahweh's covenantal bow and cuts it down to size; a powerful model, incorporating the past, steering us through the present, capable of running far ahead to offer detailed constructions of alternative futures and allow us to choose.
Never mind the superficial connection here—the use by both Burns and Dawkins of the past/present/future triad—but note Burns’ view of human consciousness as being, unlike mouse consciousness, capable of transcending what Dawkins calls “utilitarian reality.” The mouse can only concern itself with survival and reproduction, while the human can concern herself with a great deal more. Burns’ conclusion is narrower and more tragicomic than Dawkins’, but the link is no less compelling for that. Long before modern science confirmed the human brain’s extraordinary power, Burns might have had an inkling. (In fact, I’m almost tempted to posit that Burns’ poem is itself an act of simulation. Is he not simulating in his own mind the mind of the mouse? And does that mean that Smithian sympathy is an act of simulation? Is there something in this—is morality founded, at least partially, upon this evolutionary fact? Or is it simply an assistant to or booster of morality? I wonder.)
Yes, we humans have always seen ourselves as special, but the specific nature of Burns’ conception of our uniqueness is far closer to the truth than any superstition about us having souls or being endowed by deities with the divine spark. It is also tempered by Burns’ awareness that we exist on a continuum with other animals—our brains are more powerful at reasoning and simulating, but that doesn’t mean we are special creations of any sort, or that other animals can’t simulate, or that they aren’t worthy of moral concern. As Dawkins argues in his fireworks essay, what matters for morality isn’t how intelligent someone or something is, but whether or not it is capable of suffering.
For Burns as for Dawkins, human (metaphorical) eyes are just a bit more open than those of our fellow animals. But then again, mice can (literally) hear at much higher frequencies than we can and other animals excel in many areas where we can barely even compete, if we can at all. Evolution has produced an astonishing range of skillsets and myriad configurations of consciousness. Isn’t that wonderful? Still, let’s not deny the specialness of humans—alone on Earth, we are the supreme simulators, for good and for ill.
A higher suffering?
Very briefly, I want to return to the point about suffering. Burns certainly seems to think that humans are capable of greater suffering than other animals: it is our ability to simulate the past and future as well as the present that means we can suffer at a higher level. Dawkins, in the fireworks essay, denies this: for him, suffering “doesn’t depend on reasoning or intelligence.”
This is also a core difference between Bentham and the other great classical utilitarian, John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s moral universe, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” This doesn’t mean that other animals (and fools) can’t suffer, or that they should necessarily be disqualified from moral concern, but it does mean that the human capacity for reasoning and intelligence greatly increases our moral importance (and perhaps even that more moral weight should be given to the suffering of a genius than to the suffering of an idiot). If Dawkins is a Benthamite on this issue, then Burns is a Millian (or should we rather say that Mill is a Burnsian?).
I take the Bentham/Dawkins view on this issue, but it’s an open philosophical debate. I only bring it up here to draw out some more connections and to inspire further reflection. To reframe the issue by mashing Dawkins and Mill, is it better to be an Einstein dissatisfied than a Sarah Palin satisfied? (And no, I’m not saying that Sarah Palin is a pig; I’m just saying that she is very stupid.)
Burns’ leaping heart
If Burns blurs the categories of Enlightenment and Romanticism and brings philosophy into poetry while perhaps anticipating future scientific advances, Dawkins does the same for science by affirming its profound and, yes, spiritual beauty while speculating rationally about the nature and possible future of the human mind. I hope that this little foray into philosophy, literature, and science hasn’t been too contrived or amateurish and, much more, I hope that it has contributed even a little to those noble endeavours.
In Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins says that “the heart of any poet worthy of the title Romantic could not fail to leap up if he beheld the universe of Einstein, Hubble and Hawking.” Let me rephrase that for my present purpose: the heart of any Enlightenment Romantic worthy of the title could not fail to leap up if he beheld the universe of Darwin and Dawkins.
Another Enlightenment feature of ‘Mouse’ is Burns’ latent conviction that humans are a subject of enquiry, no more or less than anything else in the (naturalistic) world; this is what David Hume meant by “the science of man.”
It’s beside the point that the poem’s occasion is probably fictitious.
Dawkins doesn’t give us the citation for the Bentham quote; it comes from the 1823 edition of Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (the original edition, sans the “Can they suffer?” footnote, was published in 1780).