Where there are pieties—and they are everywhere, even in ostensibly secular realms of society—there will be taboos. I still recall the baffled rage of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia that met the release, a decade ago now, of Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong, a treatise that asked pointed questions concerning the soundness of evolutionary explanation, specifically the appeal to a mechanism of natural selection. The book’s conclusions and premises may well be flawed, but there is nothing special in that. Thousands of wrongheaded books are released every year. The reaction, however, even in rarefied intellectual circles (including the New York Review of Books), was far more scornful, even contemptuous, than this garden-variety intellectual shortcoming can reasonably merit, given that the book was patently put forth in good faith by two venerable thinkers. Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, released two years later and also defending the notion that a Darwinian view of nature has its limitations, was derided and denounced rather than simply demurred at—a sure sign that respectfully questioning the explanatory power of evolution counts, in our era, as a kind of blasphemy. Now, more even-handed rebuttals to these books did eventually come, of course. But it is that initial tsunami of reactive hostility among the intellectual classes, who are trained to resist snap judgments, that bears remembering.
What is properly taboo is never self-evidently or seriously unethical. It would be bizarre to describe rape or genocide as taboo. Rather, taboos are tainted by persistent suspicions of a wrongness that is not easily demonstrable: habitual drug use and promiscuity are two that still hang on in polite society, though they have lost much of their power elsewhere. Others more closely comparable to the one with which we started include research into the genetics of intelligence, an area that is not intrinsically problematic—genes play some role in structuring all creatures’ lives—yet tends to raise suspicions concerning motives (not always wrongly, either). Taboos exist in moral gray zones, places where our disapproval of a practice isn’t matched by an argument against it that we ourselves regard as self-evidently true, much less others; hence our need, in shunning the practice despite this lack, to press our hostile emotions into service.
A genuinely secular society, it seems, would concern itself only with the most basic or vital ethical matters while excising its pieties and taboos, which are nebulous in comparison. Clearly we don’t live in such a society. Yet one can take this conclusion in different ways. There are those who clamor for a social world liberated from taboo, one that countenances only rights violations and legal codes. But there are others. Might taboo and piety be features of the religious impulse not to be overcome, even for those who have no interest in upholding any particular religious tradition? Taboos express communal commitments that aren’t essential to the very possibility of a stable society (as the prohibition on random murder is); hence they may not admit of knockdown arguments. Instead, in these realms, it may be affect and disposition that guide us, however uncertainly, rather than reason. A community that failed to be bound by these sorts of penumbral norms would not feel like much of a community at all, only a formal arrangement between strangers concerning fundamental rights. Yet the scope of ethics is greater than the scope of bare law, and it is in just this space where custom and taboo hold greatest sway. It is also where we test our imaginations against the bulwark of tradition: this, finally, is the appeal of the taboo, and it is why so much productive iconoclasm is predicated on its exploration. Without taboo, a certain kind of creative pressure dissipates, from which one can only expect a slackening of culture.