An earlier post touched on the difficulty of building societies grounded in love, especially when viewed through the lens of evolutionary theory. In particular, the idea made famous by Richard Dawkins—that we are, in a sense, vehicles for “selfish genes”—poses a profound challenge. According to this view, the behaviors and traits that have been favored by evolution are those that enhance the survival and replication of genes, often at the expense of others. Even altruism, when it does appear, is typically explained as a strategy that ultimately serves genetic self-interest.

This perspective doesn’t necessarily mean we are doomed to be selfish in every interaction. Social cooperation, empathy, even self-sacrifice, can all arise under the right conditions. But if these behaviors are essentially byproducts of a deeper drive for genetic success, then what does it mean to hope for a society built on selfless love? Can such a vision be anything more than a noble exception to nature’s dominant rule?

One tempting idea is that we might find ways to change ourselves—perhaps not just through education or policy, but biologically. Could we, someday, rewire the machinery of evolution itself? Could we edit our genomes not just to cure disease but to soften the pull of selfishness at its root? Theoretically, perhaps. But this, too, invites troubling questions. If the designers of such changes are still governed by the logic of the selfish gene, can they be trusted to reengineer themselves? And if they succeed, would the resulting beings still be us—or something else entirely?

The “hard problem” of overcoming selfishness starts to resemble another famously intractable puzzle: the hard problem of consciousness. Love, after all, isn’t directed at things—it’s about relationships between conscious agents. But if we don’t really understand what consciousness is or how it arises, then how can we hope to build a moral or social order around it?

We are left with a paradox: the work of creating a society of love must be done by creatures who, from an evolutionary standpoint, were not shaped for it. And the very qualities we wish to build upon—empathy, compassion, the capacity to truly see and care for another—are bound up in a form of awareness we do not fully grasp.

Perhaps this is why so many people, across cultures and centuries, have turned to religion—not simply as a moral code, but as a way of grounding hope. If our biology locks us into cycles of self-interest, and our consciousness is a mystery even to ourselves, maybe it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the answers lie beyond us. That the longing for love, and the vision of a world shaped by it, might point not just to a better future, but to something or Someone outside the closed loop of evolution.

This isn’t to say belief in God is the only answer. But given the depth of the problem, and the mystery at its core, it seems like a reasonable one.

(Note, this essay used AI to polish the writing, but the ideas, content, and overall organization are mine.)