People commonly talk about ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’, but it’s a reductive worldview; a human projection onto reality.
Evolution has occurred as much through cooperative interdependence as though competition. The example that may come immediately to your mind will probably be same-species social groups, like swarms and tribal or pack units. Domestic animals also come to mind – inter-species cooperation.
There is a deeper inter-species cooperation at work though. Your own body is a community of microbes. The majority of the useful cells in your body do not have your DNA. Your cells are fused with thousands of different useful retroviruses, and your gut is lined with a ‘lawn’ of essential bacteria. Human anatomy does not work without this. They evolved cooperatively, like bees and flowers.
Even competition in nature is also cooperation. There’s not a sentiment of ‘cooperation’ – a wolf does not think, “I am weeding out the weakest deer and strengthening the species, while the strongest deer keep our hunting abilities sharp” – but there is a de facto cooperation that is mutually beneficial.
The cooperative, balancing tendency in nature has allowed for stable systems to give rise to increasing complexity, reaching its (known) apex in the self-aware human brain.
When humans conceptualise cooperation and competition they miss the true spirit of both. Nature is not rapacious and greedy, it just is. Nature is not sentimental and weak, it just is. Humans have the unique capacity for malice and compassion; they should not project these traits onto nature in order to self-justify. When I hear these American ‘Libertarians’ talk about the free-market economy being like nature, I think it’s a hatefully spurious argument. Nor should society be imagined and engineered as a ‘cooperative’ ants’ nest. It is what it is; don’t conceptualise it – just live wisely. There’s no need for a social paradigm – these things evolve out of small individual acts.
Tags: capitalism, communism, ethics, ideas, nature, Politics
August 27, 2010 at 5:33 am |
[...] Prisoners’ Dilemma Jump to Comments A post by The Daily G the other day on cooperation and competition reminded me of The Prisoners’ [...]
August 25, 2010 at 11:26 pm |
What exactly do you mean by “nature”? Aren’t we part of nature? I don’t think we’re all that distinct from other mammals that we can draw a big line between us and them where they’re “nature” and we’re not. I don’t think we’re that unique.
August 26, 2010 at 2:33 am |
What do you mean? I don’t think I was drawing any false distinction. But humans do have the unique ability to conceptualise nature, and problems arise from this.
Nature=reality, that’s all. Reality and its inscrutable ‘laws’ that conceptualisation never quite grasps. ‘We see through a glass darkly.’
August 24, 2010 at 11:46 pm |
Nice idea but wrong. It’s certainly not cooperation that keeps life ticking over. It’s accommodation.
Take the human body for example. Frankly any virus worth its salt would invade and take over, but it doesn’t. Not because it reaches some sort cooperation pact with the existing cells, but a stasis is reached. If not one or other or both organisms perish.
The trouble with nature being unthinking is that it can wreak havoc. Now that’s ok if it operates in world that is mindless, but we’re around. And we can change things.
August 25, 2010 at 12:38 am |
It’s not a nice idea if it’s wrong.
I think you are wrong about viruses. Consider the bees and flowers example: one does not secretly want to overrun the other somehow. It is not always a question of stasis. In the case of wolves and deer, as I said it is not a conscious cooperation but a de facto one. It’s not conscious competition either; it just IS.
We have not changed things for the better, but we could I guess. What do you think that would look like?