Natural Selection: Who Deserves to Rule Human Society?
By Charles Jeanes
“And if you call me brother now, forgive me if I ask –
‘According to whose plan?’
When it all comes down to dust,
I will kill you if I must. I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust,
I will help you if I must. I will kill you if I can.”
Leonard Cohen, Song of Isaac (1969)
“…there is in every Nation and Community a fittest, a wisest, bravest, best; whom, could we find and make King over us, all were in very truth well…”
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843)
Epidemic of deaths by fentanyl overdose
I will address the fentanyl-driven suicide crisis in Canada in this column. My subject matter at first appears unrelated. But one might intuit before long where I am going, how this harvest of death relates to my theme.
Hierarchy as natural human fact
A few columns past, I wrote about hierarchy and humanity, and whether we could ever eliminate hierarchy in our species. Realism, drawing conclusions from the recorded history of human society, strongly suggests that humans must always structure their social order in layers of power and wealth, that is, as stratified societies. The human instinct for religion is evidenced in the same manner; we observe what humans have consistently done in our history, and draw the conclusion: humans must have religious practices.
It is what we have done, not what our cultural elites have talked about, that truly matters for an understanding of what the human species is.
Idealism wishes humans would be, and do, better. Idealism asserts we are all equal in the sight of god or the gods; we all have a soul and each soul is equally valuable, is the religious conception of this ideal.
That we all possess equal human rights, no matter how unequal our natural endowments of talent, genius, capability, and potential may be, is the political and legal face of the argument for egalitarian society. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is the global community’s expression of the ideal.
Liberalism: the common-sense, default ideology of modernity
Today, “in the modern age”, I doubt any liberal person would argue against equal human rights. I am not certain of the “conservative” position; the liberal position has become the necessary and correct public opinion of our times, due to the specific historic circumstance in which we live – to wit, we live in the posterity of an absolutely horrible war against the racialist doctrines of the Nazis and fascists of Europe, and liberal democracy has become the stated ideal of the United Nations. The victors were not able to be anything but liberal after that war. Before that war, racialist theory was “scientifically” respectable, and without the Nazis’ dogmatic atrocities, such theory might still be in vogue.
The U.N. is the prime postwar international geopolitical accomplishment of the Western victors in that war, the USA, Britain, Canada, and France, nations of a specific liberal-democratic tradition. I do not believe that liberal egalitarianism is some inevitable end of human evolution, that liberalism is irreversibly forging moral “progress” as we march “forward through history."
Progress of a certain sort is possible. Scientific knowledge has accumulated, and the reward of that increase of knowledge is human mastery of material, demonstrated in our technologies, our medical discoveries, our increased life-spans in the rich parts of the world.
But moral progress is a different kind of advance. We might become better, morally, over time. Individuals can certainly do so as they age.
The mass of humanity is not, in my opinion, morally more elevated now than in the time of Shakespeare, nor than we were in the time of Jesus.
We have the same consciousness that homo sapiens had in the beginning of history, back through prehistory. Our basic material of consciousness, grey matter and neuronal net, is the brain we have had since our species emerged.
The meaning of Natural Selection: 19th-century science and progress
“History is driven forward by the war between the races of man.”
Adolf Hitler, speeches
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
“Species progress by the struggle to survive, and the survival of the fittest.”
Herbert Spencer, popularizer of Darwin’s’ theory for the British public
I assume readers have the basic knowledge of Charles Darwin’s work to understand what the great scientist meant by natural, and by selection, in his brilliant opus, On the Origin of Species (1859).
Nature was not anthropomorphized by Darwin; he did not romanticize it nor theorize it. Nature is what is and how things work, without reference to a divinity or a divine design – a fact which caused Darwin much anguish because he wished not to desert his Christian faith.
Selection by natural process means, natural events select the weak to die first. By dying first, the weak individual, or to be precise, the less-adaptive individual, leaves fewer of its progeny in the world. The more-adaptive individuals live longer and therefore have more sex, and by having more sex, more partners, more offspring, the probability of their genes carrying on is much higher.
What made an individual in a species more likely to reproduce large numbers? Darwin replied, its superior adaptability to material environments. The environment determines whether speed, strength, agility, intelligence, etc. etc. are advantageous, and those traits will be reproduced because the individual with those gifts will have more opportunity to procreate and send its genetic inheritance down through succeeding posterity.
In evolutionary natural selection, the characteristics of a species come into being over periods of time long enough to eliminate some traits and multiply others by processes of reproduction. The individuals whose progeny increased through generations were being selected naturally by longer life. Earlier death is the natural result of lesser ability; longer life is “reward” for adaptability to an individual’s environment. (No, reward isn’t an objective word, I realize.)
Darwin’s era had not discovered DNA and the mechanism of genetic heredity, but he understood that such a process, of traits passed down through generations, was at work over time. Breeding animals for selected traits was known by humans for a long time before Darwin studied the origin of species. Breeders of specific horses or cattle or dogs could demonstrate heredity to him in their practice of improving the bloodlines of a chosen type of horse or cow or dog. The cosmopolitan aristocracy of Europe had practiced selective breeding for “noble” blood in their marriage contracts for many centuries, occasionally with disastrous results. (viz., the feeble Spanish Habsburgs after 1600 CE.)
Survival and fitness, sex and death
Sexual selection is natural where humans do not interfere to “improve” a breed of domestic beast. In animals which compete for mating opportunity, the males fight for dominance. The losers cannot have access to females; thus their genes will not be carried forward. Females also select their mates by less-obvious methods, and choose which male traits will combine with their own in the progeny they produce.
Female reproductive strategies and male ones are not the same, and the former are only now being more fully explored by science. (In passing, I note that on CBC a woman discussing love said, “We all want someone attractive, intelligent, and ambitious to love, don’t we?” This is sexual selection in a nutshell.) In Darwin’s patriarchal era, it was presumed that the aggressive male was the individual worth studying among mammals, birds, reptiles. It is the male which so obviously does combat for the sexual favours of females.
But Darwin did not theorize about individual humans competing in society. He did not say that humans who sat atop the social pyramid were “superior by nature”. Other minds concluded that. He did not coin the phrase “survival of the fittest,” but once that phrase was in print, it became the slogan by which natural selection was understood in mass (semi-educated) consciousness, thanks to the public media of his times.
Now we, 150 years after Darwin, still confront the question of “fitness”. Is there a necessary relationship between an individual’s success in a hierarchical social order and that person’s genetic inheritance?
Darwin misunderstood and appropriated, by the best people
Are success and talent in a causal relationship: is the successful person’s superior endowment the cause of their superior, privileged place in society?
Not surprisingly, the people who are atop our social pyramids in modern democratic capitalist societies, like Canada’s, reply to that question with a (more-or-less qualified) “Yes.”
Please read further into the topic of social class and Darwinian evolutionary biology at the websites I list at the end of my column. As you will read there, the rich and “successful” among us believe they deserve their status.
What is your tribe? On grouping humans
In my speculations here I will allow no obstacle of political correctness to censor any question. One question is, what is your tribe? What distinguished collective entity would you accept as one in which you are a member? It may be your nation, state, town, ethnicity, religion, gender, political party, social class, sports team – to name the obvious ones. We are social animals and we are constituted to live in communities. Facebook is not new in substance, only form. Social media are cybernetic societies.
You may feel “I have no tribe but the entire human species -- I love humanity.” You are a citizen of the planet, a human being.
I apologize for doubting your idealism, but I believe that is simply a pose, an ideological allegiance you have chosen, and not true to how you really feel about your identity. It is not credible (to me at any rate) that a person feels no preference for what larger grouping of humans they would identify with. They have a tribe, whether or not they are conscious of it or will recognize the fact.
Liberal-progressives are forbidden by their ideology from declaring strong identification with a group, because then they are guilty of an “–ism”: racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, social-classism, colonialism, and so forth. At elections, liberals declare their political tribe, of course. What just happened in the USA is evidence that liberals know their enemy, and will name it.
Nation-states and ruling classes: collectives in a global capitalist market
Do you feel that Canadians are your fellows in a way Americans or Germans or Israelis are not your people? If you do, then generations of cultural programs to inculcate a feeling of national identity for Canadians have worked well.
In what way is “Canadian” a meaningful descriptor for a collective? Only as a politico-legal label. A Canadian is a citizen of Canada; our official ideology of nationhood denies ethnicity, creed, colour, or place of origin has any relevance to applying the adjective Canadian to any person. If you have citizenship in Canada, you are a Canadian.
A nation-state such as Canada or the USA is a deliberate creation, determined by historical circumstance. Our colonial Canadian nation-state came into being at the behest of British capitalist imperialism and its governing apparatus of a specific ruling class. Canada was born as materialism replaced Christianity as the normative consciousness of Europeans, and bears the marks of this dual inheritance. Christianity and capitalism gave us licence to occupy the land.
Aboriginal “first nations”: a problem for liberal ideology
Canada’s historic “Indian” policies are a topic too complex for easy conclusions, but must be noted. Before the nation-state of Canada was created by the colonial empire of the United Kingdom in 1867 – a creation we are set to celebrate for 150 years of its existence – what was the status of inhabitants of this land? Settlers were European immigrants to this northern territory of North America. Indigenous people by definition were original inhabitants of these lands.
Who was a “citizen” before 1867? Citizenship as a legal category was severely restricted. All people were subjects of the Crown. Very few indeed had all the civil rights of a 21st century citizen of Canada. The struggle to achieve civil rights as defined in the British Empire was a long one for the settler culture. The “First Nations” were left out of the political system of Canada both before and after 1867. The Indian Act still exists only for aboriginal people in Canada and no other, and therefore it is arguably true that natives are still not fully part of the civil society created by our European-derived political institutions.
Settler culture did not trouble itself much with questions of justice for the people whose land was stolen for settlement by Europeans. European legal theory explained it by the “doctrine of discovery” and Christian ideology ever since Columbus claimed the New World for the Catholic monarchy of Spain. Europeans assumed their right to sovereignty over the heathen. This is still the basis of Canada’s presumed right to be a nation-state in the form we know it.
Settlers were assured by the elites of their culture that European Christian capitalist civilization was superior to native, and that our take-over of the natives’ land was natural, just, and (for some) divinely-intended. The history of humanity written by European historians taught settlers that the strong always dominate the weak. Darwin’s science would be put to use in the substantiation of this non-scientific cultural ideology. Racism was not invented after Darwin; it had a long history, back to the days of the conquistadors.
Immigrants to Canada: how does gate-keeping work?
As I have said, we in Canada live in a liberal, post-racist era since WWII. Our immigration policies, chosen by the voters of Canada by the sorts of political parties we empower to make those policies, are deliberately designed to prove that we are not racist in our decision whom to allow into our state to become citizens. We are quite proud of our record of bringing people from all races and places, as most recently with Syrian refugees. The USA is also very proud of its liberality in sharing the American Dream with immigrants. “Give us your huddled masses” is the poetic inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
Does immigration as regulated by our elected governments, in the democratic present and in our colonial past, tend toward the making of a Canadian state that can compete more effectively with other states? The very question will offend the liberal-progressive idealist who wants to believe that competition is not now the operative principle in geopolitics; the U.N. wishes it were not.
Whether or not the allowance of immigrants into Canada has any “Darwinian” design, choosing immigrants who will help Canada become more adaptive for the struggle in the global economy to the best development of our state, is not a question I can answer with my resources. But I raise the question.
I hold to my long-established analysis that there is a ruling class in Canada. Therefore any policy as important as immigration is determined more by the rulers’ instructions to the political servant class than to mass public opinion. Just last month, our federal government announced a limit on privately-sponsored Syrian immigrants to our state. This reflects opinion among our ruling class, filling their need for productive new workers and/or investors, rather than refugees who require state subsidization to have a decent life.
And here is another offensive question: which citizens of Canada contribute most to making this nation-state the best it may be and the strongest it can be in competition with other societies?
Put it another way. Are the materially and financially most-successful people in society the fittest among us, as they believe? Are our elites better-adapted? A read-through on the websites at the foot of the column will tell you what our elites think about the matter.
Many people in Canada are not prospering, and the distribution of wealth has become manifestly less fair in the last two decades. The middle class declines; homelessness and poverty stalk our society in ways one did not observe in the 1960’s.
One big happy human family on one planet: the dream of Love
The inequality between native and non-native in Canada persists still to the advantage of non-natives. What Canada does about this, as Gord Downie says from his privileged status as a rock star, is a defining question of who we are in the next 150 years of Canadian history. I am glad he is saying it.
Gord Downie is not some rarity in Canada, not an inspired icon on the level of a Buddha or a Christ. His sentiment is endorsed by millions in Canada.
Human history is replete with teachers like those spiritual giants in whose name religions have been founded. Philosophers, prophets, holy men and women, saints and visionaries, all have exerted themselves to convince humans we are one, the Family of [hu]Man, a united planetary tribe, with all members of equal value.
One should love all humans and value all human life: this is a moral absolute, these paragons of human love have told us over and again, across historic times and in numerous places. Plato called this love agape.
The best and the brightest: taking humanity off-planet
On Boxing Day, on CBC radio’s science program, I tuned in a discussion of how humanity must search out new life on other planets – the old Star Trek paradigm of our Destiny. We must go to the stars and find other life, maybe intelligent, maybe not, because – well, just because it is “human nature” to drive forward the quest for more scientific knowledge.
This opinion is an assertion of values, not a fact. It is a variant of liberal progressivism.
Bob Macdonald’s guest on the show was emphatic in his certainty we should mount the enormous scientific effort at whatever material cost to go to the stars in the search for other life. Macdonald joked, “Or we could wait for them to come to us.” His guest joked back, “That would be lazy!”
But perhaps Bob in his mild way was suggesting we ought not to expend the effort when our home planet is in such manifest disorder that we have more than enough to do to help humans, the conscious species already living here.
Why would someone propagandize for a quest after knowledge that will necessarily take vast resources from earth where the resources are needed for the life that is here and in peril? Ideological Darwinism would reply that the “fitness” of humanity in the galaxy is being tested by the physical challenge of interstellar exploration: a species truly fit for survival would rise to the challenge, just as Europeans once used their superior cultural and technological capability to take over continents they “discovered.”
As for me, I’m a one-worlder. Earth is enough. The human species has not made a success of its life on one planet. We imperil our habitat by our mad economic habits. Going by spaceship to other habitats is not self-evidently the course for us now. It is to my mind immoral to do so in present circumstances.
The indifference of the Universe vs. the providence of Consciousness
“Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.”
Max Lehrmann, The Desiderata (1952)
The present state of opinion in modern and post-modern philosophy as it has developed in response to materialist science says the universe is indifferent. What humans used to call “Creation” and moderns tend to call “the universe” or “the cosmos” does not have any purpose, intention, or goal, in the mind of modern humanity; human life is not special in any spiritual/religious/moral sense. Conscious life is rare, science agrees, but not some sort of crown upon the material universe.
Every unfolding in material events is random entropy, though phenomena are given order by regular processes that physicists once called “laws” in Newton’s time. Intelligence can discover how the materials of the universe operate, and with technology, intelligent life can seemingly exert “control” over matter.
For far longer in our history than this modern era has lasted, humans believed in a universe under the watchful observation of a Conscious Being often called God, or the gods. God provided a design – Providence – and humans had a special destiny in the divine plan. It is the distinctive accomplishment of the modern age, since about the seventeenth century and the unique “Western Enlightenment”, to have eliminated God from the consciousness of millions and millions of humans in the most “developed” societies. Materialist, capitalist, scientific cultures such as Canada’s have experienced the death of God.
Leonard Cohen has a fine lyric about how Christianity was lost and economics substituted in its place: “As He died to make men holy, let us strive to make things cheap.” Poetry packs a lot of meaning into a tiny phrase.
Scientific Materialism: substitute for theistic religion
I indicated earlier that Christianity was defeated by materialism in mass consciousness during Europe’s nineteenth century, the very era when Canada was brought into being as a nation-state within an Empire.
It is rather commonplace to say it, but I will say it anyway: the religion of modern, mostly-Western, humanity is materialism, scientific knowledge, capitalist economics, and liberal-democratic politics. These learned habits for moulding our consciousness with ideological constructs replace the practices and beliefs we once faithfully devoted to our religions.
One is bound to ask whether the substitution has meant “progress” for humanity, as the liberal creed says it has. The best book on the history, narrating how God died in the mind of humans in the West of the modern era, is to my mind God’s Funeral, at least for English readers interested in study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British intellectual history.
The author is an Englishman, A. N. Wilson, whose very own life is a study in one man’s encounter with his culture, with Christianity, and with atheism. He once declared himself an adherent of the militant atheism upheld by the late Christopher Hitchens and Sir Richard Dawkins, but later re-joined the Church of England.
Here is Wilson laying out his subject:
“This book… attempts to make sense of [the 19th century conflict of believers and atheists] by getting to know the men and women who were caught up in it. This is not a work of science, though scientific ideas are mentioned in it. Its author is no philosopher, though he has made some attempts to explain the underlying philosophical background to the story. This is not a theology textbook, but it shows the qualities of strife which afflicted men and women who found themselves honourably at war with theology. Periodically in the course of the century they proclaimed that God was dead; and that is how it appeared to many of them who lived through those times.”
Wilson is a fine writer and no superficial thinker. I feel it is relevant to cite one of his conclusions about human behaviour here:
“For the human race did not, as the Whigs [British liberals] hoped, progress in a bland upward spiral toward a greater and gentler enlightenment. It lurched from one form of blind folly to another, from one superstition to another, from one tyranny to another. Faith was not something which could be gradually eliminated from the human scene. It was a vital component in the human make-up – personal and collective. If it was not directed toward the true God, it would be directed towards idols. Hence Carlyle’s view – as we can see now, a fatal though perfectly accurate one – that the human race, having discarded belief in the God of Israel, would always look towards an Ubermensch or Superman as its God-substitute.”
Wilson is expressing conclusions here very much in harmony with his contemporary in English literature, the philosopher John N. Gray.
But in respect for other points of view, I will refer readers to the perspectives of Charles Eisenstein, William Irwin Thompson, and Ken Wilber, all of whom have studied deeply the subjects of Western intellectual and cultural history and its distinctive evolution of consciousness. Each author in his own way explains select stories in the development of the Mind of the West and its now-globally-dominant culture.
For a profound and readable one-volume narrative of philosophical traditions, the book to read is The Passions of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, a scholar of history and astrology.
The Grim Reaper selects: death by epidemic, famine, and war
I indicated I would reference the fentanyl crisis, the apparent unintended suicides of hundreds of addicts in Canada in the past six months. Perhaps not all of the dead were addicted, but that is not germane. The stories I read and see in media call this death toll “an epidemic of addiction” and examples of overdose victims are not easy to relate to if one knows nothing about addiction; people repeatedly use the drug despite the clear risk of death.
Question: is this epidemic some form of “selection”? i.e., is death harvesting our population in some way that is Darwinian in consequences for society?
Do those questions sound like the atrocious perspectives of Ebenezer Scrooge? This fictional misanthrope famously said, “If they [the poor] had rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” Charles Dickens wrote that in 1843 (in his novel A Christmas Carol), quite in advance of Darwin writing about natural selection. Charles Marx revered Charles Darwin for his science; Marx, like Dickens, was motivated by a passion for justice. Dickens’ creation, Mr. Scrooge, was a very successful London man of business at the time the British Empire was rising like a sun: A superior type of man of the superior Anglo-Saxon race, one would say -- if one were in the grip of social-Darwinist dogma. This dogma was indeed an equivalent of religious doctrine.
The concept of “surplus population” was (is) of course a capitalist economic construct, and Dickens deplored it. It legitimizes that prejudice against the poor which Canadian capitalism allows and normalizes to this day. Liberalism may deplore that sentiment; it is not rare, in my opinion.
In recent history, ebola and HIV/AIDS have been spoken of, in dark corners, as a natural brake on African overpopulation. Historically, famines in India and China have been evaluated in the same spirit. Inter-state war, civil war, revolutionary war, also cause mass death and have been seen as an example of selection by death of the less-fit members of our species. These are cruel and inhumane opinions, one is compelled to remark in all good conscience.
Our epidemic and the immigrant dream of a Good Canadian Life
Addiction must appear inexplicable to people who only want to immigrate to Canada: how could any Canadian, with all Canada has to offer, not want to live, to make good life-choices? -- one imagines an African or Asian peasant asking this. I do not know “why” in any general way; every addict has personal history specific to their situation.
Drugs are a disease that do not afflict all equally. Addiction is a Western pathology, apparently part of modern materialist society in spite of the seemingly vast liberty and opportunity of a life lived in Canadian circumstances. The people who die from addiction are to be pitied; compassion is the moral response.
I asked my question about addicts’ deaths and “natural selection” because Darwinian thinking forces it; that form of thinking is not by any means gone from our social consciousness. Our capitalist mindset has its foundation in the notion that Nature decrees that all compete against all. Life is struggle: That was the common-sense perspective in Europe in the 1900’s. One would not easily make the case that we have moved beyond such simple-minded slogans. “Save money. Live better.” “I’m lovin’ it.” “You’re richer than you think.”
Conclusions: Humanity freely becoming, or Humanity as it must be?
All questions about natural selection and evolution of species are for humans another form of the question of Free Will. Are we free? What does freedom mean? If we are free, humans can be anything our abilities allow us to be.
True human freedom recognizes the limits of “Nature” upon us, but no one has come up with a universally-accepted way to describe those limits. Our natural species-intelligence bring powerful sciences into being, and science enables human technologies so potent they seem magical. With such potency, why should humanity accept any limitation to our will? We can rule Nature: An extreme Marxian expression of this can be found in Trotsky’s writings.
We can evolve consciously, by choice, into any kind of being we might imagine – correct? Barbara Marx Hubbard and others of her ilk believe that today. As our freedom is not limited, she would argue, we should evolve to be the loving beings we can imagine being, and whom teachers like Jesus told us we are intended by God to become.
My personal favourite author on human spiritual and historical evolution, Charles Eisenstein, argues for our conscious choice of a new narrative – The Story of the People, he calls it -- creating new mass consciousness for a revolution of love. The future can be loving, fair, and beautiful. Humans just have to choose consciously to become different than what we have been in history, choose to evolve the qualities of human beings who can accomplish goals of goodness.
Against that wonderful perspective one must put the alternative, that humans are subject to limitations of our species and will not transcend them by good will and loving wishes. We must behave a certain way, be as humans are, just as gravity must exert its force and as the sun must burn out eventually.
Humans are subject to the universe as it is and not as we wish it to be.
If the mighty among us have their way, i.e., the way rulers have ordered the material world and human society for all of recorded history, then the power they have over the rest of us will be the proof that they, and not we – we the powerless, we the poor in material possessions -- are the finest specimens of the human creature. Being at the top of the social order is the proof that they are the optimal, the best-adapted, fittest human beings. We are “surplus to requirements”, as the capitalist CEO explained to his laid-off workers.
They, and not we, will survive whatever drastic depopulating of our planet must occur by natural selection in the near future. Their genes, not ours, will be passed on into the future, and they will “seed the stars” with interstellar humanity.
There is as yet no way we can discover if that future favouring the ruling few among us is most probable. A technology to control time may empower us to observe the future, and then we will know. Who will control any technology of time-control? Most likely it will be possessed by those who master the highest-evolved technologies now.
“To command the most-advanced tools, be the most-advanced individual”: is this the law of natural selection as it applies to human beings? Perhaps.
I can say with certainty I loathe the prospect of a future where the genetic posterity of the ruling few has survived, and the ruled many have been eliminated. That is my moral judgement. But if the Universe is indifferent and random and there is no caring Providence nor moral Consciousness to guide our path ahead, that loathsome future could well be likely.
As for whether any of this philosophy matters, well, humans are “the meaning-making animal,” in the definition of philosophers, and we will give whatever meaning we choose to events and things. You choose yours, I’ll choose mine.
https://www.google.ca/webhp?source=search_app&gfe_rd=cr&ei=8xBXWKC3Ko7t8weEjZ7ACQ#q=social+class+essentialism
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/05/gelman.aspx
https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-Darwinism
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/nameof/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438818/donald-trump-social-darwinism-21st-century-incarnation-old-malady