Nature is a powerful metaphor
(posted by jackson)
A friend emailed me the link to this video, which depicts an incident that went down between some lions, crocodiles and wildebeests. It’s an interesting moment of conflict, and one can certainly watch it simply to observe the behavior of the animals, though, since my thoughts so often turn to politics, I was left thinking about Nature as a metaphor. Starting in the mid-1800s, those in favor of laissez-faire economics used Nature as a metaphor to explain the benefits of competiton. Herber Spencer came up with the phrase “survival of the fittest” to suggest a world in which progress resulted from the relentless struggle of all against all. The metaphor rested on an understanding of Nature as a place in which animals struggled against one another - alone, as individuals, without any kind of solidarity. But what happens to the metaphor if Nature is not like that? What if Nature is, in fact, full of solidarity? What if the conflict is tribe versus tribe, rather than individual versus individual? How does the metaphor change?
Tags: nature, social darwinism, solidarity, tribes
May 10th, 2008 at 2:50 am
For a second I thought you were going to mention Kropotkin.
Spencer’s weirdest analogy was that of society to an organism. Your heart is not free to beat as it chooses.
There may be some group-selection, but due to the variance between groups being much smaller than the variance within groups, the selection at a lower level swamps it.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Hi Jackson. I’ve tried emailing you a few times and still am getting bounce backs. Have a look at my site and leave a comment there or send an email if so inclined. I think we may be looking at things from a similar perspective.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Dan, thanks, I’ll check out your site right now. Sorry about email troubles. I hope to figure out the problem by Monday.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Here is an interesting quote by Sidney Webb relating to this post:
No consistent eugenicist can be a ‘Laisser Faire’ individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!
Referenced by Princeton professor Thomas C. Leonard
May 10th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“I thought you were going to mention Kropotkin.”
TGGP, I think the video can fairly be read as documentary evidence for some of Kropotkin’s wildlife observations. The video’s surprise ending pretty much screams “mutual aid”.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I think Spencer had it right (and Hobbes before him). Martial stuggle, survival of the fittest and predatory rivalry, between both individuals and groups, is the Law of Life.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I more or less hold the position that views “competition of agents” as a means to optimally derive information. This follows along the Hayekian view that holds the price system as a means to communicate information or knowledge.
The Spencer “Survival of the Fittest” is something I consider to be a relic of 19th century thinking. The modern science of neuroeconomics demonstrates the humans are far more cooperative than what was assumed under the neoclassical framework of the rational utility maximizing agent. If I thought anarchism reduced to a “survival of the fittest” meme, I never would have converted to it.
My Laissez faire economics meme centers around the market as a Hayekian spontaneous order of sorts, wherein competition serves the role to optimally extract information in terms of prices. Human cooperation is not something to be enforced by the State, but rather something that not only evolves naturally but is reinforced by the market itself.
May 11th, 2008 at 4:44 am
When I say “survival of the fittest”, I don’t really mean that in the context of any particular economic system or theory of economics. I mean it in a much rawer, cruder Machiavellian-Hobbesian-Nietzschean sense. Human existence on earth is simply one big battle royal pitting six billion contestants against one another and “survival of the fittest” is the means by which this process plays itself out. It’s basically Hobbes’ or Max Stirner’s “war of each against all”, individual against individual, tribe against tribe, sect against sect, herd against herd, nation against nation, class against class, culture against culture, ideology against ideology, race against race, religion against religion, army against army.
It’s what life is all about.
May 11th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I don’t think that’s what life is all about.
First, my life is about what I choose to make it about.
Second, my identity does not fit within arbitrary boundaries of herd against herd, nation against nation, race against race or army against army; I reject nationalism/racism. I choose which identities to support and which ones to reject.
I choose my *people* and our anti-racist tradition over your *nation* and your nationalist tradition.
May 11th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
P.S. How can I have smilies appear properly - the way I type them - instead of as silly smiley faces?
May 11th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
“First, my life is about what I choose to make it about.”
Well, I agree you can choose to make your own life what you want it be about. But when your ends come into conflict with others’ ends, you’ll find others can be quite ruthless. At that point, you’ll have another choice: You can either become even more ruthless than your opponents, or you can go down in defeat.
“Second, my identity does not fit within arbitrary boundaries of herd against herd, nation against nation, race against race or army against army; I reject nationalism/racism. I choose which identities to support and which ones to reject.”
You can also support whatever identities you want, but you’ll find there are plenty who don’t necessarily support you.
“I choose my *people* and our anti-racist tradition over your *nation* and your nationalist tradition.”
LOL! You’re misinterpreting me. I’m not a racial-nationalist. I’m saying that whatever people and whatever values you align yourself with, others will come into conflict with you. From there, it’s just a matter of winners and losers. Try a few experiments like being a Christian in contemporary Iraq, or a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, or a member of a polygamous Mormon sect in Texas, or a drug user anywhere in the US and many other places, or a political dissident in China, or a homosexual in Saudi Arabia, or a coca farmer in Colombia, or a dallit in India, or holocaust denier in France, or a Jew in Nazi Germany, or a peasant in Central America, or a person with any independence of thought or action at all in North Korea, and you will indeed come to realize that life is very much a war of each against all.
May 11th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Marja, I don’t know why those smilies are appearing. I think it must be some WordPress thing. I looked for a way to turn it off, but could not find a way.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Of course nature is full of solidarity in a sense — but it’s practically all kin-based. That is, it’s between genes. It is “identity politics” at its most base — you are “for” someone simply because they are like you genetically.
Does this change the metaphor? No, no really. Tribe vs tribe merely ups the ante; those who can bring the biggest, baddest, best organized tribe win. But we know this: why is Spanish a world language and Tagalog isn’t? Life in nature, even in a big tribe, is still hobbesian. I suppose the metaphor is changed if we focus on the in-group aspects of tribal life: there, cooperation can reign.
Only when the groups are so huge, as modern human societies are, that one can live the vast majority of one’s life in the dynamic of cooperative in-group relations, can one start to glimpse the possibility of a new paradigm.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
When you look at what Spencer actually wrote, as opposed to the caricature that most textbooks perpetuate, he’s actually a lot closer to Kropotkin than is usually thought. His conception of “survival of the fittest” was not all tooth and claw; on the contrary, he stresses the evolutionary advantages of cooperation, reciprocity, and beneficence. And he argues that because cooperative modes of social interaction are more successful than conflictual and/or hierarchical modes of social interaction, the natural tendency of social evolution is toward greater and greater cooperation, altruism, and equality.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I actually agree that is a better interpretation of Spencer, though my outlook is probably closer to Hobbes and Stirner.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I think the war of each against all more fairly describes how humans behave in unnatural, extraordinary situations. In small, stable societies where the average person has at most several dozen face-to-face contacts (the kind of primary hunter-gatherer groups we’re genetically wired for), internal relations tend to be quite peaceful, and wars with other groups are sporadic, highly ritualized (coup counting), and low casualty.
It turns into a war of each against all, in most cases, when some centralized system like a state throws thousands or millions of people together and forces them to compete over an artificially limited resource pool (like putting a bunch of dogs into a small yard, throwing them a single bone, and saying “OK, be nice.”).
Larry Gambone has done some interesting work applying Alice Miller’s theory of cooperator and dominator societies to the rise of the state. The warlike nomadic tribes, that conquered settled areas and founded the first states, came into existence in the environment of scarcity and violence that accompanied widespread desertification. And it created something of a chain reaction, as the brutalization following conquest by a dominator society created dominator characteristics in the conquered. For example, the eastern Slavs before the Mongol conquest of Russia were supposed to have been a fairly peaceful, cooperator type of society. The brutality and authoritarianism we identify with Russian political culture were a product of the Tatar yoke.