Nature is a powerful metaphor
Saturday, May 10th, 2008A 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?