Mahmoud Zayat/Getty Images Birds migrate over the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon.
All organisms, by definition, are laden with self-interest. Self-maintenance, self-protection, self-reproduction — these are biological imperatives. This mandate is often stated as “surviving to produce fertile offspring,” but organisms that only eke out survival are far less likely to be the ancestors of large lineages than are organisms that flourish in a given ecosystem. Nor is “flourishing” a synonym for that old canard “the fittest.” Rather, it connotes being well adapted to the particular environmental circumstances in which one finds oneself.
Social organisms remain self-interested, but in addition, they also cooperate in such vital activities as food acquisition and predator protection. Hence their mandate is both to flourish as an individual and to flourish in community. Sociality has evolved numerous times: Bacteria secrete signaling molecules to regulate group-related activities (quorum sensing); butterflies migrate; fish swim in schools; birds join together to chase off the circling hawk; wolves hunt in packs.
Social behaviors are in most cases “instinctive,” but in some cases organisms inherit the capacity to learn social behaviors. Primates, in particular, develop minds capable of keeping track of friendships and favors and mastering the nuances of fluctuating social hierarchies, behaviors that enhance the stability and hence the flourishing of their troops. Importantly, natural selection doesn’t “care” whether behavior is hardwired or learned; it only “cares” whether the outcome is adaptive.
Navigating the demands of self-interest versus group cooperation can be fraught with conflicting impulses, and the option to go-it-alone is frequently taken in the context of stress. Under such circumstances, social organisms typically hunker down and engage in self-interested survival patterns, the default behavior of all creatures.
Stress invariably arises when organisms find themselves in environments that fail to mesh with what their genetic scripts anticipated. Unexpected ecosystems fail to provide the necessary context for pulling together the social behaviors that were selected to generate flourishing communities in expected contexts.
Which brings us to human primates.
We turn out to be “niche constructors” — the familiar prototype being the beaver who dams up a stream and inhabits the resultant lake. We inhabit not only the planetary ecosystem but also the human-made, language-based niche we collectively call culture, allowing us access to information accumulated from generation to generation.
Language-based cultures are continuously evaluated and modified; hence humans are by definition born into unanticipated contexts. The stress engendered by this feature of our niche is minimized when a culture is stabilized by "tradition,” and maximized when cultures are amended in increasingly rapid timeframes, as is currently the case.
From this perspective, the angst expressed in this week’s series of blogs need not be attributed to the new information provisioned by scientific inquiry, nor to the new technologies generated by that knowledge, nor to the challenges modernity poses to traditional religious or political or community or family systems.
The angst arises because it’s all changing so precipitously that we’ve lost our bearings. We had hundreds of thousands of years to absorb fire and spear production; thousands of years to absorb the written word; hundreds of years to absorb heliocentricity.
And now look at us.
Talk about the stress of inhabiting unanticipated environments! Under such circumstances, self-interested survival patterns could be said to be adaptive.
But they aren’t, of course, for the simple reason that the planet lacks the carrying capacity to provide grounding and solace for all in the form of plastic purple penguins by the pool. If there has been an overarching human error, it has been to construct cultural contexts that fail to mesh with planetary realities.
But cultures are us. We invent them and re-invent them. We learn and we teach. Our growing awareness of our error and its consequences will hopefully allow us to access our inherited suite of social emotions – fairmindedness, respect, reverence and empathy – as we generate cultures that balance self-interest and Earth community. Such cultures wouldn’t seek to mask or bemoan our earthly materiality but rather would celebrate it.
We’ll always be self-interested. We’ll always want stuff. That’s part of our animal nature. But as I’ve lift up in a homily on stuff, it’s not getting what you want that’s important, it’s wanting what you’ve got. What we’ve got is a splendid planet; what we need to want is that it flourish.
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