We are a confusing species. I’m reading Francis Fukuyama’s latest, “The Origins of Political Order.” At the beginning of the book, as he sets the scene for his thought process, Fukuyama talks about research in primates to study the natural state of human behavior. Are we meant to live as independent operators merely satisfying our own desires, or are we wired to be a more cooperative species that seeks ways to coexist with others? Or do we learn to cooperate because we have negotiated away from our natural state as independent operators?
If you come down on the side of human's being naturally cooperative, you might ask if you're looking around and noticing recent social history is the individual celebrated and the social progress derided. Maybe I’m overreacting, but people being famous for being famous trump those who actually accomplish something is a trend that is confusing and highly illogical to me.
Let me pose a simple quandary. Who is more important to us as individuals living in our own community, Kim Kardashian, or the folks teaching in our schools? How about sports stars? How about Lebron James versus the cop on the beat in our neighborhood? I know, these are all cheap shots at pop culture and probably could be made at almost any period in history, but let me move the ball down the field a little further because a cheap as this example may be, it does relate to culture and the will of the masses.
We know that sugar in large quantities is not good for us. We know that tobacco, in the quantities that most smokers consume, is a threat to health on many levels. Most of us agree that educating people makes for a better economic environment. We all know that healthier people are more productive and not an economic drag on society in general.
We spend millions subsidizing the growth of sugar and tobacco, which has the effect of making the products produced from them cheaper. We are now in the middle of an economic crisis created by the greed of people who remain blameless and unscathed by their own misdeeds. The answer seems to be to continue subsidizing tobacco and sugar and cutting funds for health care and education.
Oh, I could go on goring one sacred cow after another. In Wisconsin, we are building roads we don’t need instead of schools. We are busy glorifying the subsidy enabling everyone to drive anywhere they want, at any time they want to go at the lowest cost to the driver. At the same time, we vilify teachers and public workers to justify the expenditure.
So here’s a thought, and in all fairness, I haven’t finished Fukuyama’s book. Still, we may be a species that is hardwired to be cooperative to accomplish mutual benefit. Still, we are not hardwired on the specifics of how that mutual benefit is going to be accomplished. And why does so much of the evidence point to individual satisfaction instead of sacrificing for the greater good? Just asking.
I thing you go off the rails at "Are we meant to live..." That's a philosophical question verging on the theological. If you believe, as I assume Fukuyama does, that some kind of purely material-biological processes wholly define us, then there is nothing out there to "mean" or "intend" certain outcomes or behaviors, especially at the individual level.
ReplyDeleteIf "survival" is a kind of "intention" that emerges as the collective will of living things and even certain tendencies in non-living systems suggest what they "want," humans are the exceptional case with their unique and troubled conscious minds that are capable of more and less willful self-destruction.
I am not sure that decadent tendencies in late imperial civilizations are the same type of drive toward self-destruction as the political agendas you describe. The latter come from people who clearly do have a belief in "greater goods" and who make sacrifices for them. They just have a different view of what the goods are and who they wish to share them with.
Even the most conservative person is a socialist or communist at home with family, friends, and trusted neighbors--or often with a church or school. They simply do not wish to subsidize or be forced to subsidize goods they do not want or do not want to pay for on behalf of others. There is not a shared sense of common goods at larger societal levels anymore, and everyone who participates in the partisan identity politics of hatred and contempt for their antagonists wants this outcome.