Chapter 14     Part B 

     "Past, Present, Future"   (Victor Bregeda) 

But let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. At least two different types of codes are guiding living matter across that field, out of the past and into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Other life-forms elsewhere in the universe may have found the formulas for neatly balancing the momenta of these two codes, but in the human case, the relationships between these two kinds of programming – the genetic and the cultural – are not yet well understood. The important point that we can still make, and that I emphasize in this book, is that the cultural mode of evolution is designed to respond to environmental changes and pressures in ways that are every bit as subtle, and, more importantly, as material in their consequences, as the genetic mode is.

Thus, some digression on the analogies that exist between the genetic way of evolution and the cultural one is in order here. The parallels have been noted before, by the Social Darwinists in particular. However, the conclusions of the Social Darwinists are considered by most people today to be disgusting, and rightly so. Social Darwinists conclude that rich people are rich because they are superior, to put it bluntly. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society while the workers, who in many places in the world even now are still miserably poor, deserve to be so because they don't know how to run much of anything.

Some rich Frenchmen a few decades ago lived by a similar code and found to their sorrow that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade those who still want to live by that code and who pretend that the French Revolution was an exception that only proved the rule, I offer the much harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. All of this evidence has taught some hard lessons to the nineteenth century-style Social Darwinists in societies all over the world. If you want to live, be nice. 

But how could it have been otherwise? The whole social milieu in which the Social Darwinists of earlier times lived and carried on their daily activities was not loving or free or wise or even brave. They saw cruel indifference, wastefulness, and arrogance as being necessities of human society. Subsequent experience in countries all over the world has shown that societies which contain more compassion and justice can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today know it. They will not accept exploitation, misery, and a subsistence existence as necessities of social living anymore.

Teamsters' Union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

For a paragraph or two then, let’s consider an example which shows how values in real life must reach dynamic equilibrium in order for us simply to function. I want to consider this particular example of how values shape human relations partly because it fits neatly here and partly because it can be seen as a paradigm of how humans today really do relate in all areas of their lives, professional and personal.

The captain of industry in the West today has times when he hates and despises unions, but he has come to accept that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of what the company is taking in every year, they will work less and less efficiently. He may find ways of retaliating, but then the cycle will just deepen and worsen with every passing year. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, then violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production – farms, dams, mines, factories, etc. – in this society, get ever meaner and more incorrigible in their attitudes, the whole country will indeed break down into revolution and chaos. To prevent such chaos - to preserve his way of life, in other words - the industrialist must have ambition and drive (courage), but also wisdom. A smart owner and/or CEO works with, not against, his workers.  

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. Workers in the Western democracies have rights, to safe working conditions and free, collective bargaining, and business people negotiate. Contracts are arrived at. In fact, the business people who are the most successful in the West today are the ones who train specifically to be skillful at labor-management negotiations.

Boeing union-management bargaining - Seattle, 2008

On the other hand, in their hearts, most union leaders today know that they have to respect a company's ability to pay. They ask for wages and benefits for their members right up to that line, but most of them don't try to push the owners past that brink. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders must have drive and wisdom in balance as well. On the other hand again, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers are going to expect wages to go up. Making her/his business or factory more efficient by smarter management, research and development, etc. is what the ethical, deserving business person does. Thus, most of the time, attempts at strike-breaking indicate not managerial competence, but incompetence.

Of course, there are also some even more nuanced ways of seeing this labor-management sub-system within our society. One truth is that each business leader is secretly hoping that s/he can achieve a modest settlement with her/his workers, but that the rest of the workers in that society will get generous new contracts. Then there will be disposable income around in the economy, money that consumers, who are mere workers in their off-work hours, can spend on that subtler business person's goods.

The complementary truth about any one group of workers, of course, is that while they want generous rates of pay in their new contract, they don’t really want to see these generous pay packets being handed out in the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. Then, these workers will have more money to purchase goods that will be cheaper relative to their wages than those goods were just a few months ago. Workers, if they are honest, will even admit that they want the company they work for to do well. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that such men and women, the hardhearted watchers of the bottom line, as long as they also know how to improve and market their goods, are the ones that the company has to have if it is to stay in business.

In short, in the modern business world, smart business people don't espouse the extreme called “Social Darwinism” any more than smart workers espouse Marxism. Democracy in all of its sectors has to run by maintaining interactions and tensions between complex, balanced systems of concepts.