Chapter 14.                              Part C

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 their society will get generous new contracts. Then there will be more disposable income around in the economy, money that consumers, who are just workers in their off-work hours, can spend on that subtler business person's goods and services.

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 all the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. Then - the workers know - goods will be cheaper, relative to their wages, than those goods were just a few months ago. Workers, if they are honest, will 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 adapt to innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, 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 and values.

                                                  wolves closing in to kill a caribou doe 

In this book, wisdom is seen as being a prime virtue. In the economic sector of our society's way of functioning, we all need to be wise enough to grasp a lesson. When there is a lesson as glaring as this one to be found in the history recorded by our forbears, refusing to learn that lesson would not just be unwise; it would be suicidal. Modern business leaders and modern union leaders, however much they may dislike each other, have by and large grown wise enough to see that they need each other. Dynamic balances make our society go. It is only the adjusting of the balance that we argue about. Over time, the wolf pack keeps the caribou herd strong, and vice-versa. 

Actually, this whole discussion of the ways in which social evolution driven by cultural changes can be compared to physiological/anatomical evolution driven by genetic variation is more fruitful by far than we have made clear up to this point. And this book builds its thesis on the assumption that the comparisons and analogies are not merely figures of speech. The idea that cultural adaptations are the key driving forces in human survival is assumed in this book because that idea fits the evidence.

                                                        prickly pear cactus (Utah, U.S.A.) 

                                                                   sedum spurium (Iran) 

Convergence, for example, is the name given in Biology to the phenomenon seen in species which are widely separated geographically, but that, after millennia of evolution, end up using strategies for survival that are practically identical. Desert plants of widely different species, in different, widely separated deserts, have waxy leaves. They also put off flowering and reproducing for years until that rare desert downpour arrives.   

                                                     Seminole elder with toddlers  

                            

                                                        Zulu woman with grandchild 

Similarly, nearly all human societies that have made it into the present age respect, value, and heed their elderly. For pre-literate tribes, an old person was a walking encyclopedia of the tribe's accumulated knowledge. What the old had stored up in their heads could save lives, even a whole tribe. This is convergence in the cultural realm.