Chapter 15.                            (continued) 

But now let’s return to our main point. A kind of field underlies time. At least two different types of codes guide living matter across that field, out of the past, across the present, into the future. These two types are the genetic and the cultural. Other life forms elsewhere in the universe may have found formulas for neatly balancing the momenta of these two codes, but in the human case, the relationships between genetic and cultural programming are not yet well understood. However, the point I emphasize in this book is that the cultural mode of evolution that has emerged in natural history so recently is able to respond to environmental changes and pressures in ways that are subtler in their consequences than the genetic mode is. Humans out-manoeuvre all other species on this planet.

Thus, a 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. To put it bluntly, Social Darwinists conclude that rich people are rich because they are superior. They deserve to be rich because they know how to run society, while the workers, who in many places in the world are still miserably poor, deserve to be so because they don’t know how to run much of anything.

A few decades ago (in 1789), some rich Frenchmen lived by this code and found to their sorrow that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. To persuade any who still want to live by that code, I offer the much harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many others. 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 social milieu in which the Social Darwinists of earlier times lived was not very loving or free or wise or even brave. They saw cruel indifference, wastefulness, and arrogance as being necessities of not just their society, but any human society. Subsequent experience in countries all over the world has shown that, on the contrary, societies containing more compassion and justice can work, and do work, and ordinary folk all over the world today realize it. They will not accept exploitation, misery, and bare subsistence as necessities of social living anymore.

   

                                              Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934

Let’s briefly consider an example that shows how values in real life must reach dynamic equilibrium in order for us simply to function. This particular example of how values shape human relations is relevant because it can be seen as a paradigm of how humans today really do relate with each other in all areas of their lives, professional and personal.

A captain of industry in the West today has times when he despises unions, but he has come to accept that if workers are not paid a fair percentage of the company’s earnings, they will work less and less efficiently. He may find ways of retaliating through punitive measures, but he knows those will simply cause the cycle to deepen and worsen. If the obstinacy on both sides becomes hardened enough, violence is inevitable. If those who own the means of production—farms, dams, mines, factories, etc.—become even more incorrigible in their attitudes, the whole society will eventually break down into revolution and chaos. To prevent such chaos and to preserve his way of life, the smart CEO must have ambition and drive (courage), but also wisdom. A smart owner or CEO works with, not against, his workers.

Thus, we have learned, by trial and painful error, to aim for balance. For example, workers in Western democracies have rights to safe working conditions and free collective bargaining via their unions. Smart business people negotiate with unions, and contracts are arrived at by debate and compromise. In fact, the most successful business people in the West today are those specifically trained to be skilful at labour-management negotiations.

   

                                 NAVFAC and IFPTE sign new collective agreement (Hawaii, 2013) 

For their part, most union leaders today know they have to respect a company’s ability to pay. They ask for reasonable wages and benefits for their members, but most of them don’t try to push the owners to the brink of insolvency. To do so would simply be irrational. Union leaders must have drive and wisdom in balance as well. Furthermore, most business leaders in the West have accepted that as long as prices go up, workers will expect wages to go up accordingly. Making their business or factory more efficient by smarter management and ongoing research and development rather than by union-busting is what the ethical, deserving business people do. Thus, most attempts at strike-breaking are rooted in managerial incompetence.

There are some even more nuanced ways of seeing balance in this labour-management subsystem within our society. One truth is that while most smart business leaders secretly hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that workers, who are simply consumers during their time off, can spend on the smarter business leader’s goods and services.

The corollary is that while any one group of workers wants generous rates of pay in their new contracts, they don’t want to see generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. If settlements in general are modest, workers know that goods will be cheaper, relative to their wages, than those goods were just a few months ago. If they are honest, most workers will admit to wanting their own company to succeed above others. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that managers who watch 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 the company needs if it is to stay in business and keep workers employed.

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 or, to put the matter more exactly, between the groups of people who carry those concepts and values in their heads.