Allegory of Prudence (Titian)    (credit: Wikipedia) 

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 responds to environmental changes and pressures in ways that are subtler in their consequences than the genetic mode is. In short, it’s obvious that 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 harsher lessons of the Russian Revolution. Then come the ones in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many others. And the very near miss in the US in 1931. This evidence contains some hard lessons for 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 misery, exploitation, and bare subsistence as necessities of social living anymore.

   

                 Teamsters’ union members vs. police, Minnesota, 1934 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)