Evolutions, Biological and Cultural

                                 Olympic women's marathon competitors, 2012

                            (credit: Aurelien Guichard, via Wikimedia Commons)

In some recent posts, I have referred to the parallels between biological evolution, the process by which living species change over millennia, and the process of human cultural evolution. This is a useful, fruitful comparison, so I want to discuss it a bit further today.

The ways that living species and ecosystems change are shaped by two main general principles: genetic variation and natural selection.

Every living thing contains some core DNA that directs how that living thing will be built up from atoms and molecules, how it will interact with other things, living and non-living, in its environment, how it will reproduce itself, and how it will wear out and terminate. Die. The fate of all living things in the end.

Humans, like most living things of our type, i.e. mammals, are conceived in the uteruses of females of our species, born out of our mothers’ bodies, nurtured for fifteen to twenty years, and sent out into our physical environments, which usually contain a lot of others of our kind. These others are usually like us in anatomy, but also in cultural programming. We’re born, nurtured, educated, and sent out into our environments to live as independent members of the tribe. We usually find a partner to mate with, and the whole process begins again.

All living things follow a very similar pattern. Really simple organisms don’t use sexual reproduction. Each of them simply divides over and over again and their numbers grow in their locale for as long as they can do so. But otherwise, unicellular organisms are very similar in their life basics to complex organisms. Come into existence, feed, excrete, reproduce, die.

                                         Unicellular organism (paramecium)

                                (credit: Barfooz, via Wikimedia Commons)

But studied over time, life reveals that it contains much more. Living things don’t merely reproduce themselves and so survive in their offspring. They keep changing in ways that enable them to adapt to, and survive in, their changing physical surroundings.

Living things clearly fall into groups. Most of the group members look like each other and can only reproduce by mating with each other. But the groups, or “species”, as we call them, also change as they go forward. The members of the group gradually, over generations, take on new forms and behaviors till in 50 or 100 generations the members of the group look and act quite differently from their ancestors. The changes come by small steps, and in each generation, individuals whose special traits are not effective in enabling those individuals to survive die out before they can reproduce. They take their genes out of the pool of genes available to the whole species. Unusual coat markings, for example, attract predators that get their bearers killed. In desperate cases when environmental changes come rapidly, sometimes whole species become unfit and die out.

They die out because conditions in the environment around them change faster than the species can adapt. More often, however, some members of the species better suited to the changing conditions do survive, adapt, have offspring,  and pass their fitter genes on to a new generation of the species.

   

                                Artist's conception of the dodo bird (now extinct)

                          (credit: Bazza Da Rambler, via Wikimedia Commons)

Real environments change often and sometimes drastically. An ice age arrives, a drought sets in, a volcano erupts, blight wipes out a forest. One marvels at how living species manage to adapt and survive. What gives life such tenacity?

The answer is that members of a species may be very much alike in anatomy and behavior, and they may be capable of reproducing with the members of the opposite sex of their species, but no two of them are ever exactly the same. There are always small differences in intelligence, size, coloration, speed, strength, resistance to disease, heat, cold, hunger, and so on.

When an organism reproduces, it passes some of its attributes on to its young via the DNA that is implanted in the young one’s cell nuclei. But not all of a parent’s attributes get passed on to its young. Some inherited traits come from the other parent and some come through a parent from earlier ancestors. Some of a new individual’s traits, in other words, may have lain dormant in the DNA of one of its parents, and not shown up in the parent at all, only to turn up now, maybe generations since its last occurrence. Red hair, blue eyes, large stature, musical ability, reasoning ability, sprinting speed …lots of traits can skip one or several generations. Inherited DNA keeps getting stirred up. In fact, DNA sometimes even gets re-arranged by outside forces (like radiation, for example). New gene combinations, and living styles shaped by those new combinations, keep emerging. Thus, living species are always subtly morphing into new forms.  

So this is the first big point to get about all living things: they are experiments, every one of them, all the time. Life is always trying out new design ideas.

   

                                                 

                             leopard (credit: Srikaanth Sekar, via Wikimedia Commons)

   

                                      Black panther (a color variation of the leopard) 

                                   (credit: Bruce McAdam, via Wikimedia Commons)

This first big principle of biological evolution is termed “genetic variation”.

The second big idea to get when we try to understand evolution is that though nature is always being creative and inventive, and nature seems in this picture to be kind and generous, there is a dark side. The real world is harsh, uphill, deadly. Individual organisms are dying in thousands of ways in millions of places all the time. The best creative ideas that nature has each year – the individuals that are designed in anatomy and behavior so that they can feed themselves, reproduce, and successfully nurture their young – these transmit their genes forward through time in their young. The rest don’t. They starve, they get killed by predators, they freeze, they fail to protect enough of their young to ensure that at least some of those youngsters go on …whatever. They and their closest kin die out. In nature, this is not sad; it’s just over.

This second big principle of evolution is usually called “natural selection”.  

Gradually, over many generations, the living things that do survive have done so because they kept adapting as their environments changed. When a drought came, or an ice age, or a blight killed off the plants they ate, or a new predator came into their area – or whatever – the winners went on because they were well-suited to handling the new reality.

Genetic variation: all living species are changing subtly all the time. The genes in their cell nuclei keep getting re-arranged and the individuals that are built up as each one implements its genetic plan are always subtly different from their parents. Species constantly experiment and tinker with their programs.

Natural selection: of the billions of small experiments going on all the time, many don’t work. In nature, only individuals whose design is suited to current conditions go on to reproduce; over generations every species keeps turning into something else – smarter, faster, stronger, better camouflaged – because not all members in any given generation pass on their DNA gene codes. Many die before they can reproduce, because they are slow, weak, unintelligent, etc.  

Genetic variation and natural selection drive the living world.

Except that in the case of humans, we have stumbled upon a way of evolving and adapting that is daring and dangerous, but much quicker than the process used by other species. We train our young to survive. We program their brains, and we do it generation after generation with great care. We pass on knowledge about ways of getting food, healing injuries, curing diseases, reproducing, fighting off predators, and so on to our young, not by coded information in DNA molecules, but by parents training kids to do behaviors proven to work.

Humans evolve almost entirely by refining their cultures, not their gene code. Human DNA codes have had very little revising in the last 10,000 or so years. We don’t use genetic evolution much anymore.

For example, our ancestors learned long ago that some seeds or fruits that were edible, but that they did not eat when they stripped the tree or grass of its edible parts, got missed, dropped or excreted. These seeds grew new plants that made even more fruit or seeds. It occurred to one of our early, smart ancestors that she/he could purposely put some seeds into fertile soil in the spring – i.e. could intervene in events in reality – and likely get some food for herself, himself, their children or even their whole tribe before winter came. Agriculture began.

Probably, in similar ways, our ancestors learned that the deer came to drink at the water hole just after sunset. Or that places in the river where the water was bubbling and swirling were likely to contain lots of fish. Aloe juice healed cuts. Ash wood made tough spears. Fire can be controlled if you control its fuel. We learned tricks that fed or aided us. Most of all, we then taught them to our kids.

Once that process of building up and transmitting knowledge began, it made new ways of life happen without any DNA changes. Cultural evolution. Then, the most useful new ideas for surviving and flourishing spread as their carriers spread. Good survival ideas spread like new combinations of genes spread, but much faster. Smarter, healthier, better-fed tribes took over more and more territory. 

Sometimes the new territory was in lands that used to be marginal for human existence, but more often it was in lands that were already inhabited by other tribes. Sometimes the tribes traded, learned to live together, interacted, and got along. Till they were interbreeding and making even more creative ways of life. But more often, they fought a war, and the more vigorous tribe overran the others.

In the cultural system of evolution, weaker tribes were hardly ever wiped out. They did not all die. But their way of life, their culture, did. The old ways were gone. In the cold judgement of Science, the old ways died out because they did not deserve to go on. To the individuals involved, the extinction of their way of life was often very sad, very tragic. But not to nature. Nature doesn’t care.

All this only shows that our emotions are programmed by our cultures so that we feel fiercely, even irrationally, loyal to our “way of life”. We get mad when we think our nation has been insulted or shortchanged. This programming of our emotions is due, in part, to the cultural code simply protecting itself. It programs its carriers to protect their way of life. But our feelings, in a scientific analysis, are just pieces in the bigger game. Yes, you are programmed to fight hard for your way of life. No, the depth of your feeling does not indicate you or your way of life are somehow “right” or “natural”. You can be very heroic, you can fight very bravely, weep profusely, and still be simply wrong. Obsolete.  

Cultural evolution proceeds in ways similar to biological evolution, but with some crucial differences. The tribe that has a breakthrough in agriculture or medicine or warfare or navigation, or whatever – a breakthrough that gives the tribe a competitive edge in its struggles with its neighbors – often is outbreeding and outfighting those neighbors in five generations or less. Cultural evolution is very quick. Note that genetically, the members of the tribe do not change in such a short time frame. Biological evolution could never work this fast.

Cultural memes are analogous to genes in biological evolution. Human tribes have been trying out new ways of getting food, healing diseases, expanding their territory, making more babies, fighting wars, and so on for millennia. Every tribe always contains a variety of lifestyles being practiced, just as every species always has a variety of individuals in its population. Cultures need innovators in the same way that species need mutations. The ones that work well, that have useful new ideas in the cases of the successful innovators, enable their cultures to adapt to, or even exploit, changing conditions in the environment. Then, the people living in that culture don’t have to change in their genetic makeup. They adapt culturally and behaviorally. For the tribe that learns to make them, beaver pelt vests turn out to be more than just a fashion. Colder winters come.

And there are many other features of the two forms of evolution that are analogous. Fatal ideas and fatal genes. Really vigorous idea makers and really vigorous breeders. And so on. I will leave them for you to muse over.   

For many people, probably many of my readers, this picture may look very sad. Disheartening. Does it imply that war will always be with us? That it is our species way of staying strong? Adolf Hitler thought so. “In eternal warfare, mankind has become great. In eternal peace, mankind would be ruined.” (Mein Kampf)  

The pessimists say that this scenario will end in a forest of mushroom clouds circling our planet. We now have the weapons to exterminate ninety percent of humanity in one day. The rest would probably die of radiation poisoning, starvation, disease, and subsequent fighting within less than another year.

But this is not the only conclusion we can take from a logical analysis of human cultural evolution. It is far more rational to say that we can change. Change our ways, our cultures, in comparatively short periods of time. We simply have to persuade a significant segment of the humans in one or two areas of the world that war has become obsolete. We must come to see it that way if we are to go on. We must write a new culture that stays vigorous and evolving. We must write it by our conscious choice instead of by the tribalistic conflict mode we have used for so long. But there is nothing in this more optimistic picture that is impossible. We can change without war. We have before. We can again.   

Tribe after tribe in the past has recognized that its neighbors had a better way of getting food and learned to copy that way. Or a better way of making tools, or preventing diseases, or making drinking water safer …or whatever.

WE CAN CHANGE BY OUR CHOICE INSTEAD OF BY BLIND FATE.

Pessimistic critics say we will we lose our vigor or our ability to feed ourselves, if we set out on a path to peace. I reply what evidence says so? I say the evidence indicates the opposite.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its oppressive communist system is still the political miracle of my life. Monolithic superpower to gone in one lifetime. And it was defeated via economic, artistic, and scientific competition, not via war.

And Adolf Hitler with his vision of eternal warfare? He lost.  

We have it in us to get better and better at preventing disease, yes, but also at eating more intelligently, feeding our metabolisms, not our mouths. Exercising strategically. Designing better practices for preventing injuries and diseases.

Most of all, we have it in us to get better at teaching the kids to live together and get along. Competition will be at exam time or on the field or in the ring or on the hardwood court. Or in the marketplace. But it will be done without war and competitors who lose the race will come away with either a renewed dedication to training, or a more honest sense of where their talents lie, or both. 

Can we stand to be this free? Letting people pursue whatever recreation or work they want to, even if their ways seem strange to us. I believe we can. The markets of goods, services, and ideas in a democracy can sort these matters out as long as the competition is fair. No one should get advantages in competition except those earned by diligence, ingenuity, and teamwork. Then, yes, really open democracy, freedom in degrees that may scare us, nevertheless, can work.  

All we really need is to embark, at least a significant minority of us, on the path of reason. Study cultures all through history, spot the patterns of living that work, that get good results over the long haul, and teach the deepest principles embedded in these successful ways of living to our kids. Then they will outsmart and outcompete the warmongers, and yes, I really believe that.  

The purpose of this blog is to equip its readers with the ideas that they will need to build – at least a little in every humble life – toward that better future that could be ours. We can work very hard, strain for each new insight or innovation with unrelenting determination if …if …if we first have a vision to believe in.   

We will teach the kids the theory and practice of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love for their neighbors, all in balance in all their affairs, all the time. Strive for excellence, for success, but only while playing by rules that are fair for all. Courage and wisdom in balance. Under that vision, we don’t need war. It really will become obsolete.  

Will our species get it? In time? I think, yes. Why? Because most people want to live, and especially want their kids to live. When the whole case is shown to them, they will try to follow better values and better ways.  

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” (H. G. Wells)   

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have an optimistic day.  

   

                                  

                                            young scientists conference 

                 (credit: Official CTBTO Photostream, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

              Gandhi as a young man (credit: public domain, Wikimedia Commons) 

Satyagraha

Buenos dias. I am in Mexico for a long overdue vacation and rest.

My topic today is the concept of satyagraha. This is the name Mahatma Gandhi gave to the main principle in his philosophy of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was born in India, but he received his law degree in Britain. He then went to South Africa to work as a lawyer, but he soon found that in that country, he was not allowed to practice law. He realized that the rights of Indians in South Africa, as citizens of the British Empire, were being violated. Over the next twenty years of trying to secure those rights, he worked out the concept of satyagraha. He came to believe that, in this concept, he had found an alternative to war: a way for people to resolve disputes without fighting and killing each other.

Satyagraha roughly means "truth force” in English, but that translation doesn't capture the subtleties of the concept.  We get a better idea of what satyagraha is if we look at situations in which the principle is put into action. If you operate under the idea of satyagraha, then when you want to bring about social change and end some form of injustice, the way to do it is to confront your opponents in the acts that they do simply as parts of their oppressive way of life. When you get in their way, make them look at themselves, very likely, they'll hurt you. But if you hang in there, don't hit back, and keep explaining the injustice of their actions, eventually they'll start to feel ashamed of what they're doing.

Your non-violent ways and your firm belief in the common humanity all of us share will make them look at themselves. When the humanity in them makes them see the pain you're feeling, after a while, that will cause them to stop hurting. Your unwavering belief that they will reach that point is what will enable you to hang on through the suffering and not hit back. When the violence ceases - and it will - then the two of you can begin to talk, with mutual respect, about ways in which you can compromise, work out your differences, and learn to live together. You will have turned an enemy into a friend. Kindness and reason, if we're brave enough, can defeat cruelty and stupidity. Gandhi truly believed it.   

Gandhi used this concept to inspire Indian people living and working in South Africa back in the early 1900's to refuse to cooperate with the white authorities there. Under Gandhi's leadership, the Indians did not fight. They just refused to cooperate. They demonstrated, protested, and got in the way, until, after years of imprisonment and struggle, they got white officials to agree to a compromise. It gave Indians in South Africa most of the rights that they'd been seeking.

                 

                                         Gandhi and associates in South Africa 

                                     

         (credit: public domain, through Life magazine) (via Wikimedia Commons) 

After this trial-run of thinking out his theory, testing it in practice, and seeing its strengths and weaknesses, Gandhi left South Africa in 1915 and went back to India. There, he used his satyagraha method to inspire Indians on a mass scale to confront the British occupiers of India. Finally, after years of suffering, in 1947, Britain granted India and Pakistan full independence.

As a further result, most historians agree, Britain began to grant independence to her other colonies till the greatest empire the world had ever known was reduced to the United Kingdom and a few islands where people have chosen to remain under British rule.

And the idea spread. Other European powers were driven to follow Britain's lead as other nations in Africa and Asia began to dream of their own independence. 

 

                                         Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking in 1963 

                                   (credit: NARA - 542015 - via Wikimedia Commons) 

The idea spread further. In the U.S., Martin Luther King used it to gain rights for African-Americans. He made his followers take an oath not to use violence. King won nearly all his campaigns. Nelson Mandela and his followers used satyagraha principles, especially in learning to forgive their former oppressors.

Thus, it can be said that Gandhi and his method of satyagraha brought about the end of the colonial era and most of the thinking that went with it. Historians really do see Gandhi as being the key, shaping figure of the events of the twentieth century.  

Gandhi was shot by a Hindu extremist in 1948, shortly after India achieved independence. King was assassinated in 1968. Mandela died in 2013 of natural causes. There have been others, too many to list, who were satyagrahis.  

  

The idea of satyagraha is very inspiring. Many people, when they first hear about it, and then are told of how it has succeeded all over the world, feel uplifted and inspired, and filled with admiration for Gandhi.  But, of course, there is more to be said about Gandhi and his noble idea, not all of it nice.

Most historians agree that satyagraha would likely not have worked if Gandhi's opponents had been the Nazis. He was even asked during WWII whether his way of satyagraha could have stopped Hitler. He replied, "There would be defeats and a lot of suffering, but is there no suffering now?" 

However, most historians think he was naive. Hitler would have killed them all. Satyagraha achieved independence for India because Gandhi was dealing with democratic Britain, not Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russian, or Nazi Germany. That sounds depressing, but logic, if we follow it to its ends, still leads us to some positive conclusions, conclusions which I'll discuss in a minute.

But let's not be naive on the personal level either. Gandhi wasn't perfect. For example, he didn't have a lot of time for his family. His oldest son, who became an alcoholic, hated him. Gandhi was also opposed to modern technology, including modern medicine. He also didn't pay attention to the Africans in South Africa while he was there, only to Indians and their problems. 

He served as a stretcher-bearer for the British Army during the Zulu war in South Africa in 1906, and he recruited other Indians to do the same. He supported Indians who wanted to fight for Britain in WWI. He took until the 1930's to come to a fully non-violent view for himself personally. Even then, for others, he made exceptions. He claimed that sex should occur only in marriage and only as often as a couple wanted children. Otherwise, sex was too much of a distraction from spiritual growth.

But my bet is you're probably thinking now what I was thinking while I was researching the material for this post.

Gandhi’s flaws just don't matter. His satyagraha idea, and the successes his idea led others to all over the world, so overshadow his personal flaws that we don't care that he was less-than-perfect. It just doesn't matter. His place in History and in our hearts, like that of some other less-than-perfect people - Buddha and Jesus - is secure. Buddha abandoned his young wife and infant. Jesus took a whip to some men in front of the temple who were just trying to make a living. We make allowances for the different times these men lived in, and we love the legacy they left us, regardless of whatever personal flaws they may have had.

Furthermore, on the big scale, even if we believe Gandhi's ways would not have worked against a tyrant like Hitler, there are still hopeful conclusions that we can draw. By using satyagraha, Gandhi and Martin Luther King succeeded in their struggles against injustice in the British Empire and in the United States. But Britain and the U.S. also succeeded in their struggles against oppressors in Japan, Germany, Italy, and Russia. 

These facts, added together, tell us something amazing. It is the conclusion which is my point today.

Maybe, humanity is working its way, through a maze of blunders and hurts, toward peace. Maybe, we humans are slowly building on what came before us. Maybe, by trial and error, decency really will defeat cruelty and greed.

 

                                  

                                                      the Berlin Wall (1986)

               (credit: Noir, German language Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons)

The political miracle of my lifetime is still the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sometimes even now, I can't believe that tyranny is gone. We're not perfect in our democracies today by a long shot; but I am very certain that we're better off than we would have been under communism or fascism. lf satyagraha could defeat British colonialism, and then Britain could defeat the Nazis ...if Martin Luther King could defeat U.S. racism and the U.S. could defeat communism ...then, in spite of the many flaws and prejudices of our species all over the world, there really is hope for us. Good is slowly gaining the edge on evil. By gradual steps, over generations, we really are getting better.

So now I want to close with an even more challenging thought for you to consider. It hit me as I was thinking about why we admire Gandhi even after we hear about his flaws.

We shrug off Gandhi's flaws because today we have a more tolerant view of the world. We know how living in another culture changes a person. When you live in another culture, you get drawn into thinking, talking, and acting in ways that back home you would have considered weird or even barbaric.

If I'd grown up in West Africa, I would look on bowls of maggots with hungry eyes. If I'd grown up in Japan, I'd have learned to love sea cucumbers. If I'd grown up in Cameroon, a sexy woman to me would be one with her earlobes drooping thirty centimenters and her head shaved bald. If I'd been born in China in the 1800's, a sexy woman to me would have been unable to walk more than a few tottering steps due to the foot-binding that she had undergone as a child. And there are other morés that we could talk about, some still being practiced in the world today, some that are very disturbing to Canadian sensibilities. But if I'd grown up in those countries, most likely I'd have learned to take them for granted.

If that cultural relativism is depressing to think about, then here's something that's not: it's clear to us today, with our better knowledge of culture and how it programs us, that even as adults, we can adapt to a huge range of possible morés and customs. We can change.

And if that's true, then what may be possible for the kids? The variety of customs that have been practiced and are still being practiced in the world, all added together, don't amount to 1% of the ways of life that are possible for human beings. We're “free” in a sense far larger than we want to think about.

I can't stand on a skyscraper and flap my arms and fly. I can't walk into a lake and breathe unassisted underwater. I'm not free to do just anything. But the range of possible lifestyles that I can learn to handle is still infinite.

We don't want to be that free. There is so much responsibility to consider when we begin to think outside the box, as Gandhi did. But if we can free our thinking, we really can make our world a better place. An end to hunger? World Peace? The ecosystem? The economy? It might take a long time and a lot of suffering, but isn't there suffering now?  

 

                                                 Schoolchildren in Laos (2010) 

                                      (credit: Ilya Plekhanov, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Or ...we could re-educate the kids. Teach them better. Write a new curriculum for a Social Studies course to be taught around the world. The theory is sound. 

I'll end with my favorite Gandhi quote:

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it -- always.”

                               

                                                                                             

                 (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55638925@N00/255569844/) 

                                                          (via Wikimedia Commons) 

Pluralism

My usual way of beginning a post is to plunge right in, without introductions or amusing little stories. This is partly because I know that my stories are not that amusing anyway.

My topic today is pluralism. So, to begin with, what does the word mean?

A community of people can properly be called "pluralistic" when it contains a wide variety of members, who are so varied in their race, sexual orientation, and belief systems that at first it might seem strange to call them a "community" at all. When visiting a pluralistic nation for the first time, travelers from less varied nations wonder how the pluralistic ones manage to live together and still function. Some Nazis in the 1930's, for example, called Canada and the U.S. "mongrel" nations. They thought of us as being so mixed that we must be inferior and, thus, we should be easy to defeat. 

But we know now that the Nazis were wrong. They lost. The ideas that unite a diverse, pluralistic nation, ideas like freedom and tolerance, can be very powerful.

So a pluralistic community or nation is simply one that contains a lot of really different kinds of people. But is that a weakness as the critics of pluralism claim?

If all of the citizens in that pluralistic community have a democratic right to have a say in all decisions that affect that community, and there are so many varying opinions among them, then it's true the community can take a long time to make decisions or carry out actions. Democracy is cumbersome.

It can also seem at first glance that History bears this cumbersome picture out. But if you think the bullies have all the advantages, because dictators decide and act promptly, you need to think again. The evidence of History, when you look at it hard, says deeper, more hopeful things about our strange species.

Consider just one reality-based argument. In wartime, modern armies have to be directed by radioed messages. To try to send out messages by couriers is simply too slow. So the messages are sent out by radio, in code. Code-breaking becomes the most important part of any modern war effort. Speaking figuratively, if you know where your opponent's next punch is aimed, you can block it or duck. He wears himself out, and you stay fit and ready.

The Americans in World War II broke the Japanese codes early on; the Japanese never did break the American code, and this was because the American code was Navajo. All the "codetalkers" were loyal. None ever betrayed the Allies, and the Japanese never solved the Navajo language. That's pluralism at work in the real world getting real, game-changing results.

On the other hand, using a minority's language as a secret code in the European sector of the war was not going to work. There was no minority there that could be trusted as the Americans trusted the Navajo. As a result, the first computers were built to create codes during World War II so that orders could be sent safely to troops, ships, and planes.

                           

                                                  Alan Turing (Wikimedia Commons) 

Luckily for the English, the smartest computer nerd alive at the time was English. His name was Alan Turing. He figured out how to build another computer that would crack the German codes in two days, rather than the three to six weeks that human code-breakers had been taking up till his breakthrough.

Turing was also gay, which was not a point in his favor in the England of his time. But in Germany, life for gay people got far worse. The Nazis officially hated gay people. They hunted them down and threw them in prisons. In fact, back in 1934, when Hitler was still consolidating his hold on Germany, the leaders of his street-thug army, the SA, were almost all murdered in one night by the SS. Many of the SA leaders were gay; in the NAZI press, their homosexuality was used as an excuse to justify the murders. Of course, from then on, homosexual people in Germany simply stayed out of any spot in the community or the workforce that might attract attention. Or they left Germany for good.

Meantime, in England, gay people were officially disapproved of; unofficially they were tolerated. England wasn't perfect in its treatment of homosexuals; it was just a lot better than Nazi Germany. The calculus of History is enormously complex. But there is this simple fact: Alan Turing was there when Britain needed him.

After the war, Turing's sexual orientation was revealed, and he was treated very unjustly. But that's another story that would take another post. In this post, I will just re-emphasize my main point: pluralism pays off for a society in the long haul.

                                   

                                                   Lise Meitner (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

There were also many Jews in key roles in the work that led up to the Americans’ building the first atom bomb. Lise Meitner, Leo Szilard, and Edmund Teller. Niels Bohr's mother was Jewish. Enrico Fermi had a Jewish wife. These people got out of Europe because of the Nazis. Then, they became key players in the project that saw the Americans get to the bomb first. 

What the American leaders did once they got the bomb was horrific.

But the U.S. dropped only two of the new super-weapons and it is arguable that if they hadn’t, the war would have taken many more lives, Japanese and American, if it had been continued by conventional weapons. Truman certainly thought this was the case. One shudders to think what might have happened if the scientists I listed had stayed in Europe and the Nazis had gotten to the bomb first.

Where am I going with all of this? I am building a case for the argument that pluralistic, diverse societies may have their troubles, but they are much stronger in the long run than any single-culture community can ever be. 

Pluralistic societies are resourceful. From diversity come resourcefulness and nimbleness.   

In a more positive example, the U.S. too has gotten loyalty in war and hard work in peace out of its African-American minority. But much more importantly, in literature, Science, music, sport, and many other fields, what people all over the world think of as “American culture” wouldn't exist without the contributions of that African-American minority. They put creativity and vigor into the mix.

In Canada, the Canadian nation itself was held together in my lifetime by one visionary politician, namely Pierre Trudeau. He was Franco-Canadian. On the grim but necessary side, the best Canadian snipers in both World Wars were from another minority, namely native Canadians. No one on either side could match them for stealth or accuracy.

 

                              Chinese-British woman in London in 1920's 

                    (credit: Harry Parkinson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

And since I'm being so honest, let's be even more frank. Britain has traditionally been more tolerant than the other nations of Europe for a simple, obvious reason. The earliest known Brits in what is now England were Welsh. In 44 A.D., the Romans conquered the area and began to establish colonies. Many intermarried with locals. The Roman legions abandoned Britain four hundred years later, but the people of mixed stock stayed. Then, from what is now Germany, came Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, all very different tribes, who also settled and inter-married with locals. Then, over the centuries, Danes and Normans did the same. In recent times, people from every country in the former British Empire have followed the same route. And the Scots added a mix of Picts and Gaels. Britain is more creative and vigorous for having all of them.

Racist thinking is the thinking that makes people say: "I want to be with my own kind and only my own kind". It is just as wrong when Ian Paisley does it as when Bernadette Devlin does it. It is just as wrong when Louis Farrakhan does it as when NBA owner Donald Sterling does it. Pluralism says the opposite. Let's embrace our differences.

But let me be clear: I'm not just saying the bigoted ones are wrong, unfair, or mean. I'm saying that, in the long run, bigots lose.

The hard scientific explanation is that the future keeps coming at us in ways that can't be foreseen or prepared for. Up till the twentieth century, scientists thought that if they could know the position of every particle in the universe and also know all of the laws by which the universe works, they could predict all future events. Physics causes Chemistry, Chemistry shapes Biology, Biology shapes Psychology, and Psychology causes History. 

The total set of data would be much too large for any human brain to take in, but nevertheless the future is already determined. Or so people used to think. Life, for them, was mostly about accepting our fate because Newton's laws of motion, ultimately, determined everything.

In modern times, quantum theory has given us another picture. It is telling us that the future is made of infinite numbers of possible sequences of events, some more probable, some less. In that picture, there is room for us to learn how to intervene in the flows of events around us, alter some of the odds, and, so, shape the future in ways that will make life for us and our kids a little easier, healthier, and more enjoyable. We're free. 

And in that picture, when events seem to be going sideways, communities and nations have a better chance of being able to find a solution and restore balance if they contain lots of different kinds of people, all sharing ideas and working together.

And that's it. I'll draw this post to a close now.

Love your neighbor, folks, not in spite of the ways in which she is different from you, but because of those ways. One day, one of her odd ways may save your life. 

That is not a dreamy platitude; it is a fact of hard reality. Love your neighbor, even when it's not easy to do. Believe in, and defend, his or her human rights.

And now I want to end by telling you one more heavy thought. In order for us to keep loving our neighbors and sticking up for their human rights, especially when events are going badly, we need to believe in an ideal, a thing that we can't see. 

Belief in a thing that you can't see - especially when events around you may be making that ideal look painfully naive - is a definition of the word "faith". It takes a kind of faith to keep believing in pluralism. Maybe it's not the kind of faith that the followers of the world's big religions say they have, but it qualifies. It takes a belief in things not seen. I believe that, if our species does survive, it will be because we finally acquire this faith on a global scale. 

And we will. Not for wild, speculative reasons, but for the hardest of practical ones. We want to live. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. 

                          (credit: Elizabeth Jackson, via Wikimedia Commons)