PREDATION AS A CULTURAL/ECONOMIC MODEL
The cloudiness of debate about predation and competition as social, cultural and economic models is the result of the fact that it is always fraught with the vested interests of the corporate universe and its free market apologists. Cultural entities that are dependent on economic predation are always funding research and promoting those theories that elevate predation and competition to the status of universal law. Any theory which enjoys currency within scientific fashions and is elevated to a law of nature, such as Darwinian evolution, and is then employed to justify economic predation, war and imperialism. The latest attempt to camouflage human cannibalism comes under the newly emerging sciences of complexity. Research institutions such as the Santa Fe Institute are funded largely by the corporate world, especially financial institutions such as banks, who have a vested interest in proving that not only is economic predation a fundamental law of nature, but that there is no higher cultural status for humanity to evolve into.
This means that there are only wolves and sheep. The best prey for any wolf and the easiest way to get dinner on the table is to invite the sheep over for dinner. Simply convince sheep to voluntarily walk into an economic feeding frenzy on the mistaken illusion that they too can grown fangs and become a wolf.
Elsewhere we will examine the fact that free markets are never free. They are a ritualized form of gang warfare much the same as is practiced on the cocaine infested streets of South Central Los Angeles.
When markets are portrayed as free they are very purposively painted as a model of free economic individuals in fair competition with other economic individuals. This is called opportunity. However, the actual market is quit different. It is in fact the freedom of economic gangs called corporations and businesses to prey upon isolated and weaker economic individuals called consumers or smaller competitors who have absolutely no power to resist.
Let us first examine predation and competition as commonly defined as a fundamental law of nature. This fundamental law in turn is assumed to prove by analogy that human beings will forever be at the mercy of their basic nature which is determined by such laws of the jungle as the survival of the fittest.
For free market apologists predation and competition are always defined as a force of nature. Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition, Page 1061, defines Predatory as "living by capturing and feeding upon other animals." For the purposes of free market apologetics, this definition is usually taken to a higher level of abstraction.
Predation, defined for the purposes of those with vested interests, is the process through which individuals and species compete for access to scarce resources.
In fact, the argument goes no further than this no matter how involved it may become. It always boils down to big fish eating little fish. The science of complexity takes the argument to a higher level of abstraction, into the rarefied heights of mathematical modeling.
The best evidence available indicates that plants evolved before animals. The cost in energy and resources of having to manufacture food from various non-living materials and light from the sun make it impossible for plants to support many of the functions common to animal life. Faced with this obstruction to further evolutionary development, a two-stage process evolved in which plant life manufactures necessary food through photosynthesis. A new variation, animal life, then makes use of that food and not having had to bear the direct costs of its production, is then free to develop the higher level functions of mobility, sensory sophistication, intelligence and consciousness.
This means that all animals are to some extent predators upon and parasites of the plants. To a certain degree, it may even be claimed that plants are also predators in the sense that they compete for resources such as soil, sun and rain, and have even evolved means for killing off plant competition. At this point it is possible to speculate upon the "fairness" of all this to the plants who have to do all the work while animals reap all the rewards. But the higher functions of animal life are unavailable to plants under any circumstances. So it really isn't a loss on their part and it simply represents another example of how everything in nature is recycled.
Those animals that prey upon plants can be considered to be First-Order predators. However, opportunity in nature begets adaptation. As a result, the world soon had Second-Order predators who preyed upon the plant eaters. However, no sooner did the carnivores get comfortable in and convinced of the permanence of their position at the top of the food chain, than one of them developed a big brain and began to prey upon them. In what seems to be the normal order of things, this Third-Order predator soon became convinced of its permanence at the top of the food chain and came to believe that something called "God" had created the world and everything in it expressly for the benefit and amusement of Third-Order predators. It may further be speculated that in some not too distant future a Fourth-Order evolves, an artificial consciousness that is even more intelligent and powerful than sentient apes.
At this point the analogy begins to fade into noise. At the point of the evolution of intelligence there is no clear analogy to predation as a linkage in the hierarchy of who eats who, other than an increase in hunting skill brought about by a bigger brain. it is not clear why artificial intelligence would even need to predate animal life. In what sense does a computer eat hamburgers? human or otherwise? It may be possible that a time would come when intelligent and artificial intelligence would have to compete for declining or scarce resources. But it seems more probably that the only animal intelligence that we know of is perfectly capable of annihilating itself without any outside assistance.
Once again, for free market apologists, it boils down to the issue of scarce resources and the competition for access to them. What we see as predation, they claim, is merely one aspect of this competitive process that operates in nature to insure that eventually, scarce resources are put to the best and highest use. In nature, nothing is really wasted and virtually everything is reused and recycled.
This may be true in some sense, but it difficult to see how it specifically applies to ethical issues, human empathy and evolution above and beyond the jungle.
It really does no good, the economic barracudas proclaim, to get all teary-eyed and snuffle-nosed about the more juicy and lurid aspects of this process. It is there because it has to be there in order to maintain the necessary degree of efficiency in the system and is likely to remain there whether we are around to complain about it or not.
In other words, predation and competition are fundamental laws of nature.
We all have to compete for scarce resources, as individuals, as groups, as cultures, as societies, as nations and as a species. In an ecological context, it may mean the ability to co-operate as a family group to better detect, run down and kill the weak, the old and the sick, to put them out of their misery and into the commissary.
The trouble with line of analogy is that while it is true that predator in the jungle hunt down the old and the sick, human predation is more closely analogous to cannibalism in that it destroys the young, the unborn and the poor. Poor humans may very well be in possession of better genes and greater intelligence and by the accident of birth alone fallen into the cattle pens of human economic predation. Human poverty and political impotence is not analogous with old, sick animals, it is analogous to cattle ranching. In the economic cycles of the hamburger perfectly healthy, young animals are killed in slaughter houses every day. There is no grand cosmological necessity or fundamental law of nature that is maintaining the health of the bovine species by eliminating the old, sick and genetically undesirable. It is for no greater reason than the production of the Big Mac that cattle are slaughtered and rain forests are turned into swamps and deserts.
Economic and political predation is always made analogous to hunter's ability to soar to great heights so that it can scan for carrion over a vast area and arrive more swiftly than more powerful, but ground-bound competitive scavengers. Skill and advantage are always promoted as the end product of the laws of nature. Presumably, this is so because the only intelligence humans know of is a predatory ape, and that predation is necessary for the evolution of intelligence.
This may be so, but so what? Does that mean that predatory intelligence is apex and end point of evolution. Not likely.
In an economic context, in the opinion of economic marketeers, predation means the ability to develop and market a better product at a more attractive price. In a social context, it may mean having access to the blond, blue-eyed and buxom woman.
For some reason a better mouse trap at a cheaper price is considered to be fundamental to the betterment and survival of the species. There is some reason, however, that this is not the case. Economic predation has brought this massively intelligent species close enough to the brink of annihilation to peer over the edge and ponder the unthinkable.
The specific activities of predation related to the process are assumed to vary widely from one context to another and that what may well be appropriate to a given context, may be totally unacceptable in another. It is the process that is inescapable.
The intelligence of mankind provides no escape. For free-booter economics intelligence is just a better tool to get that Big Mac to the dinner table. Indeed, they rhapsodize, our intelligence has made it possible for mankind to be involved in competition for scarce resources in many more varied ways, ironically making us, as a species, more deeply involved in the process than any other.
How true it is. But in the jungle, most predation is perpetrated by one species on another. It is only in the case of overpopulation that a species cannibalizes itself. Most human predation in economic and political terms is cannibalistic.
At this point competition may be defined as the struggle for access to rare resources, such as plants competing with other plants for sunlight. Predation is an animal species of life eating another species, such as sheep eating grass. Hunting, a type of predation, is one animal species eating another, such as the wolf eating the sheep. Cannibalism is when a member of a species eats another member of its own species, such as insane rats in an overpopulated cage, or human wars, ethnic cleansing, or free market economies.
Free market apologists, ranging from the most stodgy of scientists to the junk bond privateers, in the heat of the feeding frenzy become strident in their impatience with contrary points of view, inconvenient facts, or embarrassing theories and dismiss them as non-scientific, as nonsense or as non-sequiturs.
They feel constrained to point out that a torrent of incandescent non-sequiturs do not constitute a philosophical argument. Most often any consideration beyond or outside the laws of predation are labeled Marxist and let go at that, as though the mere label constitutes a philosophical and scientific proof to the contrary.
Non-sequitur according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, page 1539, is an inference that does not follow from its premises; a fallacy resulting from a simple conversion of a universal affirmative proposition or from the transposition of a condition and its consequent.
According to the AM Heritage Dict. page 893, non sequitur, Latin for "it does not follow," is a statement to which no answer seems appropriate or reasonable.
No where can it be noticed that either label, Marxist or non sequitur, is a replacement for an argument or a reason. To label a position as a non sequitur in lieu of an argument is a non sequitur.
The basis for the argument against predation as the final model for the evolution of economics and politics may be summed up as follows.
It is a given that predation exists in nature. So far, so good.
But the jungle model does not necessarily apply to human culture, including economics and politics, because the human species possesses two factors uniquely distinct from all other known life forms.
Humans posses intelligence of a kind that is beyond all other known life forms, certainly in terms of magnitude, and possibly different in kind.
On planet earth, the human species is the only form of life is possession of a culture. That is a culture as opposed to a society such as is possessed by bees and wolves. A society a form of social organization that learns, teaches and transmits information in the biological media of the species, from individual organism to individual organism and from generation to generation. A culture is defined in terms of information preserved and transmitted outside the physical organisms of the biological species. A culture is an exobiotic media. Writing, books and all other technological forms of data storage and transmission are media that allows culture to exist.
There is no animal model for this. There are models for social cooperation, some language ability, and various degrees of intelligence, but none for information carried outside the physical organism.
Human culture is different in kind than animal intelligence or social structures.
Without a cultural matrix, individual human work in the creative sense is not possible except on the most primitive scale.
Since we cannot claim that evolution has stopped or reached a final goal, there is no reason not to assume that predation and competition will be transcended in the process of further evolution.
There is no good evidence that human cultural predation performs any necessary or useful task. In fact it seems to promote a population of less than functional minds instead of promoting a high ratio of productive minds.
Finally, there are other solutions available to human intelligence and culture that are not available to animal models in order to solve the problems of scarce resources.
Ultimately, the question of whether or not predation is ethically or pragmatically defensible seems to resolve itself into an argument about the status of dysfunctional humans. Can dysfunctional humans be considered as prey or cattle? Is poverty, low intelligence or cultural incompetence a sufficient definition of dysfunctional to define certain classes of humanity as prey or cattle?
The vast majority of the species is dysfunctional in nearly every significant way except to serve as cattle or as prey. That is they do not function well in the culture, they are not especially intelligent, they contribute little in terms of creative product, they do not accumulate vast sums of wealth and they are often dangerous. But they do consume commodities, they eat, consume, are utilized as an economic slave force and then they die. The problem is more easily resolved with those humans who cannot even serve as prey or who are considered to be generally dangerous since they are disposed of either by extermination or by incarceration.
There are perceived benefits to the process of predation in response to certain cultural, political and economic problems. There are solutions to these problems other than predation that make predation unnecessary and probably harmful to the species.
The argument against predation is that the jungle analogy does not hold, that it doesn't work, and that there are other solutions.
Garbage collection, defined as the human predisposition to rid itself of dysfunctional individuals, and sometimes whole classes, is simply not necessary.
The Species does no longer suffers great hardship maintaining the existence of dysfunctional members. Setting aside the criminally insane and uncontrollably dangerous the culture can afford to support the life currently in existence.
Genetic decay is insignificant and is not at issue. The human brain is already so overpowered with redundancy that slight declines in small sectors of the population are trivial.
Other important skills such as IQ and empathy are teachable by definition. The loss in terms of mental function is minimized so long as adequate nutrition is provided.
The free market desperado needs to minimize the horror of economic predation in order to keep the herd from stampeding. They assure us that an individual may compete with others in a social or economic context without the necessity of eating his liver with a fine Chianti.
In other words economic predation is nothing personal, just business. The frenzied sharks are not enjoying themselves. Nevertheless, eating is eating, with or without Chianti. From the prey's point of view the vintage is irrelevant.
The harmful effects derived from dysfunctional humans are more easily, more humanely and more cost effectively neutralized by other means.
It is better to remove their power than their lives.
Institutionalized population control is more acceptable than poverty, pandemics, war and the incalculable suffering of million of living human beings.
Life in a sense is sacred no matter what the perceived short term gain accrues to some powerful minority, including the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.
No cultural or human decision based on the theory of an afterlife can justify the destruction of human life, which rules atrocities committed in the name of religious fanaticisms.
No one is absolutely qualified to determine what life is or is not worth living and everyone is therefore incompetent to judge who is prey and who is not.
There is no such thing has human garbage since every human life is unicentric, meaning that every human life is the center of some universe.
For the scientific reductionist, the economic predator and the politically hungry life is not sacred in any context. Life, they inform us, comes with opportunities, not guarantees. Good old individual ruggedness and, private initiative and unbridled ambition will guarantee that some will be wolves and the rest will be sheep. This applies to humanity as well as the Spotted Owl.
Lack of guarantees, however, is not a license for cannibalism. Furthermore, from the moment of birth, opportunities are not equitably distributed. A cultural philosophy of the strong preying upon the weak really does confine the species to the status of predatory ape.
To the free market apologists humans are cogs and ciphers in an impersonal process that merely redeploys the available resources.
"The redeployment of available resources," is simply another way of saying that wholesale human destruction and the misery of the vast majority of human individuals is an acceptable price to pay to maintain the status quo and lifestyles of a class privileged with the possession of ludicrously vast amounts of wealth, power and opportunity. Redeployment of resources and human destruction are identical, since the results are the same.
In addition, in the human case, the resources are not saved or redeployed. The resource may be useful to plants, roaches and sharks, but in terms of the human species and its culture the resource are lost. Natural resources are expended, some of which are not renewable. Human effort and creativity are wasted on such trivia as war and crime instead of famine and disease. Finally, the experience of human life that is thrown away to ignorance and the wastes of the free market is lost forever.
That life is sacred comes under the vague headings of belief, value and choice. Ethics and responsibility may be dispensed with in this context. Essentially it seems that life is sacred on the grounds that it is the only organism we know of that appreciates the universe, smells the roses and considers the ramifications of predation. Life experiences this magnificent world and in that sense, an admittedly poetic sense, life is sacred enough to not be abused when there is a choice and there are alternative means.
Stimulation, both cultural and individual, is considered to be a another fundamental law of nature. Economic productivity is assumed to be more sacred than human life itself. Any economic theory based on one free lunch and infinite resources finds that it is mandatory that productivity always increases and population forever grows. Otherwise there is no one left to pass the debt on to.
Economic stimulation usually assumes a system of rewards and punishments as motivation. Otherwise the naturally lazy and shiftless human animal would simply nap its life away basking in the afternoon sun.
There are two primary arenas of reward/punishment. The first is the physical survival of the organism which involves wealth, power, access to critical resources.
The second is pander to egotistical inadequacy.
The threat of punishment is by far the greater motivation. The threat of physical suffering and a short life is the primary motivation for cultural predation.
Since the motivation of the prey in the presence of rampaging predators declines, the benefits of stimulation does not apply to the species as a whole, but only to the successful predators.
Every predator is some other predator's prey. No predator is ultimately successful.
On the other hand the promise of reward is limited to low odds, small chances and unequal opportunity. Recently, the only acceptable medium of reward has been confined to money (not necessarily wealth). This degrades any system of values that lies outside the arena of money including art, spiritual undertakings, empathy, learning and the pursuit of joy, peace and wisdom.
The disparity is too great between the out of control predators and the prey. The physical survival of a subset of individual humans does not require the massive starvation, poverty and death of the majority of the species that is currently rampant. It can well afford a more equitable distribution of necessitates without loss of reward.
Cultural predation does not tend to stimulate the creation of products beneficial to the entire species, but to products beneficial to the subset of cannibalistic predators.
Egotistical inadequacy seems to be primarily relieved only by some value relative to other humans, usually in the form of dominance and manipulation. Certain types of infantile humans must accumulate power, as wealth or otherwise, in order to appropriate resources that might otherwise have been used by others.
This is nothing less than infantile egotism. It is entirely opposed to love or empathy.
This form of self-worth is based on dominance and not on the empathic recognition of the unicentric nature of other human beings. That is, other humans can only be perceived as either threats or as potential prey.
Empathy, however, is teachable. Since not every human is likely to become a mystic, then education and cultural controls are necessary. The least acceptable teachable skill must be empathy.
There is little doubt that cultural predation promotes a tendency toward destruction, not creation.
Destruction in the form of the garbage collection of large scale cultural artifacts such as the break up of GM or ITT may be necessary on one level, but it does not map isomorphically as an analogy to justify the destruction of human life.
More human resources in the forms of intellect, creativity and ingenuity are dedicated to the engines of destruction, such as war and weaponry, than are devoted to products that promote the general welfare of the species. Engines of destruction are necessary to maintain the hunting superiority of a class of economic predators.
Even if the loss of human resources were less so, any and all resources lost to such ends are forever lost as unrecoverable waste.
Human impotence is the final motivation for the egotistical and infantile predilection toward human destruction and cultural predation.
The cultural rewards that are taught as motivation toward predation can be supplanted by teaching other types of ego fulfillment; empathy, the security implied by human cooperation, the relief of huge amounts of stress placed on the individuals and the culture by the threat of cannibalistic predation.
The animal model of predation is not evolutionarily productive. It is devolutionary and atavistic.
Darwinian evolution may not be random, but is not evolution by design. It controlled by arbitrary events and the complex vagaries of environment and resources. To merely enhance Darwinian evolution is by no means an evolutionary leap. To merely use science and technology as a means to enhance our ability to prey on one another is not an evolutionary gain for the species.
Evolution by design is a definite, and hitherto unknown, leap as opposed to evolution by survival of the fittest. It turns out that survival of the fittest is a tautology; what survives is the fittest and the fittest is what survives. There is no fundamental law or intelligence that determines what the concept "fittest" defines.
Evolution is analogous to awareness becoming consciousness in an act of self-awareness. The obvious step for a species that has evolved intelligence by forces external to itself is to use that intelligence to engineer its own evolution by design.
At some point, it is reasonable to assume, that the animal model, predation and even biological life itself may be transcended.
The human species has already evolved certain systems beyond the animal model.
The most obvious is that of culture as a trans-generational, exobiotic media for the preservation and transmission of information.
Another is technology, a means of manipulating the environment with tools beyond the physical body.
Technology has given the species a global and near instantaneous media of information transmission; computers, television, telephone.
It is approaching artificial intelligence. A non-biological and non-sexual intelligence may not be bound to animal models of predation.
A bionic symbiosis between the human animal and machine intelligence may become feasible provided the species survives long enough to implement it.
Genetic engineering is already in its infancy. The ability to evolve according to intelligent purpose is now a possibility.
Potential gains in human empathy, increased intellectual ability, telepathy and the higher forms of spiritual realizations and experiences are no longer impossible fantasies, or even unlikely dreams. They are realistic human goals.
An intelligent species that cannot transcend cultural predation may be to smart for its own good. Intelligent predation as reflected in cultural cannibalism may guarantee racial extinction.
Culture as a complex organism is capable of maturation and consciousness in the sense that the sum total of human brains are the basis of a cultural mind, or consciousness.
An increased density of human minds in addition to enhanced connectivity and complexity resulting from electronic media allow for the possibility of the evolution of cultural consciousness.
More functional, more mature humans yield a greater chance of cultural evolution. If more humans are allowed the privilege of creative thought by being released from the threat of human predation, the stimulus for the progress of human culture is greatly enhanced.
For this reason there is an urgent and imperative need to promote human maturity and functionality, not merely to breed human cattle.
Although complex systems require a tension between cooperation and competition, the emphasis on competition alone in our culture is a prescription for catastrophe. There is a now a mandatory requirement shift that emphasis to cooperation.
There is little doubt that cooperation results in higher productivity for the kinds of goods that humanly useful.
There is less waste, enhanced creativity and real problems are targeted in lieu of the problems resulting from more enhanced human cannibalism and predation.
The logical conclusion of cultural predation is
The analogy of animal predation and/or eater-and-food models does not hold. The analogies ranging from particle behavior to the law of the jungle does not map one to one to the behavior of the human species because the species has the additional qualities of intelligence and culture which transcend those models at a fundamental level.
Wolves do predate other wolves for the purposes of population control, but they cooperate to predate other species.
Wolves do abandon young in the interests of population control. Other species utilize cannibalism. It is interesting to note that competition between adults is avoided when controlling population by terminating the young, a form of birth control similar to abortion.
Overpopulated rats will lapse into psychotic cannibalism to reduce the population.
Animal cannibalism does not contain an ethical factor. Human cannibalism does since humans have alternative means of population control and the ethical awareness to use them.
Predation simply does not work. Economic predation does not limit population. It promotes poverty and nothing promotes increases in population like poverty.
Predation promotes a lower IQ species wide by denying proper nutrition and ineffective education. It wastes resources, natural, wealth, and human. It decreases productivity and arrests intellectual and cultural progress. It arrests cultural development in the stasis of infantile aggression. It denies the value of intelligence and evolution.
War represents only a minor perturbation in the overall escalation of population. The fact is that population has steadily increased. In fact, aside from the initial population decrease due to untimely death, war often promotes population increase such as the WW2 baby boom. It also promotes a false economic stimulus based on military industries which in turn promotes the illusion of false resources and produces nothing to meet the needs of the increased population.
Economic predation does not improve the conditions of the species en masse. It promotes the well being of a predatory and cannibalistic sub species who do nothing to restrain population, but encourage it much in the manner of any cattle rancher. They do not behave as a species performing cannibalism for the purposes of population control. They behave more like one species preying on another.
Economic predation occurs when the perceived resources do not fulfill the perceived needs of the population. But often the perceived needs are excessive. Greed or infantile egotism are the only explanation when the perceived needs are beyond biological necessity.
Using economic predation to solve these problems is to deny intelligence and culture as a viable human function.
If Wittgenstein was correct and value and belief are beyond the limits of knowledge and science, and that what science or knowledge can be useful for is strictly limited and can never tell us anything new, then the ability of the species to evolve beyond known models may depend on value and belief.
Only belief and empathy transcend the horizons of knowledge. It becomes a matter of choice. If the species chooses predation as a fundamental law then it will never transcend it.
Predation may perform the function of garbage collection, but intelligence and culture can do it benignly. But predation will terminate the species with waste, population and aggression.
If the species chooses to accept the possibility of evolving beyond predation then it may fail and loose nothing, or it may evolve and become, finally, their own gods.
Predation is not the only solution to the problems of garbage collection and other forms of ethnic cleansing. Nor is it the only solution available in answer to the need for creative stimulation.
Cannibalism is unnecessary and dysfunctional humans will breed out by attrition provided that further increases in population is controlled in order to prevent cultural and genetic degeneracy, and to save what remains of global resources.
Also, basic biological and emotional needs must be met in order to prevent revolutionary unrest.
Immense sums of human wealth, resources and creativity will be saved by not having to police, control, or destroy a massive dysfunctional population which could be left to quietly go about the business of breeding itself out.
It is the recidivist anachronisms such as cultural predators, cannibalistic aggression, war, free market pseudo economics that comprise the current sub-species of Neo-Neanderthals.
With a modicum of intelligence the new species can
simply wait for them to breed themselves into extinction. Such recidivist truly belong on the windy plains of
Or the entire species will disappear thanks to runaway population leading to extinction through mindless wars, cannibalism, economic collapse and ecological exhaustion.
In the likely case of annihilation then it becomes imperative for an intelligent, self-evolving species to preserve resources, information, technology, culture and the means to biological survival. Perhaps this may occur in conjunction with an artificial intelligence and certainly through large scale computer networks.
The little stimulation provided by predation is more than offset by the waste of time, resources and human creativity, and by the ever increasing population which it promotes.
Greater stimulation is provided by a system that emphasizes rewards rather than the threats of punishment. This awareness is demonstrated by those industries and corporations that have realized that happy employees, having fun and not being subjected to undue stress, are more productive employees.
Cooperation as opposed to competition enhances creativity. Brainstorming is a typical example.
Simply by not wasting time in defense of predation is another stimulus to creativity and production.
Culture allows freedom from the jungle and from predation, from the perpetual necessities of biological survival which permits the luxury of creative thinking.
Culture in evolutionary terms is a media that preserves and transmits information outside the physical organism of the species.
If every human being died the culture would still exist separately as long as the physical media exists in exactly the same way that Mozart's 27th Piano concerto exists as sheet music and recordings, on paper, plastic or magnetic storage without Mozart, a musician or an audience.
In all other predators information outside the genetic code is preserved and transmitted by the physical organism. Interrupt the generations and the education passed directly from parent to young and the cheetah or the wolf is no longer able hunt effectively.
Beyond its individual constituent members a culture exists in a synergistic way. The sum of the culture is already far beyond the capability of the individual to absorb in its entirety.
Humans en masse as a culture behave the way water molecules do in a pipe, as yeast behaves in grape juice, and as big fish eat little fish. They do no behave en masse as an intelligent human individual does. Culture exists independently of its component humans for no other reason than this pragmatic distinction.
If cultural evolution and maturity depends on a complex organization of interconnected mature minds, then it is not population that needs to be increased. The ratio of mature minds to dysfunctional minds needs to increase.
Technology needs to evolve media of more complex organization and greater connectivity such as computer networks. Population needs to decline in order to secure creative space free of predatory stress.
To say that only individuals create intellectual products is false. Einstein is credited with creating relativity. Setting aside the problem as to whether this was creativity or discovery, without culture to provide a medium of biological security, language and the preservation and transmission of information, Einstein would have had to reinvent language, mathematics, physics, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton from scratch, and then get on to the task of relativity.
Had Einstein been abandoned on a deserted island he may have come up with a better way to crack a coconut, but he wouldn't even have a word for coconut, let alone E=mc2.
Creative mental products are the result of a cooperative synergism between culture and its individual members.
Individual humans are the medium through which a culture creates mental products in exactly the same way Mozart uses a piano as a means to manifest an actual piano concerto.
If an electronic machine assembles a widget from components we cannot properly say that it creates or produces the widget ex nihilo. The machine requires an electric power supply, other machines to supply the components, a human culture to design and build the machine and the concept of the widget, and raw materials.
There is no single human artifact or creation that was accomplished by some human completely outside a cultural matrix. Culture necessary to human creative thought.
If Heraclitus was right that the primary fact of existence is change and that life itself is a constant state of flux and evolution, then certainly predation is another phase that, in time, will pass during the course of the evolution of intelligence and complex organization. Indeed, biological life itself may only be a passing phase. And a machine may not require the model of animal predation to perpetuate itself or to further evolve.
The universe, life and culture seem to evolve toward complex organization, recursive self reference, self generation, self awareness, self evolution and sentient minds.
If Heraclitian flux is the case then predation may be a passing state in the course of evolution.
Science may choose to limit itself to the set of known observables. These observables cannot represent the sum total of reality. They certainly do not represent that which has not yet evolved.
The human species must consider potential evolution beyond known observables and the paradigm of the jungle in order to evolve beyond the death of cultural stasis.
Because we have observed evolution only to the point of predation does not mean that predation is an end point or final product of evolution. If it were, what was the use of the trip?
Infinity is the final refuge for the argument that mind is epiphenomenal and that evolution is the happy accident resulting from an infinite number of improbable traits randomly generated, or generated without benefit of design.
In order to accommodate the extreme improbabilities it is necessary to suppose a universe infinite in time, or infinite in extension, or an infinite number or universes, or all of the above.
Infinity implies that everything occurs and nothing is necessary and that intelligent purpose is irrelevant.
It may be so but it is not provable and so we come back to belief and choice of action. It is better to choose to believe and act as though we can design our own evolution and are able to engineer a better culture. If we fail, that at least we fail having tried.
Predation may be perceived to be necessary simple because big fish eat little fish. However, predation may not be a cultural necessity because humans are smarter than fish.
We are not compelled to compete under the lash of cultural imperatives. We do have other solutions. We are compelled to husband our resources, not waste them in trivial competitions, and we are compelled to do what any wolf pack would do, control our population in relation to resources.
Competitive predation does not universally stimulate creative thinking.
It is a telling argument in the defense of predation that even the most enlightened and intelligent human individual must behave in a parasitical and predatory manner if for no other reason than to maintain biological survival.
Yet, given culture, biological survival is our least creative act. And, en masse, as a culture it is not yet proven that we are not steadily populating ourselves to extinction.
Some individuals give up in the face of overwhelming
predation, such as in
In many cases an individual's most creative work is not motivated as a response to the threat of predation, social ostracism, ego gratification, or biological necessity as represented by money. It is created in spite of the fact there is no reward and that the overall sensation is one of being punished in terms of biological and economic well being.
For some individuals the primary drive seems to be knowing and creating, followed by the secondary motivations of status, wealth and comfort.
Predation may be perceived to work in the less intelligent species such as big fish and little fish. On the whole these species have populations that have declined or remained static, with the exception of those species that are parasitical to human culture.
In spite of predation the human species has steadily increased in population. Predation does not work either as garbage collection or as a creative stimulation.
No fish ever had an idea for a new solution to the problem of a dwindling food supply. The options for fish seem be either extinction or the happy accident of genetic mutation.
The only argument that the free market apologists seem to be putting forth is that of scarce resources. If primitive needs such as food, shelter, clothing and a degree of human dignity and satisfaction could be met by cooperative means instead of competitive means, there still remains some resource that will be considered scarce.
This is so if for no other reason than the fact that infantile humans require something to aggrandize themselves with.
If this is true, then it is correct that at some level there will always be predation and competition. They are trivial instances in comparison to the benefits that could be achieved by cooperation and such runaway predation and competition as represented by free market feeding frenzies needs to be severely controlled. At a more fundamental level of resources and needs there is no longer any need for predation, and that in fact, it degenerates the quality of life for all of us and has put us within viewing distance of annihilation.
Michael Andrews
13 April 1994