Centuries ago, American industrialists like Rockefeller and Carnegie took Charles Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest” to justify the exploitation of workers and the subsequent inequality that followed.
The long legs of these philosophies remains in effect today where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals or families like the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame.
This is the tangible expression in reality, that concentrating wealth among the few is what is best for our society as a whole. The government has also created laws that seem to support this premise as many wealthy people are afforded special treatment when it comes to paying an equitable share of taxes.
This issue was so famously championed by Warren Buffet the richest man in the world at one time, whose tax rate was less than his secretary who made $60,000 a year. This issue of wealth concentration was briefly in the news as the ninety nine per centers demonstrated against the one per centers who held most of the wealth in America. Curiously, the movement quickly lost energy and vanished.
Though often quoted and referenced, Darwin’s theories have been used in a manner that is inconsistent with his beliefs about the human race. In his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Darwin offered that humans had succeeded as a species because of traits like cooperation, caring and selflessness. Darwin wrote that “those communities with the greater number of most sympathetic people would flourish and would rear the most offspring.”
Darwin believed that wealth sharing and cooperation were more consistent with his observations about human survival than the elitism and the rigid hierarchy that dominates contemporary corporate culture. Darwin’s early observations seem to explain how much of our culture is currently arranged.
New research by Psychologist Michael Tomasello has comingled 30 years of research to develop an evolutionary theory of human development. He identified two uniquely human elements that made humans interdependent and therefore fostered cooperation. Food was essential to the survival of our fledgling ancestors some two million years ago. Cooling climates lead to vast open plains that required our ancestors to adapt to this new environment or perish.
They lacked the ability to hunt the large carnivores of the period and instead became scavengers of the carcasses of these large predators. The fossil record reveals that while the skeletal remains have numerous carnivore teeth marks, so do the carcasses have marks from stone tools that were used to glean the remaining flesh form the animals.
Unlike jungle dwellers, who could independently gather fruits or nuts for themselves, these early humans had to work together. As they approached the remains of a carcass they had to insure that people were on the lookout for predators that might attack them while others removed the remaining meat from the bones that then would have been shared with everyone.
These behaviors resulted in a form of natural selections that favored cooperation. There is some evidence that humans that did not adapt these sharing behaviors may have been banished. Today researchers have shown that this evolutionary legacy of cooperation remains strong in humans, young children who are too young to have been taught cooperation have these behaviors.
A study in the journal, Nature, demonstrated that when three year old children obtained food through cooperative efforts they were much more likely to share the food than when achieved individually.
The second element of Tomasello’s theory holds that certain kinds of commerce are more in line with human evolution than others. Through language, cooperative food gathering and unique rituals humans developed a human interdependence not seen elsewhere.
This interdependence lead to cooperation beyond small scale cooperation to culture wide cooperative efforts that lead to greater solidarity. Corporations are the antithesis of these evolutionary lineages. Corporations impose a linear conformity that may, in time prove unworkable for the human race. More and more modern businesses around the world are run as cooperatives where a group of people set the economic and operational philosophy of the business.
Within these cooperatives control is more regional and less centralized and more open to the wishes of employees. The single imperative of traditional corporations is to return a profit to investors. This reason alone may explain why so many Americans working in a corporate culture are unhappy and alienated from the corporation.
Often the outcomes of the corporation are not to benefit the immediate community but rather a remote group of investors that have no connection to the lives or the labors of the employees. Perhaps in time and from necessity, the “survival of the fitness” will be relegated to an obscure corner of our national psyche.
The challenges that face us as a nation, a planet and as the human race may finally force us to revert to the cooperative strategies that helped to create the human race, a race that in my opinion we are starting to look less certain.
Remember, all kids count.
Reach the writer at Hurlburt@wildblue.net