The attraction of power is as lizard-brain as it gets. Power comes in many flavors: wealth, celebrity, sexual, political, and sheer physical domination. As much as we attribute racism to meanness of spirit, racism, too, is about power. Pecking order. “The alpha males are back,” former Donald Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka told Fox News a month before the inauguration.
Who is on top and who isn’t. It’s a dog-eat-dog world where you are predator or prey. Survival of the fittest.
Marlene Cimons argues in the Washington Post that, like so much folk wisdom, we have this (and Darwin) wrong too:
Scientists Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, both researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.
Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication. And they point to many life examples of cooperation and sociability to prove it.
Dogs, for example. While their wolvish progenitors find themselves on the endangered list, dogs adapted themselves to humans and thrived. Hare explains, “Dogs were the population of wolves that decided to rely on humans — rather than hunting — and that population won big.”
Plant adaptations also rely on mutually beneficial relationships. Pollinators get food. Plants spread their seeds and reproduce.
In the simian world, the researches compared the behaviors of bonobos and chimpanzees:
Chimps make war — males take charge — and can be quite violent, even killing one another. Bonobos, on the other hand, are governed by females, don’t kill one another and engage in sex to maintain a peaceful collective temperament. Bonobos also are natural sharers. They enjoy sharing food with other bonobos, and never outgrow their willingness to do so, unlike chimpanzees, who become more selfish in adulthood.
“The friendliest male bonobo is more successful than the unfriendliest chimpanzee,” Hare says, referring to reproduction. “The most successful bonobo males have more offspring than the most successful alpha male chimpanzees”
Friendliness is the winning strategy that allowed our species to outlast hominids now extinct, Woods and Hare argue. “When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”
I don’t really need to frame that in the context of our present societal predicament for you. But I will.
The U.S. is failing to quell the coronavirus outbreak, save the economy, and stop the mounting death count because a political faction that measures success by domination controls many of the levers of power. Call it racism. Call it classism. Call it free-market fundamentalism (or the religious kind). We are failing because we as a culture have devolved over the decades. We lust for power over one another rather than seek cooperation. A faction that sees its power dwindling has reverted to a failed evolutionary strategy.
The acting president, as damaged a human being as ever occupied his office, sees domination as the path to success. As do his hangers-on from Gorka to Attorney General William Barr to Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the business titans of Wall Street and petrochemical giants. In the short term, it may appear to work. But in evolutionary terms?
Days before Gorka made his remarks on “Hannity,” Neal Gabler wrote at Bill Moyer’s site about the right’s embrace of Ayn Rand’s reformation of greed from deadly sin to moral imperative:
To identify what’s wrong with conservatism and Republicanism — and now with so much of America as we are about to enter the Trump era — you don’t need high-blown theories or deep sociological analysis or surveys. The answer is as simple as it is sad: There is no kindness in them.
In the name of neutrality, the media sat by while “extremists who advocate a bizarre morality that elevates selfishness and deplores altruism” took over a major political party. Years later, the media are only beginning to shake off somnambulism.
Read those Ayn Rand quotes to your children as moral instruction, and you will see how far we have fallen. This is Republican morality. This is Trump morality. And the media, loath to defend traditional American values in an increasingly hostile conservative environment, let it happen. That is what value neutrality will get you.
Not to mention thousands of children separated from their parents at the border. And 140,000 dead Americans, with more on the way. And secret police in Portland abducting pedestrians in unmarked vans. An economy teetering on collapse. Ignoring science and inviting disease or death in the name of personal freedom.
Research by Hare and Woods, as well as more before them, suggests cooperation holds the longer-term evolutionary advantage. I wrote in 2014:
What strikes me is how this research echoes something paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said about Turkana Boy in speculating about the development of compassion in early Man:
Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.
There but for the grace of God. Compassion has an evolutionary advantage, Leakey suggests. Perhaps it is what helped us rise above the law of the jungle.
In pursuit of power, often for its own sake, our neighbors have failed to learn the lessons of evolutionary history and have reverted to the jungle. The unresolved competition now at issue is which faction will survive in the short term: the cooperators or the dominators. In the longer term, history has already decided. But that may not help us survive another four years of Trumpism.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.