Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [28]
As we know only too well, our actual societies are not the harmonious associations of friendly, cooperative people that we long for them to be. Our treatment of the natural world that supports us threatens to wreck it; we abuse and needlessly slaughter beautiful, harmless animals that deserve our protection. People whose primary nature burns strongly within them, perhaps thinly overlaid by their secondary nature, yearn to transcend the narrowness of their societies. They wish to live in harmony with all creatures, not only their fellow citizens. In their efforts to achieve this more inclusive harmony, they may adopt habits that cause them to be mocked, avoided, or persecuted. They rise above the conventional level of their society, often to lonely heights, as indicated by arrows passing from the central circle through both enclosing rings to rise above the outermost.
The diagram corroborates the judgment of philosophers who long ago proclaimed that human nature, despite its manifold blemishes, is intrinsically good. The Socratic doctrine that people naturally seek the good but mistake it, hence can be made virtuous by teaching them to judge correctly, is recognition of humanity's basic goodness. Far away in China, the sage Mencius (1942), who can hardly have been influenced by the Athenian philosopher, compared human nature to a mountain that had been wooded with beautiful trees, which were ruthlessly felled to supply timber to a neighboring city, leaving desolate slopes where every aspiring shoot was cropped by cows and goats. Similarly, the benevolence and moral rectitude that are our natural endowment are weakened by our daily toil. Mencius could not have known for how long an age, under what harsh conditions, evolution had been weaving an aggressive-defensive armature that tends to mask the central goodness of people and other animals.
As sages have long recognized, obsession by the disturbing passions of this armature is human bondage; emancipation from their oppressive dominance is freedom and mental tranquillity.
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When the motivation of our acts springs from our primary nature, uninfluenced by secondary accretions, we consistently choose the course that best promotes harmony, as far as we can foresee the consequences of actions. Our will is free, not by virtue of some nebulous indeterminacy but because it is an expression of the true and inmost self; and who can be freer than one whose course is determined by the process that formed and sustains one's body, gives coherence to one's thoughts and benevolence to one's will?
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Mutual Aid and Social Relations
To emphasize the vast disproportion between the number of plants and animals of all kinds that nature produces and the number that can survive to reproduce, and the resulting severe competition between individuals of the same species no less than between those of different species, was essential to the argument of Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Evolutionary change depended upon the survival, in this ceaseless struggle, of those best fitted to survive. To Darwinists of the latter part of the nineteenth century, nature was ''red in tooth and claw," a monster proclaiming, "I care for nothing, all shall go," But it would be unjust to hold Darwin solely responsible for the prevalence of this attitude. The famous phrases quoted were written by Tennyson between 1833 and 1849 and published in 1850, nine years before the appearance of Darwin's great work.
Obsessed by the idea that relentless struggle is indispensable for evolutionary advance, the Social Darwinists advocated a competitive society, with few props for the weak and the faltering. They seemed to forget that the attributes most promoting survival and reproduction in a fiercely competitive system are not those which raise humans above the level of the shark and the tiger. Fitness to survive and fitness to live in a society