WWIII or Why I Love Darwin

Neighborhoods and Nazis in the streets of Europe. Presidents and polemics behind podiums. Immigration debates raging through the houses of Europe. Illegal immigrants dying at the USA-Mexico border and the Rock of Gibraltar. It seems as if every nation and religion in the world has an ax to grind. Without apology I can now unequivocally say that humanity requires its self-destructive tendencies. We are like little children and lapdogs who need constant attention. If we are not occupied by, say the Cold War, we just go ahead and make a hot one for ourselves. That way we have a good excuse to fight over who gets to be on the moon first, who gets to be on the other side of the moon first and who gets to freeze their little recalcitrant behinds off on the moon’s south pole first (there is supposed to be water there). Not that I have a problem with it. My eggs would still be sticking to my frying pan if it weren’t for Teflon.

Let us for once forget who started what. Let us ignore the battles, the insults and the prophets who all seem to have the same peaceful message but nevertheless manage to instill hatred for the other guy amongst their followers. Even though those issues seem to be on the forefront of most discussions we are just not going to care about them. And the reason we don’t care about them is simple. At the base of all of the fighting there is only one instinct that drives us.

The need to compete. We need to fight. We need to test our mettle in battle. Preferably to the death because otherwise it is meaningless. Forget all the static about who killed whom, about the prophet on this mountain, the savior in that red lake and any number of other myths for which people gladly cast aside all reason in order to believe. In the end, and since the beginning, surviving on this planet means competing. Be you an ant, an elephant or a human this applies to all of you. Woe to the alien who wants to extend us an olive branch at some distant point in the future. We will break it in half, bring out the big dogs and start competing, because that is all we know how to do.

Our economic systems are based on competition. Our habits of procreation are based on competition. Our educational systems are based on competition. The one major religion that doesn’t seem to be based on competition is Buddhism, but sitting under a tree and contemplating your navel is not going to move you ahead much (levitation is cool though, but any Jedi can do that). Ah, there it is again, moving ahead. The Great Game was never great, it was always about getting ahead, becoming stronger, fitter, richer, prettier, in one word it was about competing. It’s a headlong rush into the future in order to protect our past investments.

So now that we have managed to survive in a supposedly enlightened period of history for a couple of decades, suddenly the religious nuts rear their ugly heads again. It is nearly strange to witness, when my childhood was spent in a rather blissfully rational struggle between economic systems, which hopefully most people understood to be nothing but a good old-fashioned power struggle between two systems. The more successful one won.

But now, it’s “Kill the infidels” and “Send your kids to Jesus Camp”. Reap your lord’s rewards, or your god’s, for doing away with the unbelievers. I am not used to this fanaticism. My formative years were spent in a time of rational public discourse of how to pay for social security and how to stop the Greenhouse Effect – back when it was still called that. I don’t understand the fanatics. I am an atheist. I don’t steal, I occasionally lie (small, men’s lies), I am reasonably nice to the people around me, but mostly I try to treat them with what I hope is an approximate reciprocation of their attitude to me and to life. I don’t care much about my old country; I left it behind a long time ago. I don’t care much about my new country; I have lived in too many to keep track of my loyalties. As far as I am concerned I am a global citizen of humanity. To kill or be killed for the nation that I choose to live in is unacceptable. Generally you could say I believe in little else but a fair shake for whomever wants to have a go at it. And I certainly don’t believe in anything that could lead to me finding myself at the trigger end of a gun so that some bozo can survive a little better, in his Bentley. I suggest you do the same.

But somehow nationalism, like religion, is in vogue again, although nationalism is just about the second stupidest thing after religion. How on earth does anyone with a semi-intact right brain buy this crap? You are all zombies, programmed to goose-step happily till kingdom come. Unfortunately, nationalism was just as useful as religion in its day, mostly because it’s better than feudalism. Which is when it still made sense to go kill for your Duke, because if you didn’t, he would make your life uncomfortable.

But these days we live in democracies. We don’t need to sign up with the military. Nobody forces us to pick up that gun, point it at another human’s head and pull the trigger. Nobody forces us to keep voting for governments that pump trillions of dollars into war machines – I like to call it Offense Budget - that are by definition geared towards annihilation of life and property. You don’t build suitcase-sized nukes and precision guided delivery mechanisms (nice euphemism for super destructive cannonballs) to plant flowers in your neighbor’s yard. You build them so you can intimidate the crap out of China, because we don’t really care about Iran’s and Iraq’s nukes other then the oil being there. We would enjoy it if those guys would just give us a tiny little pretext to nuke the bejeezus out of them. Whatever is left of the Muslim world after that can go look for Mecca under the radioactive glass plate while we will go and build harder drills with our conflict diamonds from Africa. That has nothing to do with you, you say? Don’t for one second forget that you drive those tires with your car, use those plastics every day, depend on medicines all your life and love to get some bling for your girl because you bought the De Beer marketing line hook, line and sinker.

So why do we sign up with the military, and why do we pull the trigger, and why do we build those nukes and wait for a good excuse to drop them? Why do we let ourselves believe in heavenly rewards for wiping out the other guy? Why is it suddenly popular again to point at the Yellow Peril?

You can call it whatever theory you prefer; Economics, Dependency Theory, Modernization or Globalization. In the end it is all based on the same principles of competition, on survival of the fittest. Good old Darwin got it right. Hitler didn’t. Even though it seems logical to assume that skin color and earlobe size make a difference when it comes to survival, it does not. Mohels in Judaism all have the same genetic markers going back 3000 odd years. Having black, red or blond hair, brown or blue eyes, hooked or flat noses the gene looks the same no matter what the Mohel looks like. Food for thought for all those silly boys who hate the crooked nose since the big foreskin reaper might actually look like they do. It should also show that our perceived differences are only skin deep. In the end we are all the same. Since the Nazis thought eugenics are cool, it is a rather huge faux pas to even bring evolutionary selection into a discussion of humanity. Hitler has managed much better than the Catholic Church to divorce my alligator brain from me. His atrocities in the name of racial purity force us to think outside the realm of evolution when it comes to Homo Sapiens. But whether you like it or not, whether humanity’s evils are carried out in evolution’s name or not, we remain a product of a long chain of evolutionary choices in which the only thing that matters is survival. Nature wouldn’t blink an eye and so forth.

I know you are misunderstanding me, and I forgive you your short Darwinian fuse. So let me posit that capitalism, similar to war is a natural result of our evolutionary development. It is based on competition. The fittest (the inheritors and the monopolists fall into this category – stop crying and start fighting, it’s what your cat would have done before you robbed it of its last vestigial instincts) will survive and come out on top. But more importantly this dreaded capitalistic system seems to address our in-programmed need for competition, forces us to innovate and evolve and thereby hopefully become fitter at every stage in our lives. If nature were into economic theory she would have written The Invisible Hand herself and turned the lights out on all that social balderdash without, you guessed it, blinking an eye.

You say we have a brain and that makes us different than animals. I agree. Mostly. Doesn’t look like we have been using it that much lately though. Or ever. We can blame colonialism and the Thirty Year War on the ignorance of the masses and on the willfulness of the high and the mighty. Not anymore. Three billion people around the globe can get their daily news feed online. Unfortunately, that access seems largely to be used for learning about stupid blondes and their hair choices. It should be more important that we are constantly fighting over resources, over Lebensraum, over oil and just wait until the water starts running out or the coastlines start disappearing on us. We think nothing of Africans killing each other in droves except when that child with the bloated belly and the flies in its eyes makes us feel bad late at night. But the child’s life is not as wretched and short as it is because it doesn’t have a social worker helping it make a career choice. People in Africa are at each other’s throat because survival in Africa is stupidly hard since there is no food and no clean water. Every time you try to grow your meager protein-poor crops (10 points for knowing that to be the reason for the bloated belly) the rainy season washes half of it away. And when that doesn’t happen the seven year drought kills eight of your nine children. If we would be such social creatures wouldn’t we be helping the poor people of the Congo achieve a better life? Or how about starting by helping them get out from under Belgium’s astonishingly brutal thumb in the 1960s, instead of extending their wretched misery so that we can get cheaper rubber for our tires and nicer bling for our honeys? And why did I never learn about the Belgians in school, apart from the fact that they make tasty chocolate? Just like the three billion today who care about the wrong news, my teacher back then didn’t care to let me know that Europeans in OUR time raped, pillaged and tortured their way through the jungles of the world. Let’s just call a spade a spade and be clear about the fact that Europe is not the wonderfully civilized haven of intellectual pacifism they like to think they are. It seems as if there is a lot of stone throwing out of glasshouses going on here.

I would like it if we would share the wealth around a little more. The EU could bottle their milk and wine lakes and send them to Africa. The prices would still be artificially high. The USA could use some of its offense budget to fight any and all diseases around the globe. There would still be enough suitcase-sized nukes left to turn the globe into a marble. Japan could build a road through Africa without thinking the black man lower than a dog, even though that would mean realizing that the people of the sun are just another tribe on the evolutionary playing field. None of that is going to happen. We simply are products of our environment and our environment has decreed that the fittest competitor will survive.

Now we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can blithely continue down this path towards a true competition of civilizations, and if this moment in history doesn’t at least seem somewhat similar to the days before WWI my name is not Haserl. Or we can realize that this is not necessary. Individually we seem to be able to decline walking the road towards self-destruction, but we are foremost herd animals. We require our group’s protection and we are willing to pay the prize of admission. Historians will probably look back at this time and call it inevitable, that Muslims and Christians would renew their dormant hatred, would once again embark on crusades to rid the world of each other. The Turks will be at the gates of Vienna and the Templars will hunt Saracens in the streets of Damascus again. It is so predictable yet when it is all said and done your favorite expression will be “Hindsight is 20/20”. Consider yourself warned.

I feel like I should be mad at you, that I should hold it against you, your shortsightedness, your lack of imagination and restraint. That you are dragging me into this senseless battle. But I can not. I think I understand you and the forces of nature too well. You and I remain harnessed to the engine of this world. Whether we like it or not we are a product of our environment and that environment says that competition is name of the game. We are competing amongst ourselves not to evolve but to keep the herd healthy. It would be rather elegant, this setup that we find ourselves chained to, if it would not mean that my brother (mailman), cousin (particle physicist) or nephew (baby boy) will fall victim to our programmatic madness. By imprinting our need to succeed nature keeps us going indefinitely. Individually we may not like it, but collectively it has allowed us to dominate this planet. It remains to be seen if the universe at large functions the same way. In any case those aliens better watch out and hope that we have not yet learned how to harness the stars when they show up. Because we will, if only to show those damned reds who’s boss once and for all. Or at least until tomorrow's war to end all wars.