2.6 How good our evil has been to us
When I was in my twenties, if you’d asked me about any human problem—poverty, hunger, religious strife—I would have told you…
Cooperation is the answer.
Plus compassion, of course, because it’s the beating heart of cooperation.
It seemed to me that if only we could feel deeply for each other no matter what our differences, then we’d be motivated to come together to take harmonious, healing action. And if we could do that, there’d be nothing we couldn’t achieve, including saving the world.
Life was simple back then…
Cooperation, good. Competition, bad.
Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to believe in cooperation than to practice it. I got an A for intent, but an F for results, because as hard as I tried, and I tried really hard, I couldn’t make cooperation work like I wanted it to.
Then I came across The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. I was so thankful to find it, but…
At first it pissed me off.
Here was this guy talking about cooperation, showing how there was a full–blown science of cooperation with theories and experiments, and how it had been around for decades, but I was a longtime devotee of cooperation, so how come nobody told me about this sooner? Why hadn’t I been invited into the club?
Once I got into the book, though, I felt like singing hallelujahs because if smart people were figuring out the secret to making cooperation work, this essential human force for good, then maybe we really could stop making a mess of things and save ourselves.
Ridley opens Chapter 1 by talking about insects, of which there are an estimated six to ten million species. But within that boundless abundance there are just a handful of standouts—the social insects—which because of their cooperative way of life have become stunningly more successful than all the other insects.
Ridley explains…
“There are probably ten thousand billion ants on the planet, weighing in aggregate as much as all the human beings put together. It has been estimated that three–quarters of all the insect biomass—and in some places one–third of all the animal biomass—in the Amazon rain forest consists of ants, termites, bees and wasps.”
And then he says…
“They are perhaps even more ubiquitous in deserts. Were it not for an inexplicable intolerance for cool temperatures, ants and termites would prevail in temperate climates as well. As much as ourselves, they are the masters of the planet.”
Cooperative social organization is the path to standout success among mammals, too. For example, us.
We humans have the highest, most complex degree of cooperation of any mammal, though it’s radically different from the kind practiced by the social insects. They run their cooperation on instinct. We run ours on learning and moral decision–making, which is more challenging and unstable but more powerful. It’s our special cooperative ability that’s allowed us to take over the planet and use it for our own purposes.
So, here I was, charging happily through Ridley’s book, jazzed by his lively writing, when I cruised to the end of Chapter 7, turned the page to Chapter 8 and slammed headlong into six words dancing in italics…
Animals cooperate in order to compete.
Instant whiplash—YES but NO but yes.
YES! I get it! Here’s the missing piece. Cooperation is not what I thought it was. It’s a subset of competition, not its own thing. Illumination flooded in. No wonder it’s so difficult. For a split second I responded happily to the thrill of discovery.
But NO! Please don’t let this be true because if cooperation is owned by competition that means it can’t save us.
But yes. Wrenching news, and yet if evolution is killing us, I want to know why. I just do. We’re talking about the death of my species, so I have a right to understand. Give me the truth and don’t pull any punches.
By the time I got to the end of his book, Ridley had me convinced that cooperation and competition are not independent adversaries at war with each other. They’re a unitary system. They work together. But…
I wanted the war.
I remember singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” when I was a child in church. As chilling as the militarism of that hymn is to me now, back then I wanted to give my life over to something bigger than myself.
Once I left home and was out on my own, cooperation was that thing because I believed it was love in action. I wanted so badly to be one of cooperation’s soldiers. I was eager to take on competition and defeat it.
In the cosmic battle of good versus evil…
I wanted to be on the right side, the bright side. I wanted to fight for the light.
But after reading Ridley, I understood there’s no such simple answer and never was and never will be. I had loved cooperation faithfully for so many years and now I was finding out that it belonged to another. And not some random other…
It belonged to my enemy.
Once I grasped the unitary principle, that cooperation is permanently, deeply, intrinsically tangled up in competition, I saw this dynamic playing out everywhere. It was suddenly so obvious I wondered how I could have missed it for so many years.
Take basketball, for example…
If everyone on your team plays well together in seamless cooperation out on the court, you have a big advantage compared to a team that’s torn apart by the petty strivings of big egos who hog the ball because they want to hog the spotlight. One or two big talents can sometimes carry a team, but on the whole, the more cooperative a team the better chance they have to win.
It’s similar in business…
Other things being equal, if each of your staff is a team player and each department is working in harmony with the others, you have a big advantage over a dysfunctional company riven with political infighting.
So…
Cooperation makes your team a more effective competitor.
And if you’re in a competitive game, which basketball is, and business is, and life itself is, who do you want on your team when you’re up against tough opponents? You want fierce competitors—but competitors who know how to be fierce cooperators with their teammates.
The same is true for hunter–gatherer bands, which is the context in which we became the kind of humans we are. We needed to be…
Fierce competitors against other tribes but fierce cooperators within our own tribe.
So forget light versus dark. Cooperation and competition are mutually interpenetrating like yin and yang where the mystery is how they can be so different and yet so intricately and intimately involved in each other.
I had told myself this was what I wanted, to get to the bottom of the human operating system, to understand how we are made, to understand why it’s so hard being us. But…
What hateful knowledge I had stumbled onto.
The way human cooperation actually works, not our fantasy of it, not our hopes for it, but the real thing, is the kiss of death for us as a species, because if cooperation can’t save us then nothing can.
For two thousand years, theologians have wrestled with the “Problem of Evil.” It’s the toughest challenge there is for people of faith.
It starts with an indisputable fact…
Evil exists.
Our world is filled with it and it causes immense suffering. But if God is compassionate and if he’s all–powerful, how can that be? If he cares about us and has the power to stop evil, then it would be stopped. It’s just that simple.
This leaves us with two possibilities…
If God is compassionate but evil continues, he’s not all–powerful. So while he might be a very nice guy, we can’t look to him for help.
But if God is all–powerful and evil continues, that means he doesn’t care. And why would we ever give our hearts and our loyalty to someone who doesn’t care about us?
There’s good news for theologians, though. We can let God off the hook because he’s not the source of evil. Evolution is. And that means we need to replace the Problem of Evil with the Dilemma of Evil. And the dilemma is this…
How very good our evil has been to us.
Our tribal nature has been the source of our success as a species, and the exact same thing, our tribal nature, has been the source of our worst evil, so…
We are most indebted to what’s most hateful about us.
I believe in evolution. I absolutely do. And I hate it. And this is why. This evil dynamic that evolution built into our genome.
As our species has progressed, our ability to do evil has also progressed. Not satisfied with hurting each other one by one, we’ve created ways to systematically exploit billions of people at the same time. We’ve invented industrial mass murder. We’ve built nuclear devices.
And what’s next? We’re impatient. We never rest. We keep improving our ability to cause greater destruction with greater ease. And this we could call…
Human evilution.
If you ask me…
Worse than dying is looking into the mirror and not liking what we see.
This includes looking into our species mirror. What’s that? History is our mirror. And current events. Go to YouTube, type in search terms like poverty, racism, world hunger, weaponry, war, genocide, and human extinction—and there you have it, a reflection of us.
Of course you could type in kindness and compassion. But all that evil is still right there in the mirror, and it seems to me, overwhelms the good stuff. How many acts of kindness would it take to offset a century of routine, systematic, mass oppression in just one country? Or to offset a single eruption of genocide.
We want to take pride in our species. We want to believe that we’re evolution’s best achievement. But there in the mirror, if we look closely, is a level of species shame that can easily eclipse our species pride.
Sometimes I think our shame runs so deep that…
Extinction might be easier for us to accept than the kind of rigorous self-examination it would take for us to get ourselves on a better path.
And then there’s the mirror–image effect. The exact same action taken by different tribes can be considered good or evil depending on your point of view…
If you raid my tribe and steal our flock of goats, that’s bad.
If we raid your tribe and steal your flock of goats, that’s good.
And it gets ontological. It’s not just about what we do but who we are…
We say to you, “We are good, you are evil.”
You say to us, “We are good, you are evil.”
Add this all up and we see that our tribal nature is at the same time…
Our best blessing and our worst curse.
It’s ensured our survival—up till now. But we’ve paid a price for it. And that price is…
Human evil.
And…
It’s too big a price.
But our ancestors…
Had to pay it.
They had no choice. If they wanted to survive they had to tolerate this evil, and suffer it…
Both as victims and as perpetrators.
