IS CHINA MISSING AN OPPORTUNITY TO EVOLVE?
The power display ritual among animals is a fascinating subject of study. It decides the pecking order, the hierarchy. Hierarchy determines who gets how much of food, mate, best territory and so on. However, as always, Nature has a trick or two up her sleeve if the power play that decides hierarchy tends to perpetuate one particular gene pool to the exclusion of others. If there is an outbreak of some new disease it has been found that the dominant ones in the hierarchy get wiped out while those lower down seem to survive. One hypothesis is that the dominant ones take risks and venture out a lot more while the ones lower down wait for their turn. This waiting and watching and letting go of opportunities saves them if the new disease causing source is in food, mate or environment, as is the case quite often, that draws out the dominant ones first. Eventually the residual gene pool of the meek in the species is enriched with immunity for the newer disease and the species survives better, with a new hierarchy which is incrementally less aggressive and more cooperative among themselves than the previous gene poll which saw so much 'intra-species' genetic elimination in establishing the older type of hierarchy, the pecking order. This incremental improvement is made sustainable over time because the qualities of being lower down in the earlier pecking order, namely non-threatening, non-competing behaviours get passed on so cooperative behaviour gets a small leg up for the species concerned. It is a fair hypothesis that to the extent humans let go of their uniquely high levels of sacrificing individual comfort for collective good and get back to the level of raw animal behaviour, to that extent the dominant types that exhibit ruthless bloodletting to establish their supremacy in the human pecking order might be eliminated or modified over several generations, so that eventually the meek, sharing, caring, cooperative hierarchy is established, and the species as a whole becomes one of Nature's prized possessions. (“Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth” Sermon on the Mount, Mathew 5:5)
A certain teleological view of evolution is an undercurrent in the above scenario, namely that Man is the acme of Evolution and that the cooperative, less belligerent Man will get greater support from Nature and greater 'humanness' will conduce to faster evolution of Homo Sapiens. Teleological view assumes that Nature or evolution has some purpose, some goal. This teleological view is hotly contested by those who say we have no business assuming evolution has any goal at all. It is the same school of thought that sees Nature and Life on Earth as a happenstance in a harsh, uncaring universe. Let the polemics between the two schools of thought go on. We have no problem. What we can do is to extract something from the welter of thoughts here that may be of use to us in dealing with our problems, and mitigating our suffering which seems to overwhelm our sense of well being collectively.
It's pretty obvious that with the dawn of the twenty first century those among us who were derided as nerds or geeks seem better equipped to survive into the future and pass on their gene pool. That is, those who were bullied and driven down the pecking order till recently seem to survive better in the present and future scenario of the 'cyberspace'. We may perhaps compare the internet and the 'cyberworld' to some kind of a new 'disease' for the old pecking order of bloody wars and enormous loss of lives and limbs. The dominant ones of the old order in keeping with their behaviour pattern are likely to be eased out so a more cooperative, collectively less bloody species emerges. Evidences of this are to be found in the 'open source' culture of the internet, the 'Wikiculture' if you prefer ; in the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing of knowledge and skills for our overall growth and wellness in many spheres that were hitherto the exclusive domain of the 'ruling elite' anywhere ; in the social networking phenomenon that seems likely to knit people together in the increasingly shrinking global village ; in the increasingly powerful hand-held marvel, the smart phone or tablet or its future avatars, that seem poised to take apart the opaque wall of division that kept the ruler from the ruled in any system of collective living. In keeping with our hypothesis as given in the first paragraph above, less bloodletting and more cooperative collective behaviour as a species seems poised to emerge in the not too distant future.
Unlike in the animal kingdom, we humans are creatures endowed with the capacity to choose to a great degree. Unfortunately, due to the strident tone of scientific thinking and knowledge gained in biology, genetics and animal behaviour in particular, we tend to lose sight of the great variety of choices we can make that no animal can. We have settled to a view of ourselves based on our empirical knowledge in many fields. We are lulled into thinking that if we measure things more and more accurately and interpret them our knowledge will solve all our problems. As a consequence of all these factors converging as our mindset, we have been looking at ourselves as mechanical extensions in the evolutionary process of lower forms of life rather than as masters of our destiny to a great degree. We don't seem to fully understand that our own evolution is very much in our own hands in many aspects. (“God created Man in His own image” Genesis 1:27 implying Free Will is as human as it is Divine). Because of this lack of understanding, we don't exercise many of the choices we can. We don't focus on our potential to evolve as we WILL to evolve. We focus only on those aspects of our growth or evolution that can be directly derived from science. Perhaps of late we are gaining an awareness that that kind of focus has been unintentionally lopsided and has therefore upset our natural environment to a potentially devastating degree. Only time can tell if we can survive the environmental changes we have made to our detriment by neutralising them by better choices we make now and in future. The lack of awareness of our power of Will to evolve as we want to, as we ought to, is the cause of a lot of our suffering collectively and individually. As nation states, as adherents of various religions, as cultural and linguistic groups, and , most basically, as competitors for the earth's resources that power our modern way of life, we have been waging bloody wars of varying intensity for far too long. The time has now come when we have to evolve mechanisms that will let our Will to evolve to a cooperative, non-annihilating species succeed. A lot of signs that we are moving in this direction are already seen. A lot of signs to the opposite are also seen. Let us take one example of the latter and see how that can be turned around into the former. Let us study this example and see how a dysfunctional process typifying our warring ways can be taken apart and reassembled into a process of Will, of choice, that takes us to a cooperative species.
China has started exhibiting a certain behaviour after the once-in-a-decade change in its leadership. It is too simplistic to dismiss it as the need for the new leadership to assert its authority in its own Party hierarchy so that internal dissent or challenge does not rear its head. This is simplistic because the very process of selection of the present leadership has itself taken care of such contingencies adequately. This behaviour of China asserting its ownership of areas not claimed as such with so much force so far is also not with a view to assert China's supremacy in the geopolitical pecking order, or the international power hierarchy because the world cannot be conquered today by any power whatsoever by seeking to forcibly occupy areas so far allowed to exist peacefully. The reasons are deeper. We will revert to this shortly. China is also engaged in asserting its claim and supremacy in the South China Sea, in confrontation with Japan, Vietnam and other countries. This is the typical dysfunctional process of our warring ways that has to be taken apart and reassembled into the cooperative, non-annihilating model we referred to earlier. It's not as if a war is imminent or that any process of destruction is about to happen. The word annihilation should be understood in a broader sense of foreclosing our choices we can and should make as described earlier that sets us apart as humans. When we persist in such a dysfunctional behaviour we are destroying our potential for taking charge of our growth and evolution. This may sound abstract but a moment's reflection will show that this is the most important aspect of the problem we are looking at. It is to drive home this point that so much space was devoted at the beginning of this blog to the basic aspects of power display rituals among animals, pecking order, Nature sometimes wiping out the aggressive and dominant members of a species in a wave of infections while enabling the submissive ones to survive and the future presumably favouring those who mesh with the 'open sourced' 'networked', crowd-sourced, smart-phone-enabled members of the global villlage. All these are very important factors we have to keep in mind so that from a position of strength we can carve out a future we want.
Now let us revert to the reasons for China's behaviour in its neighbourhood. Obviously leaders owe a duty to protect and provide for their people. China's problems here are immense. As are India's and those of almost all the countries of South Asia, including Burma. Perhaps China, out of a sense of urgency, is trying to plan ahead for providing for its people. The Chinese leadership must do this and must be seen to be doing this. No country and no leader will fault China for this. The reality however is that the world today is a highly interdependent, interlocked world. No people can flourish in the model of prosperity that the Western and European Nations had flourished for several centuries. Their model of imperial domineering and commandeering of the natural and human resources of the rest of the world has been discarded into the dustbins of history. If China apes the West in commandeering the natural resources either in the seabed around the disputed islands of the South China Sea or the human and natural resources of Tibet or Ladakh or Bhutan or any other area, history will have to repeat itself. Maybe instead of one Mahatma Gandhi there may arise thousands of them within China and around the world whose sheer moral power will restore the balance in favour of collective, cooperative and negotiated exploitation of resources in a non-Western, non-consumerist, eco-friendly, pro-poor paradigm. Actually China has a historic opportunity now in ushering in, with the help and support of India, Japan and all the countries in its neighbourhood in particular, and the major powers of the rest of the world in general, a sustainable model of collective development with least attrition of resources, which alone can bring peace and prosperity to all the people in the area. It needs to be mentioned here that China is not wanting in being able to fashion such a leadership, its differently-structured polity notwithstanding. In its approach to the African countries there seems to be a marginal improvement in China's approach over that of the Western colonisers. China seems to be contributing to their growth more than to their internecine warfare. The latter was the preferred mode of operation of the Western powers in their exploitation of the resources of Africa, with some exceptions. China only needs to experiment in this mode with its Asian neighbours more, not less, so that the so called Asian century does not fizzle out. There seems to be no inimical force that would not want Asia to rise and shine because the prosperity of the world at large is served better by such an Asia than an Asia at war with itself. The Pivot Asia' policy of Obama should never be construed as a threat to China or to any country in Asia. Obama is an entirely different kind of persona. The world hasn't ever seen such a President of the USA. The US Establishment has a certain organizational culture that may not allow Obama to bring about the kind of transformation he wants to both in the USA and across the world. But his Pivot Asia policy is absolutely no stick to beat China with. In fact, Asia is poised to receive an immense technology boost from the USA if it goes about resolving its problems on the basis of sovereign equality and negotiated problem solving. China, Japan and India are the elder brothers of the Asian family and if they spoil Asia's peace and prosperity by less than human behavioural compulsions that are atavistic vestiges of our evolution they will stand diminished in their own eyes. If they damage the fabric of their collective will to peaceful prosperity they will not be forgiven by history.
This blog, like many from this blogger, has a life of its own. Whatever flowed, flowed. It has its bathos, taking the reader to one level and then bringing him or her down to another level. If it mitigates aggressiveness and promotes peace even one bit, if it stimulates some sober thought even one bit, it shall have served its purpose. If not it shall have served its purpose still because the blog is the bloggers work and reward at the same time.
A certain teleological view of evolution is an undercurrent in the above scenario, namely that Man is the acme of Evolution and that the cooperative, less belligerent Man will get greater support from Nature and greater 'humanness' will conduce to faster evolution of Homo Sapiens. Teleological view assumes that Nature or evolution has some purpose, some goal. This teleological view is hotly contested by those who say we have no business assuming evolution has any goal at all. It is the same school of thought that sees Nature and Life on Earth as a happenstance in a harsh, uncaring universe. Let the polemics between the two schools of thought go on. We have no problem. What we can do is to extract something from the welter of thoughts here that may be of use to us in dealing with our problems, and mitigating our suffering which seems to overwhelm our sense of well being collectively.
It's pretty obvious that with the dawn of the twenty first century those among us who were derided as nerds or geeks seem better equipped to survive into the future and pass on their gene pool. That is, those who were bullied and driven down the pecking order till recently seem to survive better in the present and future scenario of the 'cyberspace'. We may perhaps compare the internet and the 'cyberworld' to some kind of a new 'disease' for the old pecking order of bloody wars and enormous loss of lives and limbs. The dominant ones of the old order in keeping with their behaviour pattern are likely to be eased out so a more cooperative, collectively less bloody species emerges. Evidences of this are to be found in the 'open source' culture of the internet, the 'Wikiculture' if you prefer ; in the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing of knowledge and skills for our overall growth and wellness in many spheres that were hitherto the exclusive domain of the 'ruling elite' anywhere ; in the social networking phenomenon that seems likely to knit people together in the increasingly shrinking global village ; in the increasingly powerful hand-held marvel, the smart phone or tablet or its future avatars, that seem poised to take apart the opaque wall of division that kept the ruler from the ruled in any system of collective living. In keeping with our hypothesis as given in the first paragraph above, less bloodletting and more cooperative collective behaviour as a species seems poised to emerge in the not too distant future.
Unlike in the animal kingdom, we humans are creatures endowed with the capacity to choose to a great degree. Unfortunately, due to the strident tone of scientific thinking and knowledge gained in biology, genetics and animal behaviour in particular, we tend to lose sight of the great variety of choices we can make that no animal can. We have settled to a view of ourselves based on our empirical knowledge in many fields. We are lulled into thinking that if we measure things more and more accurately and interpret them our knowledge will solve all our problems. As a consequence of all these factors converging as our mindset, we have been looking at ourselves as mechanical extensions in the evolutionary process of lower forms of life rather than as masters of our destiny to a great degree. We don't seem to fully understand that our own evolution is very much in our own hands in many aspects. (“God created Man in His own image” Genesis 1:27 implying Free Will is as human as it is Divine). Because of this lack of understanding, we don't exercise many of the choices we can. We don't focus on our potential to evolve as we WILL to evolve. We focus only on those aspects of our growth or evolution that can be directly derived from science. Perhaps of late we are gaining an awareness that that kind of focus has been unintentionally lopsided and has therefore upset our natural environment to a potentially devastating degree. Only time can tell if we can survive the environmental changes we have made to our detriment by neutralising them by better choices we make now and in future. The lack of awareness of our power of Will to evolve as we want to, as we ought to, is the cause of a lot of our suffering collectively and individually. As nation states, as adherents of various religions, as cultural and linguistic groups, and , most basically, as competitors for the earth's resources that power our modern way of life, we have been waging bloody wars of varying intensity for far too long. The time has now come when we have to evolve mechanisms that will let our Will to evolve to a cooperative, non-annihilating species succeed. A lot of signs that we are moving in this direction are already seen. A lot of signs to the opposite are also seen. Let us take one example of the latter and see how that can be turned around into the former. Let us study this example and see how a dysfunctional process typifying our warring ways can be taken apart and reassembled into a process of Will, of choice, that takes us to a cooperative species.
China has started exhibiting a certain behaviour after the once-in-a-decade change in its leadership. It is too simplistic to dismiss it as the need for the new leadership to assert its authority in its own Party hierarchy so that internal dissent or challenge does not rear its head. This is simplistic because the very process of selection of the present leadership has itself taken care of such contingencies adequately. This behaviour of China asserting its ownership of areas not claimed as such with so much force so far is also not with a view to assert China's supremacy in the geopolitical pecking order, or the international power hierarchy because the world cannot be conquered today by any power whatsoever by seeking to forcibly occupy areas so far allowed to exist peacefully. The reasons are deeper. We will revert to this shortly. China is also engaged in asserting its claim and supremacy in the South China Sea, in confrontation with Japan, Vietnam and other countries. This is the typical dysfunctional process of our warring ways that has to be taken apart and reassembled into the cooperative, non-annihilating model we referred to earlier. It's not as if a war is imminent or that any process of destruction is about to happen. The word annihilation should be understood in a broader sense of foreclosing our choices we can and should make as described earlier that sets us apart as humans. When we persist in such a dysfunctional behaviour we are destroying our potential for taking charge of our growth and evolution. This may sound abstract but a moment's reflection will show that this is the most important aspect of the problem we are looking at. It is to drive home this point that so much space was devoted at the beginning of this blog to the basic aspects of power display rituals among animals, pecking order, Nature sometimes wiping out the aggressive and dominant members of a species in a wave of infections while enabling the submissive ones to survive and the future presumably favouring those who mesh with the 'open sourced' 'networked', crowd-sourced, smart-phone-enabled members of the global villlage. All these are very important factors we have to keep in mind so that from a position of strength we can carve out a future we want.
Now let us revert to the reasons for China's behaviour in its neighbourhood. Obviously leaders owe a duty to protect and provide for their people. China's problems here are immense. As are India's and those of almost all the countries of South Asia, including Burma. Perhaps China, out of a sense of urgency, is trying to plan ahead for providing for its people. The Chinese leadership must do this and must be seen to be doing this. No country and no leader will fault China for this. The reality however is that the world today is a highly interdependent, interlocked world. No people can flourish in the model of prosperity that the Western and European Nations had flourished for several centuries. Their model of imperial domineering and commandeering of the natural and human resources of the rest of the world has been discarded into the dustbins of history. If China apes the West in commandeering the natural resources either in the seabed around the disputed islands of the South China Sea or the human and natural resources of Tibet or Ladakh or Bhutan or any other area, history will have to repeat itself. Maybe instead of one Mahatma Gandhi there may arise thousands of them within China and around the world whose sheer moral power will restore the balance in favour of collective, cooperative and negotiated exploitation of resources in a non-Western, non-consumerist, eco-friendly, pro-poor paradigm. Actually China has a historic opportunity now in ushering in, with the help and support of India, Japan and all the countries in its neighbourhood in particular, and the major powers of the rest of the world in general, a sustainable model of collective development with least attrition of resources, which alone can bring peace and prosperity to all the people in the area. It needs to be mentioned here that China is not wanting in being able to fashion such a leadership, its differently-structured polity notwithstanding. In its approach to the African countries there seems to be a marginal improvement in China's approach over that of the Western colonisers. China seems to be contributing to their growth more than to their internecine warfare. The latter was the preferred mode of operation of the Western powers in their exploitation of the resources of Africa, with some exceptions. China only needs to experiment in this mode with its Asian neighbours more, not less, so that the so called Asian century does not fizzle out. There seems to be no inimical force that would not want Asia to rise and shine because the prosperity of the world at large is served better by such an Asia than an Asia at war with itself. The Pivot Asia' policy of Obama should never be construed as a threat to China or to any country in Asia. Obama is an entirely different kind of persona. The world hasn't ever seen such a President of the USA. The US Establishment has a certain organizational culture that may not allow Obama to bring about the kind of transformation he wants to both in the USA and across the world. But his Pivot Asia policy is absolutely no stick to beat China with. In fact, Asia is poised to receive an immense technology boost from the USA if it goes about resolving its problems on the basis of sovereign equality and negotiated problem solving. China, Japan and India are the elder brothers of the Asian family and if they spoil Asia's peace and prosperity by less than human behavioural compulsions that are atavistic vestiges of our evolution they will stand diminished in their own eyes. If they damage the fabric of their collective will to peaceful prosperity they will not be forgiven by history.
This blog, like many from this blogger, has a life of its own. Whatever flowed, flowed. It has its bathos, taking the reader to one level and then bringing him or her down to another level. If it mitigates aggressiveness and promotes peace even one bit, if it stimulates some sober thought even one bit, it shall have served its purpose. If not it shall have served its purpose still because the blog is the bloggers work and reward at the same time.
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