A Tale of Two Species
Installment 2 of “Incremental Mutualism”
By Joe Petrulionis
To make any progress at all, we’ll have to answer questions like “what is a human right?,” “what are property rights?,” “how do we determine what is fair?,” and other such vexing questions. At one end of the possible spectrum are people who might insist that these things do not exist at all. Arch- materialists would say that there is no such thing as a human right; they are only imaginary traditions that might be changed at any moment. Likewise, property is just a way of describing possession, --another example of “the haves” keeping resources out of the hands of the “have nots”, fairness being just a rationalization by weaklings who want a share of what’s in the feed trough but who do not wish to fight their way to the front of the line. What I call “my possession” is only mine because I can acquire it and I can defend it from the encroachments by others. What is real for an arch-materialist is what is material. And for these folk, anything that is real exists at a particular place and time. You can point to it, take measurements and samples, and we are sure it is there because we can either sense it or we can sense evidence of its existence. Everything else is just imaginary and we should disregard the imaginary and get on with our project of accumulation. In a world of limited resources (food, water, air, living space) the most aggressive, lucky, innovative, powerful, and bold will get to the feed trough. Everyone else will starve or share what is left over after the feeding frenzy. You may have heard someone say something like, “Sharks and guppies. Those are your choices. Eat lunch or be lunch.”
Some arch-materialists think we are in an all out war. It is everyone against everyone and we are being sorted by a giant sorting hat called natural selection. The victors will prevail, the strong will survive, and the winners will accumulate more stuff. Anyone else having trouble supporting themselves will either fall into line in some appropriate status of servitude to the benefit of the winners, for examples, they can become slaves, employees, labor force, adjunct faculty, convicts, etc., or they will go off someplace and politely just die.
For some arch-materialists selfishness is even a good thing, good for society, good for the individual, and good for human history. Because the winners, by definition, are better adapted to the real world, they will be the ones who find nourishment and breeding partners, they will own property, and pass on their high quality genetics (also their innovations, viewpoints, and methodologies) to another generation. In this way the human population will get stronger and better adapted to the world as it really exists. And since the world’s resources will be overseen by better managers, the aggregate wealth of the world will increase. After all, isn’t that what we want? A stronger and better adapted species, living in a world with more resources?
Careful here, not all arch-materialists are selfish and greedy. Remember, arch-materialism is simply the idea that the material world is everything that is real, so we should not let imaginary things like the idea of fairness or politeness, or property rights get in the way of how we order our lives. Some arch-materialists, in fact, think that since only the material world is real, we should not permit any individual to lay claim to more of it than they actually need. Since we are all in this together, they say, and there is not enough to go around, at least we should make sure that we all get an equal portion. Most people who call themselves communist believe in this communal ownership of property enforced by strong governmental regulations intended to ensure that no individual gets more than their share. Since a share of a pie is simple arithmetic, there is no need for any imaginary nonsense like property rights, inheritance conventions, or even fairness to get in the way. Much like dividing up a pizza, if there are twelve people present, then each person gets a twelfth of the available pizza.
Would all of the arch-materialists out there, for examples, you communists, objectivists, anarchists, libertarians, and positivists, would you please wait at the back of the room for a few minutes while we sort out the rest of us? I realize that most of you back there had no idea that you had something so important as arch-materialism in common.
But for the rest of us, let’s take the example of the earthworm, simple little Lumbricidae, which populate most of our backyards in North America, Europe, and much of Asia. Please remember, the earthworm has been under the influences of evolution for just as long as have been those many species that developed into human beings. So we can’t use the terms, “more evolved,” or “less evolved,” can we? We can only say that these two animals, earthworms and humans, are adapted in different ways to the same environment, i.e. Earth’s temperate terrestrial zones. I wonder if we can even say “better or more” adapted? That all depends on what lies ahead of us in some future we can not imagine yet, does it not? If we head into a deep ice age and all earthworms perish, then humans will prove to have been the better adapted ones, presuming some of us survive. But if we head into a phase of global warming, ice melt, and moisture increase, then perhaps it will have been better to be an earthworm. Only time will tell. We can only, selfishly, hope that someone will still be around to tell time, because, [hint], time is only important to humans.
Once we list those things which are important to an earthworm we find that they share almost all of these things with human beings. Remember, for this exercise it isn’t important if any individual earthworm realizes that something is important to its life. We are interested in those things that are important, even if the worms don’t know it. For most of the past, for example, the existence of oxygen was unknown to humans. During all of those years, however, oxygen would have always been high on our list of things important to earthworms and humans, even if there were no beneficiaries who even suspected oxygen even existed.
Now I want you to make a similar list for Human beings. Go ahead, list away. What you will discover is that almost all of the things listed for the earthworm are also important for humans.
Let’s not be ridiculous. I realize that few human beings would find well rotted rabbit droppings to be a delightful addition to their dinner menu. And an earthworm would certainly not consider a plate of barbecue spareribs to be dinner. But adequate nutrition is certainly important to an earthworm, as are warmth, moisture, a place to hide from the elements and nasty robins. In similar ways, human life depends on warmth, moisture, shelter and protection from predation. The two species seem to have lots in common.
But if you expand your lists; let us imagine that you could list every single thing that was important to each species, you will see some interesting patterns. In this list of things that are only important for humans you will find most of these things are constructs, things we made up.
These things that the arch-materialists do not believe exist, things like, love, truth, beauty, good, just, law, math, politeness, your own name, your family roles, the list can go on and on. These constructs are things we just made up!
Note that you have already admitted their importance to human life by including them in this list. Yet they have almost no importance to the life of an earthworm. So it should be clear by now that many of the things that are important to human life are things we make up. They were imagined, constructed, negotiated. Some of them, like human rights, we made up in order to create a better world to live in, to raise our families in. We will evaluate what exactly a right is, how they come about, and what keeps them in existence. But for now, let’s just admit that many of the things, including rights, law, justice, fairness, may be constructs. But the fact that we just made them up does not mean that they are unimportant. They exist. Human life as we know it and want it to be depends on these very same things that we make up.
So other than the arch-materialists still at the back of the room, the rest of us are a thing called constructivists. We believe in things like rights, law, justice, politeness, truth, beauty, property, not because they somehow pre-existed humans, but because we made them, we need them, and because they help. We understand that no two people may share the same views on these constructs, these things that hopefully make human life meaningful. See, even meaning is a construct. We can not live human life without them.
Soon, we will look closer at how these concepts like rights develop. Incremental mutualists think that many of these socially constructed ideas come about because we want their benefits for ourselves so we grant them to others. We will evaluate this mutuality in my next chapter.
In the meantime, please remember how important these things are to human life. The life of an earthworm does not provide us with a viable alternative, does it?
Installment 2 of “Incremental Mutualism”
By Joe Petrulionis
To make any progress at all, we’ll have to answer questions like “what is a human right?,” “what are property rights?,” “how do we determine what is fair?,” and other such vexing questions. At one end of the possible spectrum are people who might insist that these things do not exist at all. Arch- materialists would say that there is no such thing as a human right; they are only imaginary traditions that might be changed at any moment. Likewise, property is just a way of describing possession, --another example of “the haves” keeping resources out of the hands of the “have nots”, fairness being just a rationalization by weaklings who want a share of what’s in the feed trough but who do not wish to fight their way to the front of the line. What I call “my possession” is only mine because I can acquire it and I can defend it from the encroachments by others. What is real for an arch-materialist is what is material. And for these folk, anything that is real exists at a particular place and time. You can point to it, take measurements and samples, and we are sure it is there because we can either sense it or we can sense evidence of its existence. Everything else is just imaginary and we should disregard the imaginary and get on with our project of accumulation. In a world of limited resources (food, water, air, living space) the most aggressive, lucky, innovative, powerful, and bold will get to the feed trough. Everyone else will starve or share what is left over after the feeding frenzy. You may have heard someone say something like, “Sharks and guppies. Those are your choices. Eat lunch or be lunch.”
Some arch-materialists think we are in an all out war. It is everyone against everyone and we are being sorted by a giant sorting hat called natural selection. The victors will prevail, the strong will survive, and the winners will accumulate more stuff. Anyone else having trouble supporting themselves will either fall into line in some appropriate status of servitude to the benefit of the winners, for examples, they can become slaves, employees, labor force, adjunct faculty, convicts, etc., or they will go off someplace and politely just die.
For some arch-materialists selfishness is even a good thing, good for society, good for the individual, and good for human history. Because the winners, by definition, are better adapted to the real world, they will be the ones who find nourishment and breeding partners, they will own property, and pass on their high quality genetics (also their innovations, viewpoints, and methodologies) to another generation. In this way the human population will get stronger and better adapted to the world as it really exists. And since the world’s resources will be overseen by better managers, the aggregate wealth of the world will increase. After all, isn’t that what we want? A stronger and better adapted species, living in a world with more resources?
Careful here, not all arch-materialists are selfish and greedy. Remember, arch-materialism is simply the idea that the material world is everything that is real, so we should not let imaginary things like the idea of fairness or politeness, or property rights get in the way of how we order our lives. Some arch-materialists, in fact, think that since only the material world is real, we should not permit any individual to lay claim to more of it than they actually need. Since we are all in this together, they say, and there is not enough to go around, at least we should make sure that we all get an equal portion. Most people who call themselves communist believe in this communal ownership of property enforced by strong governmental regulations intended to ensure that no individual gets more than their share. Since a share of a pie is simple arithmetic, there is no need for any imaginary nonsense like property rights, inheritance conventions, or even fairness to get in the way. Much like dividing up a pizza, if there are twelve people present, then each person gets a twelfth of the available pizza.
Would all of the arch-materialists out there, for examples, you communists, objectivists, anarchists, libertarians, and positivists, would you please wait at the back of the room for a few minutes while we sort out the rest of us? I realize that most of you back there had no idea that you had something so important as arch-materialism in common.
But for the rest of us, let’s take the example of the earthworm, simple little Lumbricidae, which populate most of our backyards in North America, Europe, and much of Asia. Please remember, the earthworm has been under the influences of evolution for just as long as have been those many species that developed into human beings. So we can’t use the terms, “more evolved,” or “less evolved,” can we? We can only say that these two animals, earthworms and humans, are adapted in different ways to the same environment, i.e. Earth’s temperate terrestrial zones. I wonder if we can even say “better or more” adapted? That all depends on what lies ahead of us in some future we can not imagine yet, does it not? If we head into a deep ice age and all earthworms perish, then humans will prove to have been the better adapted ones, presuming some of us survive. But if we head into a phase of global warming, ice melt, and moisture increase, then perhaps it will have been better to be an earthworm. Only time will tell. We can only, selfishly, hope that someone will still be around to tell time, because, [hint], time is only important to humans.
Once we list those things which are important to an earthworm we find that they share almost all of these things with human beings. Remember, for this exercise it isn’t important if any individual earthworm realizes that something is important to its life. We are interested in those things that are important, even if the worms don’t know it. For most of the past, for example, the existence of oxygen was unknown to humans. During all of those years, however, oxygen would have always been high on our list of things important to earthworms and humans, even if there were no beneficiaries who even suspected oxygen even existed.
Now I want you to make a similar list for Human beings. Go ahead, list away. What you will discover is that almost all of the things listed for the earthworm are also important for humans.
Let’s not be ridiculous. I realize that few human beings would find well rotted rabbit droppings to be a delightful addition to their dinner menu. And an earthworm would certainly not consider a plate of barbecue spareribs to be dinner. But adequate nutrition is certainly important to an earthworm, as are warmth, moisture, a place to hide from the elements and nasty robins. In similar ways, human life depends on warmth, moisture, shelter and protection from predation. The two species seem to have lots in common.
But if you expand your lists; let us imagine that you could list every single thing that was important to each species, you will see some interesting patterns. In this list of things that are only important for humans you will find most of these things are constructs, things we made up.
These things that the arch-materialists do not believe exist, things like, love, truth, beauty, good, just, law, math, politeness, your own name, your family roles, the list can go on and on. These constructs are things we just made up!
Note that you have already admitted their importance to human life by including them in this list. Yet they have almost no importance to the life of an earthworm. So it should be clear by now that many of the things that are important to human life are things we make up. They were imagined, constructed, negotiated. Some of them, like human rights, we made up in order to create a better world to live in, to raise our families in. We will evaluate what exactly a right is, how they come about, and what keeps them in existence. But for now, let’s just admit that many of the things, including rights, law, justice, fairness, may be constructs. But the fact that we just made them up does not mean that they are unimportant. They exist. Human life as we know it and want it to be depends on these very same things that we make up.
So other than the arch-materialists still at the back of the room, the rest of us are a thing called constructivists. We believe in things like rights, law, justice, politeness, truth, beauty, property, not because they somehow pre-existed humans, but because we made them, we need them, and because they help. We understand that no two people may share the same views on these constructs, these things that hopefully make human life meaningful. See, even meaning is a construct. We can not live human life without them.
Soon, we will look closer at how these concepts like rights develop. Incremental mutualists think that many of these socially constructed ideas come about because we want their benefits for ourselves so we grant them to others. We will evaluate this mutuality in my next chapter.
In the meantime, please remember how important these things are to human life. The life of an earthworm does not provide us with a viable alternative, does it?
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