Nature and Ideology II

A scientific view.

What is science?

Basically, science is merely observing the nature of things, gathering real-world information so as to paint a reality-based picture of the world. Telescopes and microscopes augment science’s ability to do that.

Science may tell us that we are not as special as we think, that we evolved on this earth just as any other life form has, while at the same time science is something that unequivocally separates us from other earthlings.

Generally it is our ideologies that we point to as evidence that we occupy a special realm separate from other life forms and, indeed, from nature itself. But observing the nature of things with respect to ideologies does not support that view.

We were always scientists. Our primitive ancestors closely studied their environments, the flora and fauna contained therein as if their lives depended on it and, indeed, they did.

The human brain evolved in the wild over hundreds of thousands of years. Every aspect of nature became indelibly conceptualized in our minds. And although we have no conscious connection to our more primitive past the comparatively brief time we humans have spent within the bubble of civilization could not have erased those indelible conceptualizations. And through the prism of our civilized minds we have formed a rainbow of abstractions from them.

These abstractions take hold of us and can appear to be something greater than they are. Not only religions but also ideologies like capitalism and communism are abstractions that appear to some to be absolute truisms.

One supposed feather in the cap of capitalism is the idea of a pin factory that Adam Smith made so much of in The Wealth of Nations. Well, that idea was around long before humankind appeared on the planet.

The definition of a pin factory is — an organization dedicated to the production of multiple units of a single product.

Well, a berry bush is an organization dedicated to the production of multiple units of a single product. All of the berry bush’s different parts, from its roots to the tips of its branches have a job to do in producing multiple copies of its fruit. And, of course, there is the honey-producing factory known as the beehive to consider.

Now, depending on one’s predilection one can abstract from the nature of things a communist or a capitalist point of view.

For instance, all life on Earth is food for other life. From a communist perspective this can be seen as a cooperative, self-sustaining mechanism of life itself. Vegetation generously provides itself as food for the taking. And prey provides food for the predator. That prey tries to avoid being eaten is no exception to their inescapable fate to provide themselves as food. The prey themselves have to eat. Rabbits, for instance, must leave their burrows in search of food and in doing so make themselves available to their predators. Life’s just one big cooperative.

Looked at from the other perspective, predator and prey can take on a capitalistic character of survival of the fittest and individual initiative where it’s all about the predators being on top and exploiting those below them on the food chain.

There are other ways of seeing capitalism and communism in the wilds of nature: In a capitalistic version of the natural world a fruit-bearing tree develops and produces its product. When the fruit is ripe it advertises itself to potential consumers with attractive color and aroma. The consumers partake of the product’s nutrition and deposit its seed back on the earth as an investment in the future. And if conditions are favorable the seed will eventually produce new products and the process continues.

The communist view of this would be: No one owns the means of production, the product is free and the whole process is provided for by the State, the State of Nature.

Both perspectives are valid but neither is definitive.

On the other hand, communists have claimed that things are naturally evolving toward a socialist ideal. But that doesn’t seem to be bourn out historically where we see that individuality evolves from collective states. In the United States, for instance, the communist society of Amana freely evolved from within itself into a community of private individuals. The tendency toward individuality is not only evident in the macro world of societies, where we see how social evolution has progressed from primitive communal tribes into societies of private individuals, but also in the micro world of life itself where the cells known as eukaryotes evolved out of prokaryotes. The latter is the prototype bacteria whose cells do not contain a nucleus and exist together in a colony of total equality where each and every individual bacterium is exactly the same as every other. The communist ideal! Prokaryotes were around long before eukaryotes made their appearance on the scene. The cells of eukaryotes do have a nucleus, which enable them to create unique, separate individual life forms. So, the communist theory concerning the evolutionary processes of social organisms flies in the face of the natural progression of things.

However, this is not to say that communism does not have its place in the world, in the nature of things. The unique life forms created by eukaryotes are not totally independent entities. Life as a whole, or as an ecosystem, is a single organism within which all individual life forms are interdependent. However diverse life becomes it will always be one entity existing as a communist ecosystem wherein all participants cooperate to promote the sum of what they are all part of, life itself.

Separate individual creatures, then, arise out of a communal state but are never entirely disassociated from it, are never entirely free from participating in cooperative activities. (Note to humans > A species that exploits environments without participating in their enrichment in some equally significant way had better be a species with a low breeding rate.)

It is the nature of life to be communally and individually oriented. Is it any wonder, then, that socialism and capitalism have become the major ideologies in the world? And that their natural holistic dynamism is attested to in human societies?

The most advanced countries in the world today all have a mix of capitalism and socialism to one degree or another. There’s a reason for that. Nature does not give us a choice between the collective and the individual. To create a viable society the two must work in conjunction with one another, as they always have in the natural world.

We can take a lesson, here, from the United States, China and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century. Capitalism ruled in the US early in that century and many people were made to suffer under its reign. Workers — men, women and children — were forced to labor in the harsh conditions of unhealthful and dangerous work places for wages that were extremely inadequate. Commenting on the plight of the haves and the have-nots at that time, Andrew Carnegie once reportedly quipped, “I’m in heaven, they’re in hell and that’s the will of God.”

Eventually, however, it became evident to a growing number of citizens that changes to the prevailing ideology had to be installed. And, so, in order to address the abuses caused by the exclusive rule of capitalism significant doses of socialism were introduced into the exclusively capitalistic system. Also, in the 20th Century communism reigned supreme in the Soviet Union and the leadership remained absolutely committed to a hard-line Marxist/Leninist approach until this empire, ruled with an iron fist, suddenly dissolved overnight. The rulers of the Soviet Union had absolute power to make the socialist dream of a “worker’s paradise” a reality and they couldn’t do it. The other great communist empire, China, was a very different story. In the 1970’s the Chinese leadership held a conference in their capital (Peking at the time) and these avowed communists, some of whom had fought along with Mao, came to the conclusion that Marxism alone could not provide for all of a society’s needs. And, so, China began the gradual introduction of free enterprise practices into their system, by which it was able to prosper.

We are not free to impose a particular denatured order on our social bodies. Our freedom lies in creating those that reflect the natural order by bringing the individual and the collective into a salubrious alignment with one another.