What’s with all the war language these days? The War on Terror. The War on Drugs. The War against Cancer. Winning the battles against bacteria and viruses. And all the disease-focused charities – “beating cancer”, a recent one in Scotland “let’s take this outside, cancer”, “help win the war against heart disease”, “beat obesity” and on and on and on……
What are these wars exactly? And what would winning them look like? A world which eliminated these “enemies”? When it comes to bacteria, have a read at the chapter in Howard Bloom’s “Global Brain” about bacteria – is there any other life form on the planet which has been able to adapt to, and colonise such an incredible diversity of environments? Some live in us. Some live in the mouths of volcanoes which are erupting miles under the oceans! They demonstrate fabulous adaptive powers…..we see that in how they “learn” to resist toxic drugs which we throw into the environment and they can spread that knowledge around the globe with fantastic speed. Anyway, we don’t want a world without bacteria. We’d die. Did you know that apparently there is ten times as much bacterial DNA in YOU than there is your own DNA? Pretty mind boggling.
I enjoyed Howard Bloom’s “Global Brain” but he did emphasise the competitive element of Life too much for me.
But wait, I hear you say, surely competition is the ESSENCE of Life! At least, isn’t that what we learned from Darwin and from his followers? “Nature red in tooth and claw” and all that?
I think that’s partly where we’ve gone wrong. Yes competition is a strong part of Life. To deny that would be to deny reality. But that is not the same as doing battle or waging war. Think about sports like athletics, cycling or ice skating for example. The winner of those competitions is the person who performs the best. Usually the person who does the best and wins the medals is achieving their “personal best” too. They win by being the best they can be. They don’t win by waging war on the other competitors. Competition, in other words, can bring out the absolute best in people by being focused on the self – by trying to achieve one’s personal best. Yes, I know other sports are not like that. There are sports where you have to harm your competitors to win – boxing being the obvious example. But most sports, it seems to me are not like boxing. Maybe we should award “personal best medals” at competitions as well as “best competition performance medals”?
But the other big thing that is missing in this focus on war and battle is co-operation and collaboration. No, I’ll go further, it neglects the importance of the inextricable links between us, about our co-evolution, our co-dependence. Read books like, The Bond, Connected, Linked and you might start to see things differently. What matters in the evolution of complex adaptive systems is the connections, the relationships between the parts.
We won’t win these so called wars. What we should be doing is trying our best to be the best us we can be. We should be encouraging diversity, flexibility, autonomy, the building of mutually enhancing bonds between us and between ourselves and other aspects of Nature. Only down that road will we adapt, grow and thrive…….
Heroes Not Zombies 
I would like to agree with this benign view, but can’t.
The development of the world is the survival of the fittest, to quote Darwin. The downside of this is the competition for limited resources which leads to the decline of the less fit, deprived of these resources, sometimes called creative destruction.
There seems to be a very perverse trait in the human psyche which leads to the self destructive actions we as a species so unwisely take; wars, obesity, global pollution, overuse of resources, and failure to control the misuse of antibiotics. Perhaps it’s a reaction to our overpopulation, but who knows where it will end?
I’ll take a look at the books you mention – in the meantime doing what one can as an individual seems the only sensible track to follow.
Duncan Stewart
Hi Duncan, not sure you are disagreeing actually! I’m saying I think there’s been a distortion of “survival of the fittest” to say that it’s about beating all the other guys….eliminating them, destroying them…whatever. But in fact, “survival of the fittest” means being the most flexible, most adaptable, most resilient and most creative organism – and that involves building as many healthy mutually beneficial links with other elements of the ecosystem as possible. It’s not about destroying everything else – it’s about being the fittest you can be.
Not sure about the perverse trait idea either. I suspect every organism seeks to do its best to preserve its identity and to thrive as best it can. When actions and behaviours lead to harm and destruction, yep, something is going wrong. That’s a wake up call to pause, take stock and flexibly adapt – make some different choices!
Hi Bob,
Yes indeed.
Duncan
Hi Bob,
I entirely agree with you that all this war rhetoric is not getting us anywhere especially in the realm of health and disease. The phrase currently annoying me most is “kick in”, something I hear probably on a daily basis especially with regard to antipyretics and antibiotics and even Homeopathy! As a doctor, you might agree that often patients are our most important teachers. A patient yesterday was describing her severe cancer to me, but at the same time described the freedom this gave her to pursue areas in her life she had felt too constrained to follow in the past, despite the dramatic uncertainty in which she now lives. Now that is living in the moment and so beautiful too. What a privilege to meet someone like that.
Charlotte