Cooperation and Competition

Today I walked in the Crop Walk with members of my church and other local faith communities, part of the Akron Area Interfaith Council. The money we raised went to our local food pantry and to programs that will aid hungry people around the world. It was a beautiful day for walking and cooperating with each other to fill a basic human need. The minister who led us in prayer before the walk said that though we have different names for God we could all agree on one name in common and that is Love.

Cooperation is not something very much encouraged these days. There seems to be a revival of Social Darwinism everywhere. If you aren’t familiar with that term, it is the application of Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory to human society. Everyone is in competition with everyone else, businesses are in competition and societies are in competition. Competition weeds out the weak and lets the strongest survive to reproduce and prosper. Competition makes better products, more effective workers, etc. It is the basic philosophy of capitalism. A look at the reality shows on TV is a good example, “The Survivor”, “The Apprentice”, “American Idol”, are all built on the idea that there can only be one winner who makes it to the top through ruthless competition. We are told by some that the problem with our schools is that they are public and thus have no competition. Vouchers and charter schools will make public schools better by forcing competition. Government health care isn’t good because it would take away competition, and everyone knows that lack of competition would lead to an ineffective system.

I don’t believe in Social Darwinism. Most major advances in human society have been made through cooperation, not competition. It was by working together to dam rivers and irrigate land that the early great civilizations were built. As individuals, our species doesn’t have much chance of survival. We don’t have hair to keep the cold out. We don’t have very good claws and fangs for fighting, and we aren’t very strong or swift for flight. What we do have is the ability to communicate effectively which provided an edge in the area of cooperation. We are also pretty good at thinking abstractly, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. - Good because it has led to understanding some of the mysteries of the universe and solving problems by working together, bad because we can create some really outrageous, hurtful, theories such as this idea of Social Darwinism. What really seems strange to me is that I’m not one of those people who object to teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in the science classroom, but a lot of the people who object to that theory seem to subscribe to Social Darwinism as touted by the capitalist competition philosophy.