Darwin, Interrupted.
A scientific study on conflict, evolution & the neuroscience of discursive relationships.
Action movies teach us one of the greatest lies that science has perpetuated: People are naturally violent beings. There are a host of other values that emerge scene-after-scene, but this is one of the greatest scientific fallacies alive today.
Darwin was wrong. He misunderstood one fundamental aspect of how humans interact with their environment - that of correlation. He employed correlation all throughout his investigations, that was his very own major blindside.
The hard pill to swallow is the archaic, evolutionary belief that we are somehow hardwired toward conflict.
This is absolutely not true. It is very important to remember, that any belief that exists out in the world, is one that first existed within culture. Meaning, that anything that we have accepted and endorsed as the status quo, is nothing more than simply someone’s belief that people should act a certain way.
This is not to undermine science, on the contrary, it is to expose the reality, that beliefs, values, and even behaviors are first born in culture– not in science.
Science, like any other investigative tool, is equally influenced by its environment. Science is not somewhere outside of the environment. It like everything else, investigations are produced, reinforced, and ideologically confined to the culture from which they spring.
I get it. That’s not a very popular opinion.
HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS OUR VERY FICKLE FRIEND.
But, think about it. Sociologically speaking, every single thing that we value is predicated on the notion that we think it is normal to accept as true. [This is not to undermine science, research, or data. It is to expose the way in which we have come to rely on science as the only way to understand human behavior.]
Social sciences can only take us so far. I’m saying this, as a trained social scientist.
The greatest confirmation bias is the one that we can’t see.
Let me be extremely contradictory and ironic by sharing research from Neuroscience. It is in Neuroscience, that we find that our perception of anything that we see, taste, touch, and hear is extremely limited [It’s referred to as The Law of Closure]. Perception is actively filling in blanks within the world around us. If there’s anything that we are hardwired to do—it’s to be curious. It’s to not submit to the banal attraction of the status quo, which claims what we see is what we get.
Do you know why we are constantly filling in the blanks? Because, if we didn’t, we would experience a form of cognitive disorientation and a sordid relationship to our environment. So, to give us a sense of safety, we fill in the blanks. We, quite literally give meaning where there isn’t any. It’s a way for our brain to still feel in control of the environment around us. Meaning is safety. However, meaning doesn’t mean is correct.
We do this with relationships. We do this with objects. We do this with the news. We do this with the feeling of love. We do this with the feeling of hatred. we do it with our scientific studies.
We can only see with a perceptive lens of who we are. That’s not meant to sound philosophical. According to the following research, we only fill in the blanks because we can’t handle discontinuity. It freaks us out!
"If you didn't have the brain filling in all of this missing information, every time you looked at an object from a slightly different view, it would be a different object and that would be very confusing and difficult to cope with," says Patrick Bennett, associate professor of psychology at U of T and the study's other senior author. "This filling in gives some consistency and continuity to the world."
Notice the frequency here. Every single time you look at something in your environment, you are filling in the blanks. Science does it. Doctors do this. Mothers do this. Employers do this. It doesn’t matter your role, you’re always filling in some sort of blank in your own world.
So, what does all of this have to do with the argument that we are not hardwired toward conflict? Well, conflict is simply yet another way that we fill our environment with CONTINUITY. Conflict is yet another way in which we want to try to feel less disoriented with the world around us.
Conflict with resources. Internal conflict. Physical conflict. Spiritual conflict. Emotional conflict. Relational conflict. All of these conflicts are just a way in which we try to control our reality.
Conflict is the biggest lie that gives us a sense of safety over the world around us. There isn’t a lack of resources. That’s a politicized interpretation.
It is fellow sociologist, Steven Pinker, who makes the argument that we are actually in a time, where we are learning how to get along even better.
He refers to it as the “long peace“. He says that we are living in a time where there is less violence. Keep in mind, that he does not claim that we have somehow eradicated violence or conflict over resources. But we are gradually moving towards a narrative of extending resources. This is not some radical idealism, but more about a perceptive lens about conflict and its relationship to resources.
Conflict doesn’t have to do with resources.
We’ve just created a story around this idea. Conflict doesn’t have to be about lack. Conflict doesn’t have to be about disagreement. Conflict doesn’t even have to be about how we identify as people.
In philosophy, this is referred to as correlation.
Correlation is our desire to find a cause for why things happen in our world. However, to be clear, correlation is not the same as causation. They are related, however. People try to seek out reasons for why we do what we do. That’s my whole job.
But, in doing so, we try to create things that are sustained by a CURRENT narrative. The current zeitgeist has certain values and biases that are propagated by cultural values and beliefs.
Some of these values have been borrowed by confused notions based on ancient theological ideas about human existential value: that somehow humans are naturally inclined towards violence [i.e., “sinful”].
That is what correlation is. We’ve created a relationship between being human and being designed to be creatures of violence. That’s a cultural value. That’s not a truth, per se.
That just shows what a culture values. Whether it has originated in religious thought, or from somewhere else, we cannot simply look to an idea. We have to look at its origins and its many territorializations.
CULTURAL VALUE AS A TERRITORY OF IDEAS.
Territorializations are just yet another way to say that we’ve created borders and ideas around progress. We must deterritorialize these. To simply default and rely on old evolutionary ideas for scientific statistics, or geographic stereotypes, is to deny the possibility of progressing beyond the current historical ideas.
It’s extremely important to remember that conflict as an idea is a reductive understanding of human behavior. To call disagreement a conflict is to undermine certain behavioral qualities around the need to be in discourse.
Meaning, like anything else in society, it starts in Discourse. Discourse is inherently dialectical. Dialectical Discourse is not the same as conflict. It’s simply just another form of exploration.
War is misrepresented as a form of conflict. War is not the same as conflict. Conflict in the workplace tends to be seen as part of an overall process of resource discovery. Resource, in essence, refers to ideas. in this context.
The problem with seeing resources tied to conflict is that one side will always seem or seek to have more. We would love to justify that through some evolutionary misunderstanding of the survival of the fittest we are drawn to resource aggression. Which in many cases has been disproven.
I want to go so far as to claim that a conflict of resources, is not a conflict at all.
It is a mythology. The so-called conflict that we think we see, is simply a misrepresentation of our environment or behaviors.
Ideas do not have limits. It is the pushing, pulling, and experimentation with ideas that have gotten us to where we are today.
Everything in human reality has started and was birthed out of an idea. Whether it be oil. Progress. Love. Money. It all originated within human thought. What does that even mean? What does that imply?
We need to get better at asking questions, rather than expediently running after answers. Better questions equal better answers.
In this regard, conflict is not about a lack of resources, conflict is nothing more than a misrepresentation of someone’s power over an idea.
Power, control, and even resources are all meant to be distributive.
If we want to continue to fetishize certain sciences over the other: namely, neuroscience. Then, we also have to come to the awareness, that neuroscience shows that humans are predisposed towards communal relationships.
Yes, that means sharing. Sharing power-sharing ideas. Sharing outcomes. That means, all of the research that tries to argue that we are not community-oriented is slanted by cultural values.
We must embrace a better story. One where we share. That’s a much better story than one that is built around the fabled notion that conflict has to be inevitable.
MORE CURIOSITY, LESS COMPASSION.
The convenient temptation here is to read this call towards distribution, as some sort of myopic idealism. That still assumes that the theory of the survival of the fittest still has some merit. It does not. This undermined all of the research and shows that we are hardwired towards community.
Conflict does not have to be seen as hierarchical. It too, can be applied distributive. Meaning that discourse is inherently distributed. He discusses the form of conflict as one where views are not homogenized for the sake of the status quo. They are all seen as ways in which to contribute to a much better, more empowering narrative that sustains relational identity over and above resources.
I don’t really like the word compassion. It doesn’t get to the root of what is being expressed in cognitive science. Inquisitive Capability is a much better phrase, I want to create for the sake of the article. But, first, let me share this quote that gets to the heart of my point:
We have a profound proclivity towards trying to understand the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside the skulls of people we interact with, characters on television, and even animated shapes moving around a computer screen. Although we are far from perfect at gleaning the actual mental states of others, the fact that we can do this at all gives us an unparalleled ability to cooperate and collaborate with others – using their goals to help drive our own behavior.
We are bent towards curiosity. This curiosity can lead to compassion. It is a way of wanting to understand someone else. It starts as a desire to research the homogenous qualities that make us like our neighbors. This all starts with a question of connection. Connecting can lead to compassion, but it doesn’t have to. Yet, the question itself is more than enough to begin a journey of understanding someone else as an extension of ourselves — which is ultimately, at the heart of compassion itself.
We must encourage this desire - but, to do so, we have to become more cynical towards what we have accepted as ‘natural’ to being human, especially as it relates to the many codified values behind resources, relationships, and the world we are addicted to filling in with meaning that may not be there after all.