Division amongst people, whether they be political, social, religious, are all based on ideas that exist in our heads, rather than concrete reality that exists outside of us. All conflict is based on a disagreement of those norms held between people, who group themselves together based on similar values. We can recognize the differences between ourselves, understand why those disagreement in values, and work towards cooperating with each other in spite of our differences, rather than resorting to conflict and violence in order to enact our will.
I recently read a book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. It’s the origin of the word Meme. In the book, Dawkins discusses how genes that exist today are inherently selfish, and create biological functions and systems in order to propagate themselves, and they do this is selfish ways, even if the selfish way appears altruistic to the casual observer. As stated above, Dawkins discusses transmitted behaviors, which he coins as Memes. These memes were more or less created by the biological functions of gene propagation in order to increase the spread of those genes. According to Dawkins, memes are as real as genes are, and memes exist within the brains of all living animals, with humans have an exceptional demonstration of meme behavior transmission.
Behaviors are not just the mundane actions that we take everyday to live our lives. These behaviors literally build us into the person we are. Our thoughts and actions are undertaken by memes that others passed on to us, or that we have learned through direct experience. Humans are exceptionally special, as we can learn behaviors by reading a book, heuristically. Being social animals, we humans are exceptionally keen on observing behaviors that will benefit us (and according to Dawkins, the ability for us to propagate our genes). This is why social trends are always exceptionally important, no matter how petty they appear to be. Humans have survived because of our ability to cooperate with each other, and even other animals that do not share genetic relation to us, such as cats, dogs, farm animals, and even plants. Many biologists consider humans the tool animal, or thinking animal. I’d consider us the cooperating animal, as we have designed system after system to encourage and reward cooperation.
Cooperation does not just exist in a vacuum. No social/metaphysical structure exists without us believing that it exists. Norms and repeatable rules need to exists for a system to function. Humans domesticated dogs by observing which puppies were more obedient than others, and which puppies exhibited certain traits that we were selecting for, and killed the rest. Over time, the domesticated dog branched out into the literal thousands of “breeds” that exist today, most of which exist as exceptionally inbred individuals. Other systems, such as market systems, use far less violent means to achieve cooperation. Trade encourages people to undertake the creation of goods or services, so that they might provide that good or service to someone else who is also willing to trade something that the former wants, and increase the marginal utility of both. Of course nowadays we use fiat currency to achieve this, as currency is far more liquid than trying to find someone who happens to have something that would satisfy your marginal utility, and you to there marginal utility. But the point still stands, and cooperation is always better for satisfying the global marginal utility when market forces are concerned.
The disagreements in norms and values is the basis of conflict. In game theory, the game of aggression is a natural consequence of scarce resources. Because there are limited resources, naturally some people will risk injury for a greater reward than if they did not. As we are biological creatures, it is not far fetched to believe that all disagreements ultimately stem from the scarcity of resources, and that the norms that have been created, are such as a result of the scarcity of resources. To go back to Dawkins, if genes seek to propagate themselves, but the scarcity of resources makes that difficult, a balance of cooperation and conflict will eventually come about from a system in order to ensure that those genes can continue. And as such, memes, the norms and values in our heads, exist because of that need to continue our genetics.
However, Dawkins is not so glib as to say that humans are essentially just wet robots, hellbent on perpetuating our genes. Philosophers for thousands of years, across the planet, have wrestled with trying to create a system of being a good person, while acknowledging our biological limitations and tendencies. Aristotle created virtue ethics, stoics believed largely in self improvement and living with reality, Buddhists believe that aligning yourself with reality and walking the third path, all more or less accept what was state above. We can recognize our behaviors, our memes, and change them. Whether it’s due to psychological factors, physiological factors, spiritual factors, the point stands that humans do have some degree of control over how they act and interact with each other, their environment, and reality at large.
With this in mind, and the idea that conflict stems from a misalignment of values and norms ultimately stemming from scarcity, and the understanding that cooperation actually is better benefit to all parties overall in conflict, we can realize and work towards creating values shared by everyone that would eventually encourage cooperation over conflict. A fairly small and easy task that humans have tried for literally thousands of years, and are hardly any closer to accomplishing today than Cain and Abel were. I’d argue this is due to the fact that most people still live close to the state of nature (Hobbes, The Leviathan).
There really is no solution, no end goal, no end of history. The reality is that we humans are just as limited as any other animal on Earth, we just have a gift for realizing how limited we are. I believe that we can move ever closer, however, to that ideal of cooperation over violence, and that if we can do one less act of violence tomorrow than we did today, than we have done some good. Hopefully others will see how the best of us act, and inherit their memes, and perpetuate the good memes.