After my last post about the problem of abundance, I made a video talking about the same subject. I mentioned that I’d been taught scripture as a child at boarding school by the late Archbishop Tutu, who was then the curate at the local church in England. I had a comment on the video this morning from @Stan_sprinkle who wrote: “As the Tim Minchin lyric goes, “I’d rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest””
That set me thinking. The word that first comes to mind when thinking about Richard Dawkins is selfish, that’s because he wrote The Selfish Gene. His idea, as I understood it, was that we are the creation and playthings of genes – material that crept out of the primordial soup and has been clinging onto existence ever since. It’s a pretty bleak idea if you base your philosophy of life on it.
I guess I did break bread with Tutu. He joined us at mealtimes and must have been head of my table at least once – that’s how we did it in those days.
It would be interesting to break bread with Richard Dawkins – though he might take issue with the religious inference in the term, breaking bread.
Dawkins has tried hard to clarify the meanig of the selfish gene. Some have taken it as an excuse to behave selfishly and badly
The Gene, through evolutionary adaptation and survival, does all it can to create systems to replicate itself, to explore and prosper in new environments. It could be argued that humans are the pinnacle of that system – though AI seems likely to supplant that position.
All the individual genes that go to make us up, are co-operating to create the human body that we exist in, creating a vessel that allows the genetic material to survive and prosper. We are mere playthings – machines – vehicles for the continuation of genetic information.
Society is a neat trick that the gene evolved to bring us together. Co-operative humans go beyond the body to create new stuff that ensures the future of the gene. So, we humans are the servants of the genetic material that created us.
In the same book, Dawkins promoted the idea of memes – ideas that work well and go viral. It’s as if the information in the genetic code had escaped and populated a different, non-physical field. It’s a field that we humans resonate within. We receive the ideas and manifest them, turning them into spades and ploughshares, spears and guns, mud huts and skyscrapers, books and the internet. Books allowed memes to travel and be sustained. The internet is like a home that we built for memes – an interface maybe?
If the meme is an evolutionary advance of the gene, are we now the servants of the meme?
Either way human co-operation is vital, both from the meme and gene’s point of view and from the human point of view – we need humans to co-operate to survive.
We’ve been trying out systems of co-operation since time immemorial, now living under a mix of Capitalism and Socialism. Both are memes.
Capitalism is all about selfishness, driven by the profit motive. Capitalism works incredibly well. It brings stuff to our doorstep with just one click – though it brings it at a cost that is usually hidden and easily ignored. In a capitalist society, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The environment is reduced and polluted.
Socialism has brought us rights and clean air and safety in numbers through welfare. But Socialism has proved problematic too. It becomes too legalistic, sclerotic, often dictatorial. In a socialist system the individual becomes swallowed up in the interests of the state. Ideas – memes – are stifled and nothing gets done.
So what if we broke bread with the late Archbishop Tutu? well, for one thing, I think there would be a lot of laughter. He was a light-hearted, funny man. But also a deep and serious thinker.
Tim Minchin is a vocal atheist, so let’s think about what Desmond Tutu, the man, is famous for beyond his religious life.
It was he that ran the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at the end of apartheid. His leadership of the commission, it can be argued, prevented a bloodbath of revenge. (We must also take into account the extraordinary philosophy and leadership of Nelson Mandela.)
Tutu was a man of the cloth, but he was also imbibed with the meme of Ubuntu, and it was that philosophy that drove the TRC. It led to admissions of guilt, forgiveness, a coming together, understanding and revealed, literally, where the bodies were hidden.
Ubuntu is an understanding that society is made up from individuals who all have their talents and foibles. It’s not “I am the same as we are,” but “I am because we are.” in Ubuntu, you need your own distinct identity to contribute your part to the whole.
In any community there are people who are irritating, annoying, different. But if we can begin with the truth – Yes, I am irritating, I have these ideas and do these things, perhaps there can be reconciliation – Okay, you do make the best Pizza in the world, so we will try to accept your ways and maybe you can have a think about the impact your ways have on others and soften them or change them?
It’s a live and let live kind of way of thinking, but also one of service – providing what you have for the betterment of the community.
In 1919 Wallace Wattles wrote his influential book, The Science of Getting Rich, which distilled many philosophical ideas into a practical way of living a prosperous life.
The book had a huge effect on me – so much so that I rewrote it for the 21st Century – it’s called The Certain Way
Wattles’ way is somewhere in the middle of all three philosophies – Capitalism, Socialism and Ubuntu. His main recipe for prosperity is service – to give more in use value than the cash value asked for it.
That sounds capitalistic, but the emphasis is not on profit but on service. Profit is built in – the riches come as a by-product. The desire and lust for wealth is not the driving force – service comes first. Wealth appears – if it is needed to fund bigger and greater projects – to fill the destiny-shaped hole that surrounds us all. Some have big dreams, ideas and a sense of destiny. You need wealth to manifest big dreams.
Most of us just want to get by with a car and a TV and food on the table. If we had wealth, we wouldn’t know what to do with it – that’s why lottery winners so often end up broke.
I’d have liked to break bread with Dawkins and Tutu at the same time. Maybe a whole new viral meme would have emerged from the conversation?
We could have discussed the irony of Dawkins greatest idea – the Meme – being redefined as a cat video. The Meme going viral to devalue the brilliance of it’s origin. And we could discuss if the most successful thing those genes ever created was the human capacity for radical forgiveness and cooperation (as Tutu lived). The logic meeting the heart.
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