The Economist in Drag: Panda angst

When we think about evolution, all too easily we fall into thinking that Nature somehow has a will — that the survival of the fittest is her intention, and many of our institutions and ideas somehow stand against the march of progress. Whether we are willing to defend this view, it sits within many of us, as an influential idea in modern times, where our human condition — our consciousness, sense of morality — our emotions towards one another, even love and friendship all came about through the evolutionary process, where everything simply helps us to survive and procreate, and everything is tainted with the view that all is “red in tooth and claw.”

It’s a doubt about the nature of existence, and a destructive one. It removes from us the will and choice we think we possess and places us at the mercy of conditions inherited from millions of years of evolution. It also acts, for some of us, as a disingenuous justification when we find it necessary to do something against our usual notions of right and wrong. But there is faulty thinking in all of this. Evolution is a process of randomness, on a time scale that dwarfs the human anomaly that has emerged on the planet. It has no will, no intention; it is simply the fact that what lives has managed to survive and reproduce. It is not the intention of Nature that the fittest survive, it is only a fact that they do. And our notion of the fittest depends entirely on the prevailing conditions on the planet, which are continually changing.

At the present time, our social institutions and economic means of production, more than any natural condition, define those prevailing conditions. Whether or not the most intelligent or the healthiest members of the human race survive, Nature is entirely indifferent. We do not go against natural law when we select who survives and who does not. There is no such natural law; it is simply common sense that what continues on must survive. And if it should so happen that amorous space aliens should aggressively abduct all good-looking people, then the so-called good genes would be for ugliness. In other words, there is no real measure of what the fittest is or should be except for the prevailing conditions on our planet. And if humanity should wipe itself entirely out in a nuclear war, where is Nature’s will in all of this? There is none, and only the fact that man as a species has left no descendants, and is hence obliterated. In other words, there is no objective intention of Nature outside of us, but rather, we, as a people, may decide what is desirable, which certainly includes our notions of equal rights and a state as a political association among equals.

But stepping away from broader concerns about eugenics and social policy, we want to consider the internal implications of this mistaken view of evolution. As mentioned, we are led to doubt our individual wills, because they seem to arise from conditions far beyond our control. Certainly, we are handed a set of contingencies, historical, evolutionary, and also personal from our family and growing-up, and our desire to understand these contingencies and transcend them already signify an attempt to reclaim our sense of free will and hence the meaning of our actions, such that our actions may belong properly to ourselves. For certainly it is always what we make of our contingencies rather than the contingencies themselves that define who we are. And if we are led down, in the usual postmodern manner, of doubting yet again the impulses that drive this desire to transcend our contingencies, that is a vein that is perhaps properly worth considering at some point in our lives, and always be somewhat aware of, but it should not rule our lives.

All this being said, as a child the idea of animals at play always did unnerve me, in the sense of it being primarily preparation for skills the animals would need in the future, and the biting, pouncing and wrestling exhibited in their play were training for them as killers, sometimes even of their own kin. Similarly, this extended for me, at the time, to the idea of innocent human play, and even morality, as all tainted with the worldview that I’ve outlined, as “red in tooth and claw.” There was, however, an image from an animal factbook that left a lasting impression on me. It was about pandas (no kidding), and in particular young pandas, who have been observed in the wild to climb up snowy slopes, and having reached a suitable spot, would proceed to turn on their backs and to toboggan down the hills. This was an observation that, at the time, I considered too ridiculous to serve any evolutionary purpose. I mean, really, imagine their expressions as they rolled down the hills in those monsoon forests, looking up at the sky, and furthermore as they plodded patiently up the hill just to experience that brief sense of acceleration and weightlessness. Certainly, they were not filled with any angst but were simply free to enjoy their natural capacities. And so it seemed to suggest to me that red in tooth and claw does not drive all our impulses, that our intelligence has no committed subconscious motives, and that our consciousness, interpreting, is at least awake in the world, and if aware of some cosmic irony, is at least sincere in doing so.

Today, of course, I can easily come up with any number of reasons why their play might serve some useful evolutionary purpose. Who knows, there might even be a form of panda angst we have little means of understanding, probably revolving around their comedic appearances and how no one can take them seriously. Yet the story I told at the time, and the impulse that leads me to tell a different story today, to get around that virulent view of the world — that, perhaps, is something to hold onto.