At one level, there are people who are choosing how things will go. But at a more fundamental level, that which determines the chooser determines the choice.
That brings us to the challenge of understanding how systems are more than the sum of their parts. Or, more specifically, how evolution driven by a selective process represents a special kind of causality that operates at a level different from the level of individual actors.
THE SELECTIVE PROCESS REPRESENTS A DIFFERENT KIND OF CAUSALITY
From many years of trying to convey these ideas, I am aware that the dynamics of selection, in an evolutionary process, are not always easy for people to wrap their minds around. This can be illustrated by a conversation I once had with a famous (and highly intelligent) man, a psychiatrist on the Harvard faculty, who had read The Parable of the Tribes. Though he appreciated the book, it soon became evident to me that he didn't really understand its main idea.
He kept on trying to reduce the social evolutionary process to psychological terms, i.e. to ascribe the engine of causality to the motivations of the actors. But a selective process has to do with what survives in a given environment. And the criteria for selection may or may not connect with the motivations of the actors.
The power of the environment to shape the constituent actors can be illustrated by this story concerning a biological process of selection.
When coal began to coat everything in Britain with dust, a species of moth that had previously been white began, over the generations, to darken. The light-colored individuals were too easily spotted by predators against the coal dust, and therefore they were selected against. Yet, the fact that selection directed a change toward darkness in no way implies that darkness became central to the moth's life processes, determining how it flew, what it ate, how it reproduced, and so on. It's just that it was the darker ones that were most likely to survive, and the selection for darkness transformed the appearance of the species.
By the same token, the parable of the tribes can claim that the selection for the ways of power has dominated the profound transformations of the evolution of civilization without claiming that power has been the central preoccupation of civilized peoples or that power maximization has been their principal goal.
People, of course, have an awareness that moths do not. So while the moths may have unwittingly been transformed by the power of their predators, people have known that power is a problem in human affairs.
If those moths had human intelligence, they would have sought ways of darkening themselves without waiting for accident to do the job. And, in fact, civilized peoples, seeing themselves caught up in a struggle they could not avoid, have sought to cloak themselves in the protective covering of adequate power.
(For example, as one scholar observed. The Japanese in the late 19th century -- having "observed the rest of Asia being carved up and apportioned by the various European powers"--"had very little choice in the matter; it was industrialize or be gobbled up like the rest. She therefore industrialized.")
Nonetheless, even if people have been quite conscious of "the problem of power," the selective process can drive social evolution independently of people's awareness, or how largely power figures in their motivational structure.
Human life does not have to be predominantly about power for power to be the predominant force driving the overall direction of human civilization.
Soon, we will look at the brokenness that ensues from having one selective process (the parable of the tribes, shaping civilized societies) superimposed on another selective process (biological evolution, shaping the nature and needs of the human animal).
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Elsewhere on this site, you can find what I hope will be a useful brief summary of the parable of the tribes. This version, in some 750 words, outlines the logic -- step by step -- by which the breakout (into the domestication of plants and animals) inevitably leads to a process of social evolution driven not by human nature or choice but by a selective process that makes the ways of power the only possible path for humankind.
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