Adam and Eve in Cyberspace

By Vigdor Schreibman

Sexual selection patterns, themselves, raise significant moral and ethical conflicts, which are presently undergoing critical examination. These patterns are described by evolutionary psychologist G.Miller as sexual "fitness indicators": they are social and sales oriented; they operate in the semiotic space of symbolism and strategic deal making; they include the mental attributes of language, art, music, humor, which do their best work in courtship, where the most important deals are made. But the dream of a loving human sexuality is burdened by a bundle of contradictory values, which can sound like a "fascist nightmare," according to G.Miller. Id., at 104-107, 135.  Such patterns of sexual fitness violate at least eight core values commonly accepted in modern society.

• Variation in fitness betrays our belief in human equality
• The heritability of fitness violates our assumptions that social and family environments shape most human development.
• Loudly advertising one's fitness violates our values of humility, decorum, and tact.
• Sexual status hierarchies based on fitness violate our belief in egalitarian social organization.
• The idea that people sort themselves into sexual pairs by assessing each other's fitness violates our romantic ideal of personal compatibility.
• The conspicuous waste demanded by the handicap principle (also described as "the theory of conspicuous consumption") violates our values of frugality, simplicity, and efficiency.
• The sexual choice mechanisms that judge individuals by their fitness indicators violates our belief that people should be judged by their character, not the quality of their genes.
• Finally, it seems nihilistic to propose that our capacities for language, art, and music evolved to proclaim just one message that has been repeated loudly and insistently for thousands of generations: "I am fit, my genes are good, mate with me."

The bizarre waste that defines "conspicuous consumption" is the most palpable indication of evolution by sexual selection.  It is believed to be a unique sexual "fitness indicator," for monetary wealth, precisely because no one other than those who possess surplus wealth could possibly engage in such behavior. Despite the evident moral contradiction of this evolutionary pattern, one can clearly recognize the persistence of individuals in this spectacle: compare e.g., the conditions documented in the work of Thorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class, first published in 1899, with the volume of "comic sociology" written by David Brooks, BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which was published a century later, in 2000.

Brooks reminds the American "establishment," the premier educated class of Homo sapiens sapiens in the United States, how much yet remains to be done to sustain social responsibility and ecological integrity.  Human intelligence, language, and aesthetic sensibility, may have evolved from sexual fitness indicators as capacities to select mates who agree to copulate with each other, but these attributes do not, as such, assure truthful communications between individuals, they do not secure development of a mature social morality, nor guarantee the survival of the biosphere of the Planet Earth, guided by a standard of logic, ethics, or aesthetics.  Those capacities do make it possible, however, to avoid the nasty fate of sexual selection.

The final word from sexual selection theory is that the essence of wisdom and morality is, "not to take our fitness indicators too seriously." G..Miller, infraat 135-136.   What appears to be a "fascist nightmare" defining the value conflicts, which are imposed by sexual selection or by an "imprinted script of many millennia," are behavioral habits, that is, acquired predispositions to act in a certain way rather than another, but these habits are themselves capable of collective review and control. There are viable alternatives: reasoned predisposition of society to advance human morality can override conflicting values that evolve from sexual selection, assuming that the moral will exists.

An educated man and woman can easily recognize that it is not necessary at this point in America's moral evolution to persist in following a standard of "conspicuous consumption" in the competition for a mate shaped by sexual selection.  It is not necessary to blindly follow such a bizarre life style, which can defeat the striving spirit of human beings in the pursuit of universal moral and ethical norms, which are essential to freedom and liberty.  On the contrary, the pursuit of universal moral and ethical norms is consistent with sexual fitness indicators and high social status, and it also responds to the "more advanced capacity for moral vision, including the passionate articulation of social ideals concerning freedom and equality." G.Miller, at 319-321.

This understanding requires no revolution in the process of sexual selection, though it might work wonders with the change in habits concerning life style, from wasteful ornaments toward devoted moral fluency.  Walt Whitman made the point in his original introduction to, Leaves of Grass, in these words

Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.  This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body ...

 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Whitman's Introduction 5 (Viking Penguin ed.1959) (Reprinted from the First (1855) Edition).

Indeed, just such an ethic of centralized control and greed is advanced as the basis for the capitalist "free market" theory. Egoism or selfishness is the most ancient characteristic feature of life, but as Canadian Biologist Hans Selye observes in his book, Stress Without Distress (1974), this is also the most characteristic feature of a cancer, which "cares only for itself. Hence, it feeds on the other parts of its own host until it kills the host--and thus commits biological suicide ..." Id at 58.  The fatal flaw in the market system, is not resolved either by the claimed efficient allocation of resources or by the ubiquitous market function of "social coordination by mutual adjustment among participants," see e.g., C.E. Lindblom, The Market System ch.2 (Yale University Press 20001). First of all, individual transactions in the market cannot be aggregated into a sustainable society.  Recent research at the US Food and Drug Admimnistration by Dr. Alexander N Christakis, an expert in group decision making, has confirmed that the choice of priorities by the subjective vote of an individual in a field of interdependencies (which is what occurs when individual consumers make choices that have important impacts for society-at-large e.g., buying a car that is not fuel efficient, or patronizing a firm that produces cheap goods with child labor), "leads to spurious priorities and ineffective actions."  No sane and reasonable person can accept the idea that  individual transactions, which disregard social equity and ecological integrity, which are essential to the well being of the people and the survival of the biosphere of the Planet Earth, are nevertheless sustainable.

In addition, as Yale Professor Emeritus of Economics and Political Science Charles E. Lindblom clearly and fairly explains, the market system is "grossly inefficient," as well as being "highly irrational," infra at ch. 11.  It is, perhaps, astonishing under these circumstances, as Lindblom points out, "that no democratic nation-state has ever attempted to eliminate its market system."  The reason for this, Professor Lindblom speculates, is that, "The market system is ... historically tied to democracy by elite assault on the mass mind." infra at 235.  Without a sound intellectual foundation, capitalism persists only by means of mass propaganda, systematically coercing the mass acceptance of self-destructive market fictions.  Many-to-many communications via Internet may radically change this situation with the perfection of techniques that can help human beings overcome species-based limitations and the current superficiality of the medium. See Ecology Dialogue.  Even without such perfections, the global protest against capitalism is palpable.  An opening of the global mind is occuring.  This writer has devoted the past decade to telling that story, breaking through the mass denial of market system failure despite punishing resistance, through News Columns, Special Reports, and Occasional Papers published in electronic format by the Federal Information News Syndicate (FINS).

Market theory, which supports the privileges of the few, is a weak theory, which cannot be sustained in practice against the will of the whole, in the absence of coercion, which is universally condemned.  With the power to speak truth to each other, using "many-to-many" communications media and systems methodologies, which are now available or obtainable, the people "now have in their hands, if they know how to use it, the power of becoming masters of the situation." Lindblom infra at 234.  Facing existing realities, many global leaders in the public, private, and civic sectors now recognize that the old style dysfunctional market ethics based on greed has no future.  For example, a deliberate initiative of "self-organization and self-directed design" was started at the end of the 20th-century to secure a rebirth of the core promise of Homo sapiens sapiens. This initiative was premised upon the New Dreams and Promises of global leadership institutions undertaken in cooperation with the United Nations to: reduce global poverty; and unite the power of markets with the authority of universal ideals.  Yet, removed from the abstract dreams and promises of leaders, the old ethic of centralized control and greed, remains with a choke hold on the world. Only recently (Aug 1, 2002) the US Congress granted the President authorization to make new trade agreements by Fast Track Approval, recovering from the Fast Track Knockout delivered five years earlier. This will enable the US President to negotiate trade agreements that bypass the voice of the people and their representatives in Congress, thereby, disregarding essential social and ecological demands, and responding instead, to the raw power of strategically located persons alone.

The obvious alternative to failed market ethics is real democracy, which brings genuine unity of the whole people while protecting their diversity, the ancient biblical antidote for The Tower of Babel Syndrome! The protest against capitalism must not be perceived as a call for return of failed communism/socialism, which offer only tyranny of a different style.

Democratic modes of association, which provide the best foundation for responsible actions by public and private organizations, arise in the civic sector during the paramount, every day lives of citizens where individuals can collectively influence the choices made by members of a group guided by the norms of  trust and cooperation. The research of numerous well regarded scholars have confirmed the critical importance of the civic role of ordinary citizens in a democracy, for example: Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton University Press 1993); Peter F. Drucker, Post Capitalist Society ch. 9, Citizenship Through the Social Sector HarperBusiness 1993). Putnam and Drucker have followed the path laid down by the early 20th-century "Prophet of Management," Mary Parker Follett, who wrote the classic philosophy of democracy, The New State ch. XX, The Growth of Democracy in America (Penn State University ed. 1998), FINS ed. online. Follett identified, "the living democracy of a united, responsible people" as the task of the 20th-century and this remains the task of the 21st-century.

Of particular significance in supplanting the old mix of conditions and influences, the law of cyberspace capital now emerging, reveals that the norms of trust and cooperation and the collaborative participation of all people in the decisions of public and private organizations that directly affect their lives, are crucial to maximizing the benefits of electronic communications. This is the mandatory basis for mining the spectacular resources of cyberspace.  It opens up possibilities for a mammoth expansion of multilateral worldwide communication, holding "possibilities of mutual adjustment that are not yet even imaginable." Lindblom infra at 26.  The private business sector is pouring its traditional creativity into this opportunity with a vengeance, reports Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Professor of Business Administration, in her book Evolve! (2001). This creative effort, lays a troubling emphasis on superficial communications, however. Only by conforming to the laws of trust, cooperation, and collaboration, can Internet users expect to secure the full benefits of the medium, with the turn toward more meaningful modes of dialogue successfully demonstrated, for example, by invention of the revolutionary architecture for a Structured Design Process (SDP), as elucidated by Christakis and Bausch (Feb 2006).