How to Overcome Survival of the Fittest

When people unite around some limited idea, cause, or characteristic but are opposed, sometimes violently, to those who differ from them, each group thinks they are right and the others wrong. 

Typically, those groups feel self-righteously duty bound to see that their group triumphs over the others, and the sanctity of their beliefs remains unchallenged and inviolable.  

When that happens, we human beings act out a driving principle of the lower animal and plant kingdoms — survival of the fittest. 

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Though the principle of survival of the fittest is natural, inevitable, and even helpful in those plant and animal realms, it actually harms humans, who have a higher capacity and calling for cooperation, compassion, and love. 

The Baha’i teachings say this struggle for existence – which dominates the reality of the lower kingdoms, and which has done so among humans throughout much of our history – is no longer useful for human progress:

… among the teachings of Baha’u’llah is man’s freedom, that through the ideal Power he should be free and emancipated from the captivity of the world of nature; for as long as man is captive to nature he is a ferocious animal, as the struggle for existence is one of the exigencies of the world of nature. This matter of the struggle for existence is the fountain-head of all calamities and is the supreme affliction.

This struggle for existence or “survival of the fittest,” as the biologists Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin called it, has been destructive to us throughout human history. Our hatreds, conflicts, and wars amply demonstrate that fact. 

So how do we move from our entrenched patterns of prejudice, disunity, and discord to ones that lead to unity, enrichment, and strength? The Baha’i teachings tell us that we can start by objectively and fairmindedly examining the reality of who we are, where our purpose exists, and how we can best live together for the benefit of all. 

By whatever scientific, rational, biological, or moral lens we look at it, we are one people – a single human race. The superficial differences that have kept us apart for so long – color, country, class, and creed – can no longer be rationally justified. They do not stand up to intelligent and reasonable scrutiny. We know, because it has been demonstrated in many places, that we can live together peacefully despite our differences. Nonetheless, ignorance and prejudice persist, and competition for dominance seems to intensify as narrow self-interests vie for power.

Civilization and humanity have advanced as we have learned to cooperate with ever larger and more diverse groups. We have successfully traversed several stages of collective cooperation from smaller and simpler to larger and more complex social and political structures, and have largely achieved the level of national unity throughout the world today. 

For us to advance to the next stage in civilization, the Baha’i revelation asserts, requires humankind to now achieve world unity, world governance, and world peace. We must become world citizens.

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However, rather than embracing wider and more inclusive groups as part of our self-definition, we see people reverting to smaller exclusive identities focused on narrow self-interests, groupings, or causes. Instead of expanding their consciousness to include all nations and people, some populations contract into rival competing groups. Religious communities, political parties, and other social groups splinter, separate, and become more divisive, negatively affecting the entire society. Everyone loses in these divisive wars of dominance, even those who may appear to be temporarily victorious. 

When a society divides its inhabitants between us and them, tolerating othering and discrimination against those who are different from us, it creates suffering and stymies progress. Until we learn to understand, appreciate, and apply the fundamental principle of unity in our diversity, humanity’s energies will be diverted toward mutually destructive ends. Until we stop othering those who are in some limited way different from us, and recognize our essential oneness as human beings; our progress and prosperity, individually and collectively, will be hampered.