Changing roles often bring new rules of etiquette, fashion, and other social behaviors. In looking at human’s social life, we are struck by several patters that seem to be always present. One of the first of these is cooperation. The early years of Sociology (the study of human’s social life) were heavily impressed with oversimplification of the writing of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, to the social experiences of humans. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species impact the Western World like an atomic bomb. It sent shockwaves rippling throughout society and forever changed the way many people thought about life and humanity. One of the first things Darwin’s theory of organic evolution did was to throw theologians into a frenzy, for he seemed to be challenging the account of Creation written in the biblical book of Genesis by saying that humans were not created in the image of God, but they evolved for apes. The other thing Darwin’s work seemed to do was to emphasize the important place played in nature by competition. Darwin declared tat those species survived best which could adapt to their environment, and he let loose a phrase which he later regretted: “The Survival of the Fittest.” Darwin had to write another book, The Descent of Man, to try to redact the misunderstandings, but it came too late. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The Social Darwinists—a name later applied to social scientists who applied “The Survival of the Fittest” to the social interactions of humans—had already begun their work in believing that to make it in life, one must stomp out the competition to prove they are superior. Many started believing that much like everywhere else in nature, humans are forced to compete with their fellow human beings, and must even overcome then in their natural struggle to survive. This unleashed all the justifications some people needed to perpetrate their competitive activities. People became rich because they knew how to compete better and were therefore more select and superior. Other lost their fortunes or were less affluent, lived in squalor and died, because they could not demonstrate their superiority and others are on the bottom because they are inferior. Charles Darwin’s work dealt primarily with lower forms of life, unequipped with a cerebral cortex and selectively developed nervous systems, did have to compete for survival, primarily with their physical environment, and secondarily, with other species of life. However seldom, even in the lowest forms of animal life, was there a competition or conflict within the same species. The exceptions are certain species of ant, the hyena, and a few birds. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

The general rules, then, was intraspecies cooperation. The simplest form of life, the single-celled micro-organism, demonstrates the necessity of cooperative activity in the way in which cells, after splitting off, cluster together to form colonies. On up the evolutionary scale, the rule is divide (or reproduce) to live, but come together to survive and grow. The beginning of human life is a further example. After all, an infant is a result of the greatest cooperative act in nature: sexual reproduction. The coming together of two loving people, each bringing the necessary halves of a complementary whole to the relationship, is an action of supreme cooperativeness. No competitiveness allowed. One of the most frequent problems encountered in marriage counseling is an overly competitive attitude on the part of one or both partners in the marriage. This is disastrous at any level of a partnership. At the sexual level, it is a tragedy: one spouse trying to be the better lover of the two; one or other spouse trying to see who can hold out longest, or exhibit the best technique. This is not loving sexuality; it is a sideshow wrestling match. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

After the sexual union, the sperm and the ovum further the cooperative process, joining together to merge forces and produce a new life form, the zygote. After the zygote is formed, it makes its way along the oviducts until it finds it home, the place prepared for it by the process in the mother’s uterus. There, nestling into the soft, blood-enriched walls of the womb, the zygote literally becomes part of the environment of the womb. Another cooperative act. A stubborn or resisting zygote passes out of the birth canal and no new life is developed. The entire nine-month period of prenatal development is one tale of mutual assistance after another. Not only does the mother’s body provide for the developing embryo, but the embryo does wonderful things, in turn, for the host environment. With healthy, love-inspired zygotes, where the mother really wants to be pregnant and to deliver a healthy baby, the pregnancy can give her a radiant, happy, satisfying feeling of wholeness and creativity. Many women attest (and their obstetricians confirm it) that they have never been healthier than when they were pregnant and when they strongly desired the pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

At birth, the child is thrust out of the wonderfully satisfying warmth and protection of the womb, in the loving arms of his or her or their mother and father in the physical World. However, to ensure survival, the baby needs love, affection, and protection. Humans, alone of most other beings in nature, needs someone else to help them survive. In contrast, animals move about immediately, can forage for food almost immediately, or can in some other fashion survive virtually unassisted. However, in addition to being born into this physical World, which can some times be cold, as humans we have evolved a cleaver and beautiful pattern: the family. The typical mother, due to the hormones in her body and the training she has received since girlhood, wants to be a mother, wants her baby, and wants it to live and thrive and grow and develop. This is not an instinctive thing. There appears to be no motherhood instinct; it is a learned behavior, and because it is so well learned, most mothers do everything they can to provide the necessary social environment for their newborn. The milk flows, the child ears, the family gathers protectively around, and the new life is encouraged to enter into the cooperative activity of becoming part of the family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Charles Darwin knew this: the Social Darwinists did not choose to acknowledge that much cooperation goes into being human, forming a family, and keeping society together. Darwin knew that the natural selection process had enabled humans to develop the cortical matter of one’s brain over and above the primitive, reflexive parts. Because one could develop this cortex and profit from one’s experiences and become aware of oneself as a living being, humans differentiated from the lower animals and freed themselves from the rigid dictates of the survival of the fittest and are thus made in the image of God, to be loving and kind beings. Human’s brain, complex nervous system, their memory, ability to learn, and build are all evidences of their fitness. Humans have only to compete with those other forces in nature that might harm them or impede their development. It is in the evolution of a superior brain that humans became able to show their fitness eventually to master the physical environment. It is in the place of humiliation that we find our true worth to God—that is where our faithfulness is revealed. “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us,” reports Mark 9.22. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

However, the Social Darwinists had other axes to grind (strong personal opinions about something that they wanted other people to accept and that is the reason they held so closely to their beliefs). Many of them were playing the game of Supermen and Wonder Women. Some men and Women had to be superior because there is only so much room in the upper echelons of society. Others, in accordance to the biblical doctrine of Original Sin, believed that Darwin had shown that humans after all, only a beast, and as such, still subject to the natural laws of tooth and claw (a reference to the sometimes violent natural World, in which predatory animals unsentimentally cover their teeth and claws with the blood of their prey and they skill and devour them). Of course, Salvations would transform the beast into a child of God, as our potential is unlimited and our inheritance is sacred, but of course that understanding came later. Others, in the World of industry and commerce, needed the doctrines of the Social Darwinists to justify their business expansions and the exploitations of human labor, particularly women and children. Slavery, too, since it was still practiced in America for a few years after Darwin, was justified in terms of Racial Superiority and Inferiority. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Competition, however, is a part of human life. Let us look as realistically as we can at this social process. In any context, nature or the neighborhood market, we find a fairly limited supply of goods and resources. Thomas Malthus, hundreds of years ago, started us thinking about the population problem when he presented a gloomy mathematical forecast: as resources increase arithmetically, population increases geometrically. People got worried, and well they might. Dr. Freud and Karl Marx and Charles Darwin were three people who read Thomas Malthus and did some serious thinking. Malthus’s answers to the problem of population demands outstripping the resource supplies were that: war, famine, old age, infirmary, and so on, would help; moderation in sexual activity would take care of the rest. Unfortunately, moderation has not helped much, and famine and old age, at least, have been virtually removed from the frontline of the battle. Malthus did not anticipate the technological revolution that would come. He could not know that our understanding of agronomy and other agricultural sciences would enable us to increase crop yields and virtually match the geometric increases of human population. We are dual beings. Each soul is comprised of body and spirit, both of which emanate from God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

A firm understanding of body and spirit will shape our thoughts and deeds for good. Malthus also could not predict that we would conquer many of these situations that caused infirmary he knew and expand the life-span of people, which was 35, to nearly 2.5 times what is was in 1776, when we had a World population of about 1.26 billion (7.44 billion today). So the problem became even more complicated: not only was life-span increases, but health and fertility were increased, so population continued to grow. Today, we face a problem of overcrowding that he could never have anticipated. Competition exists whenever supply is outstripped by demand. It has always been so, even when supply could match demand. There is no innate factor that makes us compete, but the physiological needs of humans are strong enough that when two or more persons want the same gratification for their needs, they will view for it, competing and even fighting to obtain it. This is seen mostly during holiday shopping, in the effort to enroll children in highly coveted preschools, and in other aspect of life that involve commerce and human beings competition for valuable resources. People call this The Law of the Jungle, though the real law of the jungle is cooperation and mutual assistance. Competition is the process of attempting to meet needs through activities that make individuals contenders for rewards or goals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The competition, in many cases, is nonviolent, more often taking the form of verbal contest. Two beautiful women compete for the attention of the same man, not by fighting, but by trying to be more seductive, attractive, alluring, and so on. Is competition good or bad? This is a difficult question to answer. Those of us who attempt to analyze the society will find that American life is based on a strong system of competitive attitudes and behaviors. It seems to fit, or be demanded by, the economic structure. Of course, the Social Darwinism mentioned before is a very powerful factor even today and makes competition unnecessarily important. Since we have to acknowledge that the social and economic life in this country is very rich and well developed, competition has apparently been good for us. If economic affluence were all that we had to worry about, this would be a satisfying answer. However, we are interested in a deeper problem: human’s feeling of loss of significance. We share the feeling of numerous other social scientists that the economic competitiveness that has built America into the most power nation in the World, with the greatest productivity in the World, has contributed to the breakdown of many personal values, including the personal sense of worth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

This is a hard saying. It seems like an attack on the style of life that we have all lived with. We are not doing that, directly. As any analyst does, we find things within the system that are unworkable, maladaptive. These things need fixing, changing. When any aspect of a system works against the best interests of the people who the system is supposed to serve, then that aspect is malfunctional and needs remedying. The competitiveness which in the past enabled one person to content with another for customers, land, positions, privilege, and a mate has too often become the dog-eat-dog viciousness which says, in effect, it is every person for oneself. Tis attitude is not only morally wrong (since it denies the sense of community which our social system needs), it is also bad science. It forgets that the very basis for survival, throughout human’s recorded history, has been the ability to work cooperatively and to take an interest in the well-being of others. This can work in complementary fashion with the necessary competitiveness that carving out a way of life may demand. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

What about the fall-out of this excessively competitive way of life, the losers in the contest? Too often in the competition, the winning of the struggle means a conquest. The winner does not just get his point, or his goal; the loser is vanquished, defeated emotionally, made to feel completely worthless. Thus, in many modern forms of competition (especially in the commercial and business World), the game moves over into the third type of social process, conflict. And conflict is a desperate, no-holds-barred matter. Conflict is probably as old as life itself and some would say that it is just right. Our understanding of human behavior should enable us to make some distinctions between those kinds of natural phenomena that are necessary and those that we have outgrown as human beings. Conflict, in the sense of fighting and warfare within the species of humanity, is an outmoded and certainly dysfunctional social process. Dysfunctional means not serving the survival needs of the organism or the structure. So we have three basic social processes: cooperation, competition, and conflict. Of the three, cooperation and some forms of competition seem to be functional, while vicious competition and conflict can be shown to be devastatingly dysfunctional. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The proponents of instinctive aggression claim that competitiveness and conflict have just as much natural origin, are just as functional, and have just as much survival value as cooperation. However, many experts believe that a full evaluation of the biosocial nature of human beings will point up the dysfunctionality of continued hostility in a World growing daily more crowded. It is the aim of eugenics to eliminate, so far as possible, the unfit stocks, which by their constitutional defects lower the level of human achievement and increase the difficulties of social life. However, in the state of our knowledge today, and probably for some time to come, this is extremely difficult. So complicated is heredity, so various the order followed by the inherited genes in constituting the new individual, that the more cautious investigators sometimes think it may take thousands of years before we can make much progress, through methods of deliberate selection, in raising the level of race. However, there is a simple method of working towards the purification of the race which as perhaps prevailed from the beginning and been held in honor in the highest civilizations, including those of Greece and Rome, from which we ourselves so largely descend. We know in the back of our minds that only God can save us. “And now let us be wise and look forward to these things, and do that which will make for the peace of this people,” reports Mosiah 29.10. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13