Could there be anything more seemingly innocent than a beautiful nature documentary? And yet, it is one of the clearest examples of how the description of reality adapts to the interests of the dominant groups and transmits their ideology, their values.
Thus, these splendidly filmed images of a group of lions or eagles hunting with great skill and strength, repeated so many times, are the expression of a model of society in which the strong hunt and the weak are hunted, a model of society in the one that the powerful dominates and the others submit. These images of predation, turned into icons of the dissemination of nature, are presented in documentaries as irremissible, showing us that the world is like that, that it cannot be otherwise. They are “the laws of nature”, the lilting and solemn voice of the documentary’s narrator tells us, while gazelles or rabbits are falling at arm’s length.
But, it is well known that predatory behaviors are by no means the dominant reality in nature. Of course lions and eagles hunt and curiously always appear linked to symbols of power in most cultures. But as the Russian evolutionary biologist Konstantin Merezhkovski already pointed out in 1905, the great evolutionary leaps have been produced by cooperation: the eukaryotic cell, for example, one of the pillars of life, comes from a symbiosis between different organelles that group together giving rise to a new structure endowed with an enormous capacity for the creation of complexity (a complexity that will give rise to the emergence of emotions, reason or consciousness, for example).
Obviously we are not defending a seraphic, angelic vision of the world, but a nature structured in relationships of complexity: in which cooperation, competition, reciprocity, predation, altruism, parasitism, symbiosis, intermingle giving rise to a great biodiversity of evolutionary strategies. .
On the other hand, and to make matters even worse, to legitimize these predatory-type operations, the theory of evolution is often evoked, one of the most solid scientific theories we have. But it is important to point out that Darwinism must be differentiated as a scientific theory, and as such as a theoretical and methodological body, from Darwinism as an ideology and especially differentiate it from the ultra-conservative current that emerged very soon in evolutionism. Already at Darwin’s funeral, it was proclaimed that nature is “a gladiator fight”, a phrase that has made a fortune in our political culture as a justification “using science” for all kinds of abuses and exploitations. This ultra-conservative ideology of Darwinism, based on the model of predation, has been used to justify the so-called “Manchesterian” or ultra-liberal capitalism. Thus, Rockefeller defended that the poor were inferior people and could be exploited “Every day a fool is born who can be scammed” the Spanish banker Juan March also wrote along these lines. In my opinion, this ultra-conservative current has given evolutionary theory a very bad name which, in many social and academic circles, is associated with savage capitalism, Nazism… has tried to prey on evolutionism, we could say.
This competition-focused Darwinian perspective tends to see enemies everywhere: bacteria, viruses… When they don’t. Actually our own body is constituted by a great symbiosis with bacteria. Only on the skin we have 100,000 bacteria for every square centimeter. In our digestive system we have billions of them. And they are symbiotic with us. As Sendín points out, only some bacteria become malignant in some contexts (possibly due to stress, contamination, etc.). Apart from the fact that when talking about predation it is hidden that it is regulated in each ecosystem
But there is not only bacteriophobia in this ultra-conservative Darwinism, but also virusphobia, when much of our own genetic code is made up of viruses that have been embedded in it during evolution and that are a very important part of ourselves.
In the dominant social model, even identities, which I wrote about in my previous article, have to be opposed to each other. The system presents them eternally facing each other, in perpetual war, without the possibility of being able to share or evolve together.
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