Do you ever get the feeling things are out of whack? Against the bigger picture of life on the planet in the first world, everything else seems normal, yet it’s not. If you’ve had Covid, every malaise in your body after the fact could be interpreted as a symptom of long Covid. It may or may not be hypochondria but who can tell you? If it feels unseasonably warm or cold, or an unusually heavy storm hits, is it a clear consequence of global warming or just the randomness of the weather?
As I write, Russian military personnel and hardware are amassing on the border of a smaller sovereign state called Ukraine. Does it mean war in Europe or is it saber-rattling by a paranoid kleptocracy trying to negotiate better terms with the west?
Everybody seeks for balance, but the present reality seems to offer little comfort. Instead, we are all exposed to creeping anomie: the awareness that old certainties like health, the seasons and world peace are peeling like paint eating away at our sense of meaning and purpose.
Which brings me to the concept of symmetry — it is a concept that runs through nature and through us in our daily interactions. It’s the symmetrical perfection of a butterfly’s wings and so many other bilateral creatures. Indeed, bilateral symmetry is so prevalent in the animal kingdom that many scientists think that it can’t be a coincidence. The fossil record reinforces this pointing to bilateral symmetry in animals as early as 500 million years ago.
Symmetry is anecdotally a key component in beauty and attraction. Certain studies have found that women are more attracted to men who have features that are more symmetrical and that facial asymmetry in humans also correlates with ill health — a strong deciding factor in choosing a mate long before there were any agreed standards of beauty.
Interestingly, asymmetry also governs so many of our social interactions, bound as they are to power imbalances. Think about such concepts as reciprocity, or the difference between pity and empathy, respect and the nature of revenge.
Reciprocity is a good natured balancing of the scorecard. It reinforces prosocial behavior and builds community and trust. Failure to reciprocate might imply that the beneficiary does not value the other party and sees little benefit or worth in doing so. This can lead to resentment and at best, indifference. People are just as likely to remember a snub as a good deed. Both reinforce attitudes that shape long term relationships.
Feeling pity towards another speaks of asymmetry since it quite possibly places you in state higher than the subject of your pity. Empathy on the other hand puts you in a position to feel the other’s pain almost directly — something imprinted in our mirror neurons — the same neurons we share with primates and interestingly, bird species. The hard science behind their correlation to empathy for example is contested but the universality of empathy in the human experience (and some observed behaviors in other species) suggests a hardwired as well as cultural component.
Revenge is particularly interesting in the cultural context. Many of the political fault lines of the world were created wittingly or unwittingly by dividing people across religious, racial, and ideological lines. Their continued existence reinforces asymmetries of wealth and power and continued violent conflict is its consequence. Even after a peace is secured, the memory of persecution persists and acts like a silent weight against the balancing counterforce of peace. There are multiple examples of this silent asymmetry in the world and factors beyond our control, like the tipping points in climate change can precipitate conflict based upon it.
Wars, for example are almost invariably battles for resources and are lost and won on the ability to secure those resources. Take a long look through recorded history and you can see the wreckage of empires based on that principle. The model was set, however, long before recorded history.
Before the dominance of Homo Sapiens across the planet, there was a period when we co-existed with multiple other hominids. Many of these entered the fossil record permanently in Africa early on because they failed to reach a critical mass or were snuffed out like failed evolutionary experiments in nature’s sandbox.
One of the most interesting prehistoric human success stories were the Neanderthals who colonized large parts of Europe, adapting to its climate before the arrival more than 50 000 years ago of modern humans. Without a written record of this chapter in human evolution, no one can say for sure what led to their extinction. Some theories suggest climate change was their undoing. Their adaptation to a cold climate as well as the flora and fauna upon which they survived could no longer sustain them in a warmer one.
The other theory is that modern humans simply out competed them for resources, outsmarted them and in the worst instance, purposefully exterminated them.
Scientists have been able to determine that both modern humans and Neanderthals lived in the same environments for five, possibly ten thousand years which suggests that there was some degree of accommodation between the two groups. Trace genetic markers in the human genome also show up in about 1 to 4% of modern humans pointing to inter-breeding but one where one group were almost completely subsumed by a more successful (and prolific) group of near relatives.
It’s no surprise that Neanderthals were characterized as primitive fur robed savages and cave dwellers. In some sense they were pushed to the fringes like desperate fugitives seeking a final refuge. As was the case in the last century, they were possibly hunted down like Tasmanian aboriginals and reduced to such small populations that annihilation was inevitable. Also, history is invariably written by the victors, even when no language is yet available to transcribe it. Only forensic archaeologists can present a more subtle and nuanced picture of this lost race and give them a voice.
The story of humanity is one of growing asymmetries because in one sense, we don’t as a species live in balance with nature. Power relationships are based on asymmetry and when we have not been waging asymmetric wars on each other, as a species we have been waging an increasingly asymmetric war on nature and all the natural resources of this planet.
It’s questionable if the projected 9.9 billion humans can coexist with each other and with the dwindling natural resources at our disposal by 2100 anymore than the present 7.8 billion can do now. A lot of anxiety hinges on the continuing specter of a Malthusian catastrophe. Does the planet have the carrying capacity for such a resource hungry species? It’s an experiment for which there is no precedent. The present asymmetries of wealth alone between rich nations and poor and the obscene disparity between the wealthiest individuals on the planet and the rest of world place us at an inflection point in history as a species. Such asymmetries cannot stand.
If you were given the God view of this earth, one of the greatest asymmetries you would see is that of suffering — the stark difference of suffering in the natural world pre and post-industrial revolution and the huge weight of suffering borne by the mass of humanity against a small, privileged caste bent on domination and self-interest.
Is there any workable solution to this infernal dilemma? By way of conclusion, I defer to the heartfelt wisdom of the late Terence McKenna here. In all your interactions, I enjoin you to seek for balance and symmetry. It is the only way forward for us as individuals and as a species.
