This thing occupied my mind sometime back when I read two books Into the wild and Walden. In their own ways, both the guys wanted to be away from living in the so-called society. They wanted to uncover a life, more at ease and real than the one they were living. The question that came to me was: Wouldn’t living in solitude solve many problems for a person? Then, it started appearing in a logical fashion why ‘society’ at all and what does social living entail? It’s pretty clear that it is possible to exist as a species without collective living. The first kind of collective living started way before man and in fact in very early beings too. This must have happened in two stages: first, the concept of a mother (birth giver) and later on a father and family would have come. Sometime later, animals started living with each other for very fundamental reasons like security and sharing food, which enhance survival chances. Social living in short is a favorable notion from the perspective of evolution and hence its place in the world today. What are the negative sides to society: since beings have evolved to a whole new complexity level and with so many changes, the role of society can’t be so directly assessed. It still benefits the living of us present humans in countless dimensions, but some feel the other negative side too: need to be unnatural at times, obligation for some conventions like believe what others do, live with people affecting your life at times beyond your control etc etc. It is obvious that what one is today is what he is by himself and what others have made of him all these years. There is a coexistence of such two entities inside us and some people want to be one edge and some on the other. Lets further clear what these parts really are: I’ll take some broad things/ topics that relate to our living significantly and see which entity it belongs to. Politics/War/Law, religion, language (communication), commerce/economics, some complex emotions like jealousy etc are things that one would not see if we lived as loners. On the other hand, there exists a list of things that are innate to a being: basic emotions/drives, ideas/cognition, arts/entertainment, curiosity, interaction with environment and other species. These would have been irrespective of whether we live as a social being or not. They might have shaped pretty differently however in absence of collective living. I don’t hold either of the extreme side views and think both, living as an individual and living as a piece of a machinery have their importance. There is no conclusion I really got to and neither was I seeking one :) So, was there any alternative possible in the history? Well, when it comes to the question of collective living, there are only two possibilities (YES/NO) and one is favored by natural selection, so it just had to happen. However, societies can still be shaped in many ways, there is no unique prototype like the kind of picture we have of our present. And so has been the case. Anthropology has shown that all the kind of societies that have existed in the past have been pretty diverse in their features. Across time and space, nature has tried and will continue to do her experiments with the kind of way we live. The survival is of course, of the fittest.
Anyone interested in nature related topics, read Discover magazine (I go through its online blogs) and NatGeo magazine’s blog. They are worth following.
Not directly related to nature, but have you given it a thought? The enlightenment that people talk about is always achieved alone. Then isn't living alone for some time in your life better?
ReplyDeleteExactly, my thinking is that both social living and the lack of it has its positive points. In fact, I strongly feel the two complement each other. There is certain feelings of satisfaction that only living alone can provide you and one must accept it. To me, the so-called enlightenment is just one of those.
ReplyDelete