Following the Yellow Brick Road
Should you have a peek on Amazon, here is what the publisher wrote as a description of my book Follow the Money; How China Bought the World….
“While anyone can hop on a plane and fly anywhere in the world for work or a holiday, investigative journalist Michael McCarthy combines the two, using his frequent press trips as research for hundreds of stories of his travels to nearly 50 countries. While ostensibly reporting about places to stay, where to go and what to do on vacation, he also keeps his eye out for hidden clues about ways that the Chinese Communist Party is secretly infiltrating western democracies in order to take over the world. The book is structured as a page turner, one trip leading to the next, told in narrative style about what the author sees and where, and why the reader should know and care about what is actually happening to the world behind the scenes. The Chinese are taking over the world, and using Westerners money to do so, a true Trojan horse disguised as actions good for all concerned, but deadly dangerous for all.”
Personally, I think the most important aspect of the book is the chapter where I describe ideology. For many people in the Americas today (both Canada and the US), “not getting caught now is the same as doing the right thing.” For them it’s a “dog-eat dog” world and anything goes. I don’t share that opinion, and here’s why.
CHARLES DARWIN MEETS THE MARINE IGUANAS IN THE GALAPAGOS
One smells the iguanas before seeing them, and they are not hard to see. We tiptoe along the path, cameras in hand. Thousands of them, even tens of thousands of them, doing exactly what iguanas are supposed to do, which is lie on the sand or rocks and bask in the sun. Iguanas are excellent baskers; they can do it for hours. Who more surprised than Darwin when he first spotted some of them crawling down to the ocean and slithering right in for a swim. Iguanas don’t swim! It must have been like hearing a politician tell the truth for the first time.
Darwin didn’t have a camera but he closed his nose and made sharp note of the occasion. Then he sat down and started to study the local wildlife to find out what else was up. What he learned about the blue-footed boobies, frigate birds and marine iguanas and eventually published in his book had a profound effect on the world and continues to do so today.
Charles Darwin not only did not coin the phrase “survival of the fittest” (the phrase was invented by his colleague and competitor Herbert Spencer), or its eventual evolvement into “dog-eat-dog,” his work argued directly against the term. Darwin goes so far as to tie the success of human evolution (and even “lower animals”) to the evolution of compassion. What Darwin wrote after his research in the Galapagos was the opposite of dog-eat-dog. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives,” he wrote, “nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.”
It was The Principles of Biology by Herbert Spencer (1864) that introduced the expression ‘survival of the fittest.’ According to the British Library, Spencer’s work included writings on religion, economics, literature, biology, sociology, and political theory. He argued against the theories of Darwin and has been credited with the mistaken idea that “might is right,” also known as “social Darwinism.”
Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species did not include human beings in its discussions of species evolution but his ideas were soon applied to human groups and organizations. The shorthand term “Darwinian” appeared very quickly after 1859 and by the late 1870s the phrase “social Darwinism” began to be heard and in the following decades was used to describe and justify a whole range of competing political and ideological positions.
The scale of social change during the 19th century because of industrialization, urbanization and technological innovation was unprecedented and led to Britain’s competitive capitalist economy in which some people became enormously wealthy and others struggled amidst the direst poverty. Sound familiar? It was argued that markets should be allowed to operate freely, without government intervention, allowing wealth creation to flourish through competition. Social Darwinism confirmed this singular view: species compete and struggle and only some (the fittest and best) survive. Actually, Darwin wrote that cooperation was equally important, especially for those creatures, including humans, who live in groups.
Spencer argued that to try to help the weak flies in the face of nature. Attempts to aid the weakest in society, such as improving the living and working conditions of the poorest people, were dangerously mistaken and risked impeding the forces of “evolutionary advancement.” Notions of competitiveness also often appeared in justifications of Britain’s imperial ambitions. For instance, at the end of the 19th century there was fierce rivalry amongst European colonizers, keen to exploit mineral and other natural (i.e. “human”) resources in Africa. Social Darwinists argued that Indigenous populations unable to withstand the greater military and economic power of a colonizing force must inevitably be pushed aside to make room for “fitter” competitors.
Similar ideas were important for Robert Knox, whose 1850 book The Races of Man classified and evaluated all human beings according to their race, and insisted that race was the most important determining feature of behavior and character. Arguments such as his were used to support the retention of slavery in the southern states of America. Darwin was horrified by slavery and his revolutionary ideas helped many Victorians to imagine a dynamic world of progress.
Towards the end of the 19th century, however, Darwin’s theories of evolution became the basis of fears for social, racial and cultural degeneration and decline. Evolution was countered by frightening examples of “devolution,” like Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), whose gentlemanly Jekyll turns into the beastly Hyde upon drinking a potion, whose squat, ape-like body, dark, hairy hands, and animal energy all signal a “primitive” state. The argument continues to this day and “survival of the fittest” is used an excuse by many to exploit their fellow man. But I am reminded of another Darwin quote, perhaps less well known; “If the misery of the poor not be caused by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”