The logics of conflict, it is often said, can hardly be sized up by ordinary law. The exception called for is also evident in the popular saying that everything is fair in love and war, for in the end, presumably it is only winning that matters. Call it the law of the jungle, but it is a fact that the history of life itself has been a long winding tale about winners. Life’s story since its inception some 3.8 billion years ago as unicellular creatures in the cooling ocean waters, has been one of eat or be eaten. Only the fittest have survived to tell the tale, and the competition has been for each species to be at the top of the food chain so that nobody can eat them alive but every other creature is on their menu.
But it has also not always meant the biggest and the strongest have survived. The extinction of the dinosaurs as well as the falls of invincible empires in recorded history all are testimony. Who knows, in the end, it may just be uncomplicated one-cell creatures, and viruses that prove to be the fittest.
For close to 60 million years, humans have been at the top of life’s chart but in evolutionary terms, 60 million years is negligibly short. In Bill Bryson’s easy to grasp scale in his bestseller: A Brief History of Nearly Everything, if the entire history of the earth were to be represented by the outstretch arm of a person of average height, the distance between one fingertip one hand to the fingertip on the other hand, then the single stroke of a medium-grain nail-file on a nail would be enough to wipe off the entire human history. 60 million years is that very insignificant in evolutionary terms.
It is rather oxymoronic, but the fact also is, this insignificant and short 60 million years may be in evolutionary terms, it is also extremely significant and long in another way. Indeed, 60 million years is virtually unimaginable to the human mind. Forget about the 60 million years, even the last 12,000 years since the last Ice Age receded and the race of human civilizations was flagged off, has been an extremely long time. Forget also the 12,000 years, but the last century (20th Century) which those older than 26 years have seen, and the one we live currently are from our point view extremely significant and long. For one thing, humans have chosen to believe they are an exception. All religions, obviously all born within the last 12,000 years, when the race of human civilisation formation began, claim this without exception. All of them have preached that Creation centres around humans.
The human drama however is no longer only about the survival of the fittest genes only. If this were so, there would have been no place for refined emotions such as compassion, empathy, sympathy, love etc. Consequently, as in the animal world, handicapped kids would have had very little chances of survival. The phenomenon of adoption, (or the transfer of parental affection to non-offsprings) known for perhaps as long as human civilization – which is now a raging benevolent fashion, thanks to celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Sushmita Sen etc and before them Paul Newman and many more – for instance is totally contrary to the law of natural selection, where each living thing is supposedly in a perpetual competition to propagate its own genes only.
Maybe in evolutionary terms, these qualities are deviants that will lower the defences of humans in the survival of species struggle. All the same, let us admit it, humans are different, and that this species has gone beyond the evolutionary principle of natural selection and survival of the fittest only. Call it strength or weakness, but this is also what makes humans stand out. Hence our objection to the survival of the fittest theory and leading to savagery extended as logic such as – everything is fair in love and war – and the argument that war calls for exceptions in even in laws of liberal humanism.
There are obviously many who disagree, especially those who think in terms of deadly conflicts as resolutions to disagreements and disputes. They also generally think in terms of what is now popularly referred to as the “zero sum game”. From this perspective, in a competitive environment, one competitor’s gain has to be the other competitor’s loss. The offshoot of this vision is also another rather sinister war game: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Such players push their “friends” to be the enemy of their enemy as well.
Maybe the “zero sum game” is unavoidable in a straight equation where there are only two players. But when there are many more players than just two, things get a lot more complicated, and the “zero sum game” often becomes unproductive. American mathematician and economics Nobel Prize winning genius, John Nash, said as much in his biography by Sylvia Nasar titled “A Beautiful Mind”, which also became major Oscar winning Hollywood movie. Individual players in any multi-players game, do not function as isolated, independent units, but conform to a larger pattern or ethics on the acknowledgement and restraint that “I think that he thinks that I think that he thinks…”
Breaking this unseen bond, even between rivals, whichever player it is that resorts to it, has never proven productive for anybody. This principle of economic rivalry can very well shed some valuable light on why the strategy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” or “everything is fair in love and war”, so repulsively rampant in Manipur’s conflict scenario, are holding back meaningful resolutions, Perpetuating in the process chaos, disillusionment and despair.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
