A not-so-subtle return to survival of the fittest

Father Ronald Rolheiser

In Time magazine there’s a column called "Numbers." Its purpose is to startle you by throwing out curious statistics that you could never have imagined. Reading these, I often find myself precisely surprised, not always happily so.

Recently, there and elsewhere, I have seen statistics that are indeed startling. They have to do with how globalization is widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Here’s a sample:

8 million. The number of millionaires in the United States. This has quadrupled in the last 10 years and that number now represents more than one-quarter of the population of Canada.
10,000. The number of millionaires in Seattle, Washington alone.
1.3 million. The number of people who will find themselves homeless this year in the United States.
22.4 percent. The percentage of children in the USA living in poverty - second highest (after Mexico) in a survey of industrialized nations.
2.6 percent. The percentage of Swedish children living in poverty - the lowest among all countries surveyed.
1 out of 5. The number of children who live in poverty in North America, even as this continent is undergoing a record-breaking economic boom.
100 percent. The percentage that homelessness has increased in North America in the last 10 years.
100 percent. The number of shelters for the homeless, food banks, and soup kitchens that are over-strained and over-stretched in North American cities.
Number 1. The place that the United States holds in the industrialized world both in terms of its number of millionaires and the number of its elders and children who are living in poverty.

These contrasts speak loudly about the differing effect of globalization of the economy on various groups within society. While the present economic boom has been wonderful for some, it has been less wonderful for others. Our present prosperity has left too many people behind. What’s to be said of this?

One must be careful not to make a moral judgment that is too simplistic. Some things that are happening are, in fact, good - even as some others are cause for considerable concern. However, as Jim Wallis states in a recent editorial in Sojourners magazine: "To put it in the plainest moral terms, this just isn’t right. Something is terribly wrong with this picture."

What’s wrong is pretty obvious at one level - the gap between rich and poor is widening and it is simplistic to suggest, as many do, that those who are left behind are themselves to blame since the rules, after all, are the same for everyone. This would be true (everyone) has been given equal opportunity) if everyone were lined up in the same way and at the same starting gate.

But that’s not the case. Some of us participate in the new world economy from a position of privilege - be that historical, national, ethnic, gender, intellectual, or physical. We may well play fairly, but the rules favor us and we have started from a place far ahead of many of the others. An appeal to fair play is a dubious moral argument when we are playing on a field that is not level for everyone. Right now the economy grossly favors those who already have wealth or some other exceptional endowment. This is a good time - if you are even a little privileged - to get obscenely rich!

What is less obvious is the root of this thing - namely, a shift in moral thinking that is leaving us comfortable again with the most brutal of all evolutionary laws, the survival of the fittest. Initially this was true for our species biologically; now it’s becoming true economically.

Good arguments can be made, of course, to extol globalization’s other virtues, to extol the amount of employment and wealth the present economy has generated, and to extol the real virtue inherent in personal initiative and hard work. But at the end of day, there is a brutal Darwinism at work in all this, too. As Hank Zyp, Western Canada’s moral maverick, put it in a recent column "Those who drop out of the race are written off as ‘genetically challenged’ unfit to participate in the booming economy. ‘They are dealt an unlucky intellectual or physical allocation from the roulette wheel of genetic inheritance,’ according to Michael Walker of the Fraser institute. ‘That’s life,’ the new realists say."

It may well be life. Nature has this brutality in it. The fittest survive so as to make for ever-stronger seed and progeny. But moral evolution, as both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures assure us, works exactly the opposite. We evolve morally not by the survival of the fittest but through the survival of the weakest. This is what makes for an evolved moral offspring. The biblical gauge for morality within any culture is always how its weakest members fare. Lately, that hasn’t been very well.

Oblate Fr. Ronald Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and author and currently serves in Rome as general councilor for Canada for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.