Life’s Golden Tree
‘My dear friend, all theory is grey – life's golden tree alone is green.’* – Goethe Not so long ago, we who were brought up in western cultures were taught to believe that nature was ruthlessly competitive, that ‘survival of the fittest’ operated at all levels of life, from species to individuals. These ‘grey’ theories (as Goethe would surely have called them) became the dominant paradigm in western thinking, supported and reinforced by our emphasis on individualism and interpersonal competitiveness, and by our veneration of science that abstracts itself from life and love and only deals with what is measurable and (allegedly) rational. Eventually, however, anthropologists started to realize that humanity’s ability to cooperate might have been more important to its survival than competitiveness, psychologists [...]