Mutualism
This is Cladonia cristatella,
known as British Soldiers’ lichen.
I only found out recently,
that lichen are not individual species. Lichens are two different species; a
fungus and an alga. The alga synthesises sugars that allows the fungus to grow.
And the fungus protects the algae. This relationship between two different
species – each benefiting from the other - is called mutualism.
Huh.
I was interested in biology
as a teenager. But, back then, I never learnt about mutualism. I learnt about Darwin.
My exercise books were full of notes about the survival of the fittest and the impossibility
of different species occupying the same ecological niche. One or other species would
have to leave or go extinct. I knew, back then, that homo sapiens out-performed
poor old homo neanderthalensis driving, our evolutionary foe extinct. Served them
right, I thought, a punishment for being insufficiently Darwinian.
More biology.
This is Amanita Muscaria,
or Fly Agaric
It’s a fungus.
I only recently found out
that fungi are also mutualists.
Underneath this mushroom
stretch thousands of fungal filaments - up to a kilometre in every gramme of
earth. The filaments bind to tree roots and draw sugars from the trees in
return offering nitrogen and phosphorus, stuff plant need, and can’t produce by
themselves. A stable symbiotic relationship – a mutualism.
These filaments – don’t
just connect one mushroom with one plant.
Next time you go for
forest stroll, picture, if you can, an interconnected web joining scores of trees
and their mutualist fungi via millions of kilometres of filaments and billions
of interchanges, all working symbiotically.
The subterranean network
even supports weaker trees. Sugars produced in one tree, typically a stronger tree,
are carried through the fungal network and turn up in other trees, typically
weaker trees, even trees of other species.
The science is so
breathtakingly elegant. And then the commercial loggers come along and pull up
the best trees, and commercial agriculture comes along and blitzes the fungi
with artificial nutrients that …. Ahh. We can cause greater damage than we realise.
Just one tree isn’t just one tree in a mutually reliant symbiotic network.
I only understood that quite
recently.
As a teenager, I also
studied economics. Don’t worry, I’ll get to religion soon.
I was sixteen when Gordon
Gekko, a fictional Wall Street supremo, captured the economic mood of my youth –
“greed was good” claimed Gekko. The line dove-tailed perfectly with the
economics I studied back then. All the economic models I studied assumed a ruthless
al location of resources. There would
be winners and there would be losers and that was more than the cost of doing
business – that was the very definition of good business. To argue against it
was, to my 16-year-old self, as pointless as arguing against gravity.
I remember reading Hobbes,
as a precocious teenager. Life was “nasty, brutish and short,” said Hobbes.
Nature, and our fellow human beings are out to get us. Get for yourself some
kind of government that can restrain the central destructively competitive
nature of human existence.
Maybe.
This year I read The
Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, an anthropologist
and a political theorist. Their main point is no. That’s not the human story, particular rly when you look back at the evidence of
ancient humanity. When you look at the evidence you see play, a sense of
adventure, a willingness to forgo frantic competition to create less ruthless,
kinder ways to develop and unfold the human narrative over time.
[The famous
anthropolisit] Malinowski’s [wrote in] 1922 [that] in the islands off Papua New
Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in
outrigger canoes, just to exchange precious heirloom shells and necklaces –
only to hold them briefly, then pass them on again to a different expedition
from another island. Treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing
hundreds of miles in opposite directions. To an outsider, [they write] it seems
senseless. To the men of the Massim [however] nothing could be more important.
This isn’t about trade,
it’s about taking joy from inter-personal encounter. The human that emerges
from the Graeber and Wengrow’s book is very different from the Homo Sapien described
by Noah Yuval Harari, and the authors of a Dawn of Everything do a pretty
conclusive job debunking Harari’s Hobbesian version of human history. But what
if we humans we also, at our very deepest level, mutualists
But let me do one more
picture. Back to biology
This is glimpse inside a
human cell – you and I look like this in every cell of our being. These are
mitochondria. And they break down sugars into the useable energy that powers
all cell-life.
I only recently found out
that researchers now think that mitochondria are another example of mutualism.
Before there were mitochondria, single-celled organisms floated in a gloop. But
then, around 1.5 billion years ago, a stray bacterium found its way inside a
single cell organism and began a mutual, symbiotic relationship with its host.
The bacterium produced energy for the organism, and the organism provided
nutrients for the bacterium. Over time, the bacteria lost their independent
existence, and that’s the origin of mitochondria. Each of us, in each of the 27
trillion cells in our bodies, are stuffed full of the products of a billion and
a half years of the pursuit of mutualism.
Graeber and Wengrow conclude
While humans do
have a tendency to engage in dominance - submissive behaviour, what makes
societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not
to act that way.
At our most distinctively human
we are not nasty and brutish. At our most human we seek out partnerships,
mutualisms, relationships with our fellows that bring mutual benefit.
It’s certainly a Jewish
idea, that the very thing that makes us most human is our ability to stop
pursuing dominance over other people and the world in which we live. That’s how
Shabbat works, as Heschel taught;
Six days a week we
wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we care
for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
Or, this prayer for peace, from Rebbe Nachman of
Braslav,
May we see the day
when a great peace will embrace the whole world, when all who live on earth shall
realise that we have not come into being to hate or destroy. But to praise and
to love.
I think, instinctively, we
know the value of stepping back from the attempt to dominate others. Instinctively,
we know that nothing makes us more happy than doing something decent for
another person. Instinctively, we know that loving relationships are only be
possible when we stop fighting to prove that “we” are better than “they”. But
I’m not convinced, for myself certainly, but really for enough of us, that we have
truly understood the beauty, the possibility and the potential that could be
unleashed if we spent our lives pursuing mutualism, rather than dominance.
I had a clarifying moment
earlier in the year. We were, as a community, in the midst of appointing David
and Yoav as our new cantorial leads. I sought the counsel of one of our members
who works in Human Resources. Drafting employment contracts for cantorial leads
is a fiddly business with bits of hours for this and bits of hours for that,
and David and Yoav are – for the first time – working a job share. So, I took
counsel.
Actually, let me pause for
a moment to acknowledge this. This is the first time David Djemal has led a
full Rosh Hashanah Musaf service. He, and Yoav have taken on an enormous and
terrifying task. And he’s done magnificently. To David I want to say – it will
never be this difficult again, apart from, maybe Yom Kippur. And to us all, I
want to ask for your hearty Yashar Koach.
But to my point. I took
counsel on the employment contract and David Franks suggested dropping the
phrase ‘for the mutual interest of all parties,’ in all our conversations. And
in that moment, the complexities of the employment situation dissolved. Of
course, this Synagogal endeavour is never going to work with David competing
with Yoav, or either of them competing with Stephen. Of course, this isn’t
going to work with anyone competing to turn be the winners in this
relationship, backing others into being losers. Of course, of course we know
this to be true. But how much of our lives are still spent seeking dominance
over our fellows?
The story is told of the
great Tzadik of Jerusalem, Rabbi Aryeh Levine, who attended his doctor along
with his limping wife. “What,” said the Dr, “seems to be the problem.”
“The problem is,” said the
Rabbi, uncomfortably speaking on behalf of his wife, “the problem is our foot
is hurting.”
It’s a touching tale, with
a gender complexity I want for today to overlook. It’s a tale about the
mutuality of love and pain and hope and concern. If one of us hurts, we all
hurt.
So too with success. Your
success is interwoven with my success.
So what if we can still the
shouty voice of dominance and instead pursue the mutually beneficial?
We are here, on the cusp
of the New Year of 5783 and I’m not sure many of us still cling to the conflation
of the pursuit of dominance and morality. Personally, I’m done with it. I’m
done with the notion that we can even survive as a race if we pursue the sort
of rapaciousness Gordon Gecko claimed to be good. And that’s not even out of
sympathy for the less greedy, but because we could do so much better, I’ve come
to believe, by pursuing mutualism.
In our very cells, we are
designed to be mutualists. In every web of interwoven possibility that maps out
the existence of all creation, mutualism is the way we have learnt to thrive.
Our possibilities for joy,
our chance to experience love and even the future of the planet on which we
all, mutually, travel, depends on us getting this deep truth, quickly, and
obeying its call profoundly.
But what if we could make
that shift, even in a small way, what if we could tilt our existence away from
competition towards the pursuit of mutualism, with everyone and everything we
meet? What if we could re-configure our training in rapacious competition into
a similarly rapacious pursuit of mutualisms?
If we can, and of course
we can, perhaps we will unlock possibilities for sweetness, joy and delight and
a future of health and the right kind of prosperity.
May it come to us all
Shannah Tovah
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