It gets bandied about as though it’s in contrast to nature, separate from it. Like, “I’d take civilization over nature any day; there’s lions and tigers and bears out there!” As if we left evolution, red in tooth and claw, behind. There’s a reason Marx and Darwin are contemporaries.

I’d like to here propose a distinction; a difference in kind and scale. There’s Generational Evolution – Darwin outlined this while sketching finches and pinning insects to corkboards. It’s slow. Generations upon generations, infinitesimally small changes seeping through populations bit by bit. He described it as “survival of the fittest” but I think “perpetuation of the first thing that just so happens to work” better captures it.

And then there’s Behavioral Evolution. If the first sort of evolution was slow, this one is a lightning-strike. Genetic Evolution needs a bottleneck to up the pace - needs to crawl right up next to extinction for a new trait to propagate in only a lifetime or two. We, on the other hand, just need to talk to each other. We learn. Our behavior changes at the rate we allow it to.

Of course, it’s not as if we’re no longer subject to that older sort of evolution. Genes still do their thing - but, again, that wheel turns slow. It’s got a great and terrible momentum. We don’t harness it. Not this century, or the next. Hell, probably not even this millennium. We have a much more attainable goal - harnessing Behavioral Evolution.

At present, we use words like “civilization” as though we already have. As though we’re not still stuck perpetuating the first thing that just so happens to work. As though liberal-democracy nation-states were some deliberate design and not just classes of people acting out of material self-interest, reacting to others doing the same, enriching themselves via the latest scheme that happens to work. It’s funny; here in the US, the people who deny evolution and the people who champion market economics have such a broad overlap.

this, I believe, is how we frame the struggle of the 21st century. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the evolution of class struggles.” Communism is the belief, the dream, of putting consciousness in the driver’s seat. Of making dialog the defining evolutionary pressure, rather than a mere component.