Looking out across a desert landscape
Pocked with irrigated trees and suburbs,
The eye was most often drawn to the rim
Of buttes, mesas, plateaus, rumpled red
Hills, black folds, and cream-colored cliffs
That ringed the scene like a cradling wall,
Or up to the high, expansive skies. One time,
However, it was the collection of steeples,
The seven distinct white-painted needles
That I could count sticking out from green
Clumps in low-lying housing developments.
Each one represented another Mormon ward
With its own tidy neighborhood to serve.
I had been reading another exchange
In the long running debate about Darwinism
And eusociality in various colony species,
Bees, ants, termites, naked mole rats.
Inevitably, one scientist opined, as if
He had secret knowledge, hermetic,
Possibly heretical, that, really, competition
Is much overrated, while cooperation,
Not to be too touchy-feely about it,
Was commoner than is thought and more
Powerful. This is a sub-debate in the greater
Debate about how cooperation evolved,
Given life’s apparent preference for struggle,
The inevitable limiting force of scarcity,
And every life form’s hunger. One side
Finds cooperation puzzling, aberrant.
The other side finds it fundamental, fine,
Maybe even uplifting. Then they quarrel.
Humans. Cooperation is both so obligatory
And so fungible for us, we are unsettled
By either its apparent absence or perfection.
Here, let me play the part of the scientist
Possessed of hermetic, heretical knowledge.
Cooperation is not an alternative
To competition, nor wholly not
Competition. Cooperation is
A competitive strategy, a type,
A wickedly effective and sophisticated
Type of competition. Cooperation
Amplifies competition, raises the stakes,
Ramps up the intensity, ever since the first
Cooperation between unicellular
Organisms, down through those billions
Of years of their aggressively aggregating
Descendants. Army ants are cooperators,
As are armies. As are lynch mobs, martyrs,
Gangs and churches. The greater the scale
Of cooperation, the more ruthless
The competition becomes. To miss that
Is to wholly misunderstand the nature
And function of cooperation. Cooperation,
If I may repeat myself, is murder. Still,
I like the pretty architectures of our worship.
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