In a previous series of posts, I used The Walking Dead and Philosophy to look at the worldview issues in AMC’s hit series. Since the release of Catching Fire is not too far away, I am using The Hunger Games and Philosophy as a springboard to dive into some key themes in the trilogy.
The first post looked at the role of entertainment in the Capital; the second one looked at the intersection of luck and choice in understanding morality. This post will build from Abigail Mann's “Competition and Kindness: The Darwinian World of the Hunger Games” to look more closely at how this series looks when viewed through the lens of Darwinian theory.*
The first post looked at the role of entertainment in the Capital; the second one looked at the intersection of luck and choice in understanding morality. This post will build from Abigail Mann's “Competition and Kindness: The Darwinian World of the Hunger Games” to look more closely at how this series looks when viewed through the lens of Darwinian theory.*
The Hunger Games themselves seem to epitomize Darwin’s concept
of how the evolutionary process works: competition, adaptation, survivability, and a little bit of luck. The Games manage to involve three of evolution’s famous Four F’s: fighting, fleeing,
feeding, and, uh reproducing.
It’s pretty basic, really. Survival of the fittest as entertainment.
In the evolutionary process, all processes of selection bring the strong to the top blindly and haphazardly rather than purposefully. No situation is right or wrong or good or bad. Life just happens. As it happens, nature in essence "selects" that which is most fit in a given set of complex circumstances either through blind luck of superior adaptability. The only thing this blind process accomplishes ruthlessly is survival through reproduction. Some would say it is the 'goal' of evolution, but that's a hard claim to make in a system with no goals. As Dawkins has written,
"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all."
If survival lacks vision or foresight, it’s important that the odds swing your way. When we meet the contestants in the Hunger
Games, most of them are favored with a social or physical strength which
increases their odds of surviving. Their
fitness quotient, however, will vary depending on the type of environment – once
again depending on chance. So we see many candidates who are favored with
certain skills, but whose fitness may not be enhanced in the chosen environment of
the Games.
