Are we wrong to believe that competitiveness must and always will be the central animating principle of human action? Media studies scholar Michael Karlberg thinks so. In fact, he believes that another animating principle, mutualism, is both central to human interaction and necessary to aid human society in meeting the myriad challenges it faces regarding climate change, inequality, governance, education and many other issues.
I saw Karlberg speak recently at a private gathering in Washington, D.C. He is measured in his tone, clear in his delivery and compelling in his logic. He poses the following question: If nearly all of our institutions are premised on competition (commerce, politics, education, recreation and many others), is it any wonder that our competitive instincts are honed and expanded while our cooperative ones atrophy?
Karlberg is not naive enough to believe that all this can be changed overnight. But he does make a convincing case that competitiveness is as much a problem emanating from social institutions that inculcate and incentivize competition as it is a problem of human nature.
The way forward, he asserts, is to build new institutions that emphasize cooperation; it's a sizable task, but one which has already begun as he explains at the end of a TEDx talk which he gave in 2012. However utopian this goal may seem, Karlberg reminds us that the current "culture of contest," as he styles it, has given us the existential threat of climate change spawned by endless economic growth and consumption. In fact, the "culture of contest" is creating a series of social and ecological challenges so profound that unless we change that culture we may drive ourselves toward extinction.
Not surprisingly, the competitive view of human nature is dominant in how we conduct international relations. In another presentation I saw recently international lawyer and scholar Sovaida Maani Ewing asserted that international relations based on national self-interest merely results in a world that lurches from crisis to crisis. Ewing, who runs the Center for Peace & Global Governance, suggested that long-term stability in international relations will only come from agreements based on shared principles. That sounds very much like a move away from the "culture of contest."
Karlberg and Ewing clearly have a contrarian and more hopeful view of human nature than we are used to. Is there evidence that they are right? Is it possible that what makes humans happy isn't consumerism and competition, but sufficiency and cooperative relations? Quite possibly the answer is yes according to a recent piece in The New Yorker magazine which summarizes the main arguments of scholar James C. Scott's new book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
Scott, it seems, doesn't buy into the putative superiority of modern governance and social organization over more "primitive" forms. He is, however, not a mere primitivist for he cites new understandings and evidence of the earliest settlements. According to the New Yorker piece Scott believes the agricultural revolution was "for most of the people living through it, a disaster" resulting in poorer health, rising inequality, slavery and other ills.
The summary continues: "War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing."
The same article touches on the Kalahari Bushmen, one of the last large groups of nomadic peoples in the world. What we know of them squares well with Scott's conclusions. The Bushmen do not accumulate surpluses, but live for the day, stopping their foraging when they get what they need to eat. Yet, they are well-fed with stable and felicitous social relations, valuing solidarity over competition and individual achievement.
The piece goes on to quote economist John Maynard Keynes as follows:
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
We are no closer to realizing today such a world than when Keynes wrote the above words. But here is the key point, according the article: "The study of hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re choosing not to."
And, this brings us back to Michael Karlberg. Karlberg claims that the "culture of contest" is not a necessity so much as an artifact of a flawed, one-sided understanding of human nature. The Kalahari Bushmen provide a window into our human past that suggests Karlberg might very well be right.
What that past tells us is that humans are far more complex than we imagined—that is, they are not merely self-maximizing machines—and far more influenced by the incentives of the system in which they are enmeshed. And this conclusion counsels hope for the project championed by Karlberg and for a world that desperately needs the cooperation which would emerge as a result.
The individual is a short term entity; the smaller the group, the briefer its run: what persists is the longest is the broadest set of values.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the overlong comment, but I was writing about this just the other day in the draft of a new book:
ReplyDeleteThe economist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which was later adopted by Charles Darwin. This maxim has been seized upon by proponents of laissez-faire economies and others in order to justify their social dominance over others; they saw themselves as the “fittest.” We need a bit of background to slay this exploitative Hydra. Darwinian evolution takes place on the individual level, that is, genes are passed from one individual to another. Thus in individualistic species, such as bacteria, snakes, and mice, this maxim largely holds true, and the best-adapted individual is likely to survive and pass on its genes to the next generation. In gregarious species, however, things get more complicated, and Ayn Rand’s selfishness notwithstanding, human beings are social animals, which are acted upon by the idea of “survival of the most cooperative,” as identified by Peter Kropotkin,i the Russian anarchist. This is a precursor to today’s theory of mutualism, or what most of us call symbiosis.
In a social species, the group that works together more successfully than its neighbors will have greater evolutionary fitness. Many types of cooperation take place between species. Almost half of terrestrial plants, for example, exchange nitrogen for sugar with a fungus growing on their roots. The Maya planted corn, beans, and squash together: the corn provided a trellis for the beans to grow up, the beans fixed nitrogen in the soil, and the squash covered the earth and choked out competing weeds. Indeed, humans have struck a bargain with domesticated plants and animals: in exchange for protecting them and creating beneficial habitats, plants and animals provide food and other benefits.
Many species, though, prefer to cooperate with their own kind. Indeed, the largest known organisms are aspens that share a five-mile-long root system and the honey fungus mushroom that is spread over two thousand acres of eastern Oregon. Herds of zebras, schools of fish, and rookeries of penguins band together for mutual protection. Packs of wolves and other predatory species hunt better together than alone. Most of our closest primate relatives live in social groups (the orangutan is the solitary exception).
Gregarious species have developed mechanisms to identify and punish “cheaters,” or individuals that benefit from the group without contributing. Developing these mechanisms, of course, is part of what makes a group successful in the first place. Humans, for example, often use moral systems policed by an invisible supernatural being to help reduce cheating. Working together is a solid strategy because, although you are unlikely to have huge individual success, you are assured of moderate success as part of a well-functioning group.
We must stop thinking of ourselves as individuals, take a step back from our egos, and look at the big picture: those of us in this together will stand a better chance of surviving than the individualists. Selfish and self-centered governance and economic principles have gotten us into our current mess. In addition to dismantling the physical causes of climate change, namely industrialized production and the use of fossil fuels, we must reform the social processes that allowed these forces to run amok. Technology itself is not the problem, it is the dysfunctional social relationships created by rapid technological change.