In fact, the very tendency to favour the “ingroup”, which Hare and Woods depict as a basic human motivation, seems to be rooted in reputation management. People treat their ingroup as a market of potential cooperation partners within which it’s important to make a good impression. Take away this reputational motive and ingroup favouritism mostly disappears.
…people are instinctive press secretaries. We frame our traits and behaviours in the most socially attractive light we can get away with - which often means depicting ourselves as highly prosocial, friendly, and altruistic - and then sincerely believe our propaganda. The result is a complex, paradoxical, and strategic species, one that’s infinitely more interesting than the version of humanity presented in “The Survival of the Friendliest”.
He is criticizing one book. His essay favorably cites a different book, The Social Instinct, by Nichola Raihani, which I put on my to-read list. This is in spite of the fact that in her introduction she succumbs to Current Thingism and makes a big deal of the pandemic as an illustration of the issues in her work. I can tell you from personal experience that when you’ve written a book with a timeless theme, you should resist Current Thingism. The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced is my unfortunate contribution, the Current Thing in that case being the financial crisis of 2008.
Human interdependence is much more complicated than just liking our friends and hating our enemies. Yes, we want to belong to a group. In prehistoric times, if your tribe threw you out into the wilderness, your life was pretty precarious. But there is still plenty of room within a group to try to get away with cheating and competitive behavior. Williams writes,
within recognisable communities, competitive, conflictual, and exploitative behaviours remain extremely common. Even setting aside intergroup conflict, human social life is riddled with strife, antipathy, bullying, bad blood, and friction. Considering just the most extreme case again, within-group physical violence - including murder - is very common throughout human history, including among hunter-gatherers.
…much anthropological research suggests a common pattern in many small-scale societies involving coalitions of high-status men, who generate extremely oppressive rules and rituals, which they use to coerce others (e.g., women, children, and lower-status men) within their communities.
Doing something nasty to someone in your group carries risks, but the rewards might also be high.
Williams argues against the thesis that we only demonize an out-group when we feel that it threatens our own group.
Consider slavery, which existed throughout most of human history since the agricultural revolution. People don’t take others as slaves out of self-defence but out of self-interest.
…When people - or, more commonly, elites and rulers - decide to launch raids, wars, and genocides, it’s often because they think it will promote their interests in some way. Although perpetrators in such cases will often depict their rivals and enemies as highly threatening, that’s often just propaganda that functions to coordinate group behaviour and justify atrocities.
Williams cites Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions, which contrasts a view in which human nature is fundamentally good with a view that there are aspects of human nature that constrain our ability to construct a utopian society. Williams himself sees the constrained vision as realistic.
Achieving mutually beneficial cooperation and peace isn’t a matter of unleashing people’s inner friendliness. It’s a matter of complex systems of norms, surveillance, incentives, institutions, and balances of power, which either constrain competition or channel it into desirable collective outcomes.
Of all the people that I read these days, Williams is the one whose intellectual interests and outlook align most with my own. As a young academic, he is an extreme outlier. About a month ago, we recorded this conversation. You probably want to skip through my parts, or at least speed them up.
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It’s difficult to argue with Williams. But one wonders if we can boil the argument down a bit more. Human interdependence rests in large part upon the adaptation of the institution of property, that is the social recognition of the ability of a person or persons to exclude others from the use of a resource. Property is thus simultaneously prosocial and antisocial. But without it, there could be no trade and without trade there would not be the degree of interdependence that characterizes our species.
Solnitsata, an archaelogical site in Bulgaria, (https://journals.openedition.org/mediterranee/8246 )
thought to be the first town in Europe, illustrates the point. It was inhabitated by only about 350 people who were engaged in using a spring there to produce salt which they then traded for other goods. The site was heavily fortified to exclude others from making use of the resource, requiring, instead, others to trade for the salt.
And thus we find sustainable patters of specialization and trade:
“Specialized salt production was the major economic activity leading to the development of Provadia-Solnitsata as a central place of special socio‑economic significance in the Eastern Balkans. It started as early as the beginning of the Late Neolithic, although only as a household craft practiced within the settlement. At the end of the Late Neolithic, salt evaporation became a specialized production which was moved outside the settlement and most probably was run as a cooperative. During the Middle and Late Chalcolithic it evolved into an industrial-scale production. This would have been impossible without the formation of several specialized groups consisting of separate teams working in a well-coordinated manner. These groups of specialized workers were engaged in the collection and delivery of firewood, manufacturing and supply of pottery vessels as well as in the process of salt production itself. Major technological advances were made in all three of the core production branches, especially in the thermal technologies related to ceramic production and brine evaporation. The emergence of specialized production was an indicator of a second major division of labour, which in turn was a prerequisite for the emergence of towns. In this sense, specialized salt production makes the agglomeration Provadia-Solnitsata a unique phenomenon.”
Along with the wealth that trade allowed the salt producers to accumulate came religion evidenced by altars. And presumably this also embodied adaptive pressures leading to specializations in social hierarchy and the trading of service implicit in those relationships.
Our modern conceptions of liberty and freedom have at least some origin in the recognition of the enhanced wealth producing capacity of such urban arrangements. At least by, if not earlier, the Roman emperor Augustus recognized the reciprocal gains possible by offering greater autonomy to conquered populations in the form of “Ius Italicum” (https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/RE:Ius_Italicum ) . This early strategy of reciprocal gain through the creation of a “charter city” was emulated in the grants of liberties, freedoms, and other autonomies to various commercial centers by feudal rulers (one example of which: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_imperial_city ) One suspects our current conceptions of liberty and freedom owe as much, if not more, to these arrangements that they do to Magna Carta.
The Rousseau – Hobbes dichotomy that Williams seems engage with, thus seems a bit retrograde. In his greatly under-appreciated History of the Revolt of the Netherlands, Friedrich Schiller offers a somewhat different analysis that seems apropropos of our current squalor:
“To combine universal happiness with the highest liberty of the individual is the solve prerogative of infinite intelligence, which diffuses itself omnipresently over all. But what resources has man when placed in the position of omnipotence? Man can only aid his circumscribed powers by classification; like the naturalist, he establishes certain marks and rules by which to facilitate his own feeble survey of the whole, to which all individualities must conform. All this is accomplished for him by religion. She finds hope and fear planted in every human breast ; by making herself mistress of these emotions, and directing their affections to a single object, she virtually transforms millions of independent beings into one uniform abstract. The endless diversity of the human will no longer embarrasses its ruler—now there exists one universal good, one universal evil, which he can bring forward or withdraw at pleasure, ande which works in unison with himself even when absent. Now a boundary is established before which liberty must halt; a venerable, hallowed line, towards which all the various inclinations of the will must finally converge. The common aim of despotism and of priestcraft is uniformity, and uniformity is a necessary expedient of human poverty and imperfection.”
In this light one might tend to see the “friendliness” school as a manifestation of both the religions of wokery and supranational cosmopolitanism newly empowered with AI and LLMs as awful tools in service of a vision of a global coerced conformity.
The Williams essay Arnold discusses is a brilliant analysis and discussion of human nature and the human condition. Everyone should click through and read it. The constrained or tragic vision of life is the beginning of wisdom based on reality; its opposite, the unconstrained or utopian vision has in various manifestations given rise to untold evil.