Dan Williams on Cooperation
Are humans actually groupish?
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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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.
This idea is basically what Ava Duvernay’s recent film Origin is all about — it is an exploration of ‘caste’ in 3 (India, Nazi Germany, USA) societies throughout history but the word ‘caste’ can really be interchanged for ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’. The film is directed by Duvernay but the ideas are Isabel Wilkerson’s (author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent). Duvernay/Wilkerson explain that ‘castes’ are constructed in society by people with power to preserve their power at the expense of people without it by using various “pillars” of control like violence, laws on reproduction, etc.