via 3 Quarks Daily, this interview by Greg Ross, managing editor of American Scientist Online, with the economist, Paul Seabright. It says and suggests so much in a short space:
It can seem extraordinary that the vast complexity of human cooperation—from road traffic patterns to markets, the Internet and the systems that keep our houses and cities safe—should rest on nothing more solid than social convention, as though civilization were founded purely on table manners. I may think my property is secure and my life reasonably protected, but that is only because the rest of the world has agreed, for the time being, to let them be so. And what people have agreed to respect today they can agree to violate tomorrow. Yet it is just as remarkable how robust many of our conventions turn out to be in practice. Partly this is because conventions govern our reactions to people as roles and not just as individuals … Partly it is because the hydra of social life has too many heads to be easily incapacitated: The conventions that sustain our physical security are not coordinated in one place, such as the U.N. or the Pentagon, but are the result of billions of individual decisions concerning how we react to neighbours, friends and colleagues. …
(Taking the risk of trusting each other) doubtless took place many millions of times, and led to millions of unrecorded tragedies. … Two things must have tipped the balance: need and familiarity. Need because many isolated hunter-gatherer groups lived a very precarious existence, with starvation perpetually threatening, along with other costs of isolation, such as inbreeding. Of those that took the risk of reaching out towards strangers, many must have regretted their temerity. But those that succeeded—perhaps only a few of those that tried—thrived and spread, and became the ancestors of everyone alive today. What helped them to win the trust of strangers would have been to play upon familiarity—behaving in ways that are like the ways we behave towards our family and friends. That's why we smile at strangers, just as babies smile at their mothers. That's why we invite strangers to eat with us, because the common table is the centre of family existence. Mastering the mimicry of family interaction must have helped enormously to interact safely with unfamiliar people. …
Some turning points in our social evolution seem luckier than others. Agriculture was independently adopted at least seven times in different parts of the world, suggesting that prior conditions made it highly likely, if not inevitable. And agriculture, by making us sedentary, made it more or less inevitable that we would evolve some kinds of institution to mediate our dealings with strangers. It also allowed for the increases in population that enabled us to colonise a wide variety of habitats and thereby become less dependent on the vicissitudes of nature in the woodland savanna where we first evolved. On the other hand, the mutations that made modern Homo sapiens so very different from our hominid ancestors and cousins seem very contingent indeed. …
A single act of violence can frighten millions or billions of us. On the other hand, terrorists are skilful symbolic manipulators, often making us afraid in ways that bear little relation to objective risks. In today's world you are 20 times as likely to die from a stranger's infectious disease as from a violent act. … This doesn't take away from the seriousness of terrorism, but it underlines how keeping it in check requires initiatives in the realm of ideas and not just of surveillance and repression.
… the capacity for violence is quite close to the surface in most of us, especially in men. When I read about soldiers who commit atrocities in wartime, for instance, I wonder how likely I would have been to act differently. The fragility of our defenses against our violent nature makes it all the more important, obviously, to strengthen those defenses we have (including through social condemnation of violence). But we should not be naively surprised at the consequences when we place young men in situations from which most of the social defenses against violence and aggression have been removed. …
… I have become more conscious of how strange it is that we should ever expect modern society to work at all.
Paul Seabright's book, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, is clearly a "must read". The AS interview is prefaced — he's 'traveled widely, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. He currently lives in southwest France, where he teaches economics at the University of Toulouse'. Even in my lifetime, UK culture has often seemed to be dominated by an insularity of outlook and unthinking confidence in our institutions and customs — until quite recently. The opening up of Europe — the sudden access to Mitteleurop, the abandonment of traditional, policed border-crossings — is having a profound impact on UK self-consciousness.
Biology/evolutionary psychology meets economics, meets social studies, meets anthropology, meets … Terror — so much here.
