Original post from Nov 7, 2020
We are a fairly brilliant species. I have no doubt that if we direct our efforts correctly, we can find effective and humane solutions (more on that term later) to the climate crisis and the massive extinction of biodiversity taking place. Instead, we direct our collective efforts primarily by financial gain. So the first point I wanted to illustrate, in the previous post, was that the effectiveness of this motive is a misrepresentation. Rather than solving the problems, it leads to total annihilation. Once we see how the existing paradigm doesn’t work, we have to find alternatives for beneficially organizing collective human activity. That’s where I want to focus.
As I noted last time, most of what enables society’s activity, not to mention our very existence, is the “work” or activity not counted in our economic calculations. We are used to thinking of competition as the basis of evolution, but extensive cooperation is more prevalent. Science has been learning more and more about symbiotic relationships. The competitive individualist paradigm is cracking as we discover how interdependent we all are. Even the success of the most talented person depends on their environment and the society in which they grew up, on the people who cared for and supported them, and on the multitude of biospheric activity that enables human existence – the homeostasis that maintains the narrow temperature range we can tolerate, the oxygen concentration we need (a few percent less and could not breathe, a few percent more and everything would ignite), precipitation and percolation that renew our drinking water…
Most of this strikes us as incidental, like the supply of oxygen being a by-product of what plants do for themselves, or rain being the result of random atmospheric activity (not exact, but we’ll leave that for another day). But much of it stems from “care,” one of the terms I started these posts with. When we care, and care for those who need help, whether they are our own children or unrelated to us at all, when we nurture plants or domestic animals, when we are considerate, when we do anything to make things more pleasant, we are not (usually) driven by reward and punishment. We are motivated by goodwill.
Of course we recognize and admit that to some extent we are out for our own interests of economic or social profit. But we are also motivated by goodwill, by empathy, by a sense that life’s meaning comes from doing what feels right. Happiness comes from good relationships, reciprocity, caring, and love. We know that after covering the basics, increased wealth does not increase well-being. Loving relationships are always necessary for happiness, just as they are necessary for survival.
Obviously not everyone is loving all the time. People are complex, and complex stories lie behind difficult behaviors. Charles Eisenstein suggests always leading with the question, “What is it like to be you?” When I was a young girl with social difficulties, my father (trying to be helpful) gave me the first “self-help” book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” I got stuck in a chapter entitled “Appeal to the Nobler Motives.” Even after finding all three words in the dictionary, at that age I could not fathom what this meant. Today, perhaps because I tried so hard to understand, this is what stayed with me: that everyone has nobler motives, it does us all good to honor them, and it’s helpful to focus on them.
We are all also shaped by the society in which we grew up. A society that assumes we are all selfish and must be forced if we are to cooperate, breeds a different kind of people than a society that assumes we all fundamentally want to do well for each other. A society based on reward and punishment as an organizing principle will be completely different from a society that is based on strengthening and encouraging those nobler motives. They will be different both in people’s experience and in the results they achieve. For us, in a society of the first type, it is hard to imagine anything else. We all know about the “tragedy of the commons”, and it is difficult for us to believe what Eleanor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, illustrated, that the tragedy is unique to our own culture, whereas most societies have developed mechanisms to preserve the commons instead of destroying them.
I started with “finding humane solutions,” but each species in its natural environment contributes to the health of the entire system. Each strain contributes to other strains around it. Just as a tree sheds leaves and builds fertile soil for itself and others, and provides shelter and food and oxygen, everyone has their own contribution. So it’s not particularly human – on the contrary, for some reason, we see ourselves as exempt from this. But that is to be exempt from joy and fellowship. To exclude ourselves from the law of maximum cooperation is to sentence ourselves to exile.
How can we organize society so that it encourages us to maximize not profits, personal or others, but caring, reciprocity, cooperation, care? I don’t know, but we can start by taking the question seriously, making it a practical goal – maybe the only truly practical goal – and start asking.