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 | The Company of Strangers: |
A Q&A with author Paul Seabright We think of human society as evolving over millions of years. But you write that our entire social and economic world arose from an experiment launched 10,000 years ago, an experiment in living in the company of strangers. What do you mean by this? For almost all our physical and mental evolution, the societies in which we evolved were small hunter gatherer bands, bands of family and close friends. That's what our psychology has evolved to understand. In such societies, strangers (especially strange males) were dangerous, often fatal. But now we depend on strangers for everything - our food, our clothes, our protection. Even stepping outside our house in the morning puts us into a human environment our ancestors 20,000 years ago could not have imagined. That's nothing short of a revolution. What enabled us as a species to make this remarkable leap? What makes us different from any other beings on the planet? Or are we different? Yes we are different. We can reason in more abstract and symbolic ways than other species. We've also developed strong instincts for cooperation - for reciprocity. We've used this reasoning capacity and these instincts to set up institutions that allow us to treat strangers as honorary friends. They're not, of course, exactly like real friends. That's why the achievement is both so impressive, and perhaps so fragile. Your book is equal parts Adam Smith and evolutionary biology. To what extent is our world the predictable result of our genes, and to what extent the product of the invisible hand of the market? Do the two forces point us in the same direction? The two are complementary, not alternatives. Our genes interact with our environment, including the environment created by that invisible hand. If our genetic heritage were different we wouldn't have built this environment. But the environment in which we live has developed far beyond the hunter gather societies in which our genes evolved. It's as though we'd evolved on land but were now swimming out to sea. You write that, at this moment, someone I have never met is working hard on my behalf, an Indian farmer or a Brazilian coffee picker, and at the same time, quite possibly, someone is working to kill me. If such disparate forces are at work, how fragile is the web of cooperation that we've built in such a short time? At some moments it's very fragile indeed. For instance, when demagogues exploit our instinct for reciprocity to make us band together to fight each other. Warfare uses the same instincts and abilities that we use in peacetime - human beings make war much more cooperatively and efficiently than other species. It's fragile also when terrorists strike in places that bring people together - trains, airports, shopping centres. These things make us scared of strangers again in ways our ancestors would have known only too well. You write that it is through the construction of economic institutions and rules that we have learned to cooperate with and trust one another, first of all as individuals and in more recent years as nation states. How do you see those institutions evolving in the future, or do you think we are in real danger of losing them because of the combined ill-effects of a single superpower, and the spread of international terrorism? These institutions face some new and frightening challenges. Population growth and economic growth are putting strains on our environment far greater than any we have worked out how to contain. The spread of television and internet has enabled the world's poor, unemployed and excluded to see and feel their deprivation more keenly. And the spread of small and large-scale weapons around the world has been relentless - our violent instincts have far more effective means of expression than ever before. It's hard to know how our institutions will react - but responding to the violence of terrorist groups just with the violence of organized nation states is certainly not the answer. We need to learn the lessons of the trust networks that have worked well in the past, and hope that they will help us into an uncertain future. There's nothing guaranteed about this: other branches of the chimpanzee family have died out in the past, and we may be the next branch to follow them. Your book takes us on a roller coaster ride through 10,000 years of human history, taking in just about every discipline from anthropology and archaeology to zoology. Nobody has attempted to put "economics" into such an epic context before. What was your motivation for doing this and who most inspired you to think this way? There's something very beautiful about unplanned organization. It's often messy, but it's extraordinary that it should happen at all. Darwin had this insight about the natural world. And modern writers like Richard Dawkins have taught us to look at the natural world around us with new eyes and see how deeply strange it is. Adam Smith had a similar insight about the social world. It's an insight that many children have, and that's often drummed out of them by too rigid an education. Answering children's questions about why human society works the way it does is the best way to see that it's a really mysterious phenomenon. Robert Putnam has highlighted the move in American society toward "bowling alone" - that is, the recent trend of Americans' disengaging from their fellow citizens. Is this a step backward in our social evolution? If so, should our governments-local and national-take a role in bringing us back together? How? I'm much less pessimistic than Putnam about human sociability. We may not join the same clubs as our parents did, but we are incorrigibly social, whether in street gangs or in internet chatrooms. What worries me is not "bowling alone" but "bowling in dangerous company". Members of Al-Qaeda don't bowl alone. What does your story of human social evolution imply for international politics today, especially the role of the United States? It implies that, just as our ancestors created the first marketplaces where strangers could meet and do their deals, we have to create analogous meeting-points for whole nations. For all that international diplomacy resounds to high-minded declarations, it's all about compromises and cutting deals; the activities of the marketplace of nations. The United States and its leaders still have to be convinced that the marketplace of nations needs trust-building institutions as profoundly as the ordinary marketplaces of the world. As a vision it may seem high on commercial prudence and low on adrenaline and inspiration, but it's the best hope we have. File created: 1/23/2008 | |
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