BQ 6: How does cooperation happen?

The big questions of history

Competition is easy to explain. The first living organisms had to compete for energy, perhaps sunlight, perhaps heat at thermal vents under the ocean. They had to compete for nutrients. All their descendants continue to compete for the same things, as well as for mates since sex was invented. We humans compete in myriad ways, although these might be mostly derivative of the more basic competitions.

Cooperation is harder to account for. And yet it is all around us—especially us humans. Within families it’s understandable. By nurturing our offspring we facilitate the survival of our genes. But we cooperate as well with people we’re not related to.

We cooperate even, indeed especially, within arenas of competition. The most popular sports—soccer, football, basketball, baseball—are played by teams. Cooperation, under the label of team spirit, is instilled in every team’s members. Capitalist economies are by definition competitive, yet most people work for companies, which amount to institutionalized cooperation. Even that most primal form of competition, war, is conducted cooperatively, by armies, which treat cooperation—unit cohesion—as the sine qua non of success.

Perhaps cooperation in this form is best explained as competition at one remove. The point of teamwork in sports isn’t camaraderie. It’s victory. We cooperate the better to compete. Likewise at work. We cooperate in the service not of the company picnic but of the bottom line, which measures our success in the competitive marketplace. At war the platoons, battalions and divisions work together to smash the units of the enemy.

Other forms of cooperation aren’t so easily connected to competition. Thomas Hobbes wrote of the state of nature as a war of all against all. Humans’ warlike inclinations were tamed only by the state—the Leviathan. Cooperation was imposed and maintained by power. If power flagged, if the state broke down, life again became nasty, brutish and short.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought Hobbes had things backward. Humans hadn’t risen from the state of nature but rather fallen from it. Cooperation, not competition, was man’s natural state. Society and government created competition through private property and the laws that surrounded it.

The difference in viewpoint between Hobbes and Rousseau has been reflected in different religious traditions. The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—start their stories with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But the first father and mother sin and are cast out, and humanity becomes murderously competitive as Cain kills Abel. Humanity remains in this fallen condition awaiting the Messiah. The three religions interpret the Messiah’s coming differently, but each treats cooperation and other enlightened behavior as beyond the capacity of unredeemed humans in their post-Eden state.

If the Abrahamic religions lean Hobbesian, Buddhism is more Rousseauvian. Buddhists don't stress about sin, original or otherwise. Nor do they believe that God's grace is required to make people behave nicely. When people behave badly, it's not because they are inherently flawed but because they are misguided. Humans are not doomed to compete, nor is cooperation denied them.

Social scientists, in contrast to philosophers and theologians, seek concrete, secular explanations for cooperation as opposed to competition. Game theorists, who are typically political scientists or economists, have developed elaborate scenarios for explaining how cooperation can arise. Typically counterparties test each other out in some situation, and if they discover that cooperation yields both sides better results than competition, they cooperate. Testing further, they might extrapolate to realms beyond the original setting.

The arguments of the game theorists are plausible for rational beings, which humans sometimes are. But often we’re not. Do the game-theory arguments apply when we’re being emotional?

Maybe. Everyday observation reveals that humans are as often disposed to cooperate as to compete. When two people arrive at a door simultaneously, each is as likely to say “You first” as to push ahead. News of natural disasters prompts hearers to ask how they can help. Charities and other non-profits rely on the spirit of cooperation.

Conceivably our dispositions—which is to say our emotional-response settings—have been trained by the historical experience of our species toward cooperation in appropriate circumstances. As individuals in the third millennium of the common era, we don’t have to do the game-theoretic calculations ourselves to determine when cooperation is more productive than competition, because our ancestors did so. And those who erred didn’t survive to bequeath us their genes. Put otherwise, the experience of our species weeded out strategies of behavior at odds with our survival.

Our ancestors bequeathed us not genes alone. They also handed down beliefs and practices. Beyond their supernatural claims, religions provide codes of conduct. It’s not extravagant to assert that the religions that have persisted over time have passed the game-theoretical test just described. Nearly every religion has a version of the golden rule of doing unto others as you would be done unto.

If the human penchant for cooperation has a genetic component, discovering it will lie with biologists and other natural scientists.

To the extent it’s cultural—whether religious or otherwise—it lends itself to historical investigation. As one example, the God of the Old Testament is a sterner figure, more inclined to the zero-sum thinking that motivates competition, than the God of the New Testament, who endorses loving cooperation. Religiously minded types have examined this theologically. Historians might probe its cultural roots.

Progress on the origins of cooperation would go far toward illuminating humanity’s past. It might also improve our future. Perhaps the competitive side of human nature was essential for the progress we’ve made thus far. Yet on a planet that has grown crowded these last several generations, and with technologies of unprecedented power at our disposal, our ability to cooperate might be even more important for our progress in the generations ahead.