Celebrating the Web of Cooperation that Sets Us Free
We can express gratitude for the great chain of human connection holding us together.
Bassem Eid, a Palestinian Human Rights Activist, has no delusions about Hamas. After the October 7th massacre, Eid explained how Gaza could have been Singapore. He wrote,
On happier days, I like to comment on the remarkable similarities between Singapore and the Gaza Strip. Both are self-governing city-states located at key crossroads of world trade on the opposite ends of the Continent of Asia. Both combine density of population with a significant urban buildup and dramatic natural advantages, including a high-quality harbor. And yet, due to differences in civil culture and governance, Singapore has been built into the trade hub of East Asia. Gaza, as Saturday's events have demonstrated to the world, has chosen another path: becoming a terrorist dystopia like the benighted lands formerly under ISIS.
Singapore is Singapore because its citizens are free to cooperate with each other and the rest of the world. Gaza is a dystopian state because, as cognitive scientist Mark Changizi said in a recent conversation with Kate Wand, they are ruled by “butchering dictators.” Changizi challenged listeners to consider that their “visceral hatred of Jews” is the only thing stopping them from seeing Hamas—not Israel—as the oppressor of Palestinians.
Hamas would rather forgo the miracles of human cooperation and live in hell than allow a single Jew to live. Am I saying that every single Western supporter of Hamas understands the mission of Hamas? No, I am not. Nevertheless, Hamas supporters march in solidarity with hate. Hate is their sustenance; their minds have been made mad by their hate.
Before it is too late, this Thanksgiving week, I offer reflections on human cooperation in the hope that more Americans will value the principles of human flourishing. “Some Americans,” the great economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “will never appreciate America, until after they have helped destroy it, and have then begun to suffer the consequences.”
Without the miracles of human cooperation, America can become a dystopian hell, too. Tribal societies cannot prosper because their mindset opposes the conditions that facilitate human flourishing.
In his book The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley points to interconnectedness to explain the miracles of modern life:
The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. The telephone had sex with the computer and spawned the internet. The first motor cars looked as though they were ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage.’ The idea for plastics came from photographic chemistry. The camera pill is an idea that came from a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided-missile designer. Almost every technology is a hybrid.
“Even the relatively simple lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer,” Ridley pointed out, “cannot exist without a large population exchanging ideas and skills.” Interconnectedness is vital: “The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.”
Almost everything we rely on depends upon mostly invisible webs of relationships. If not for the continuous effort of others, most of us would quickly perish. Any society founded on the law of the tribe blocks human cooperation and impoverishes its people.
There is a need for order, but there is no need for order imposed brutally by authoritarians. In “Cosmos and Taxis,” F. A. Hayek pointed out that authoritarians cannot imagine that social order can arise in ways other than “the design of [their] thinking mind.”
Hayek related, “There was a time when men believed that even language and morals had been ‘invented’ by some genius of the past.” It is a step backward to believe that politicians, by their commands, are capable of inventing a better and healthier way of living.
Human well-being emerges through the decentralized choices of millions of households and not the authorities' plans. Hayek observed “as members of society” we are “dependent for the satisfaction of most of our needs on various forms of co-operation with others.” With this understanding, it is natural to be concerned about the well-being of others.
In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine also pointed to social order that is not due to government. Order, Paine explained, “has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed before government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.” Like Ridley, and Hayek, Paine saw our “mutual dependence” and a “great chain of connection”:
The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.
Paine argued that “to understand the nature and quantity of government proper for man, it is necessary to attend to his character.” “In all cases,” Paine wrote, “nature made his natural wants greater than his individual powers. No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants, and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a centre.”
Like Adam Smith, Paine understood that it is not just commercial transactions that our nature has affection towards:
But [nature] has gone further. She has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants which the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period in life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and ends with our being.
Paine implored us to see that “formal government makes but a small part of civilised life.” It is the “unceasing circulation of interest, which, passing through its million channels, [which] invigorates the whole mass of civilised man.” Thus, it is our affection for and dependence on others “infinitely more than to anything which even the best instituted government can perform, that the safety and prosperity of the individual and of the whole depends.”
While some try to tear the ties that bind us, we can express gratitude for the great chain of human connection holding us together. Even when illiberal protesters, their minds made mad by hate, deny this truth, we can celebrate the relationships that set us free and make human flourishing possible.
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A much needed hopeful post. Thank you for emphasising the ingenuity that emerges from cooperation.
Barry, I am afraid I do not share the optimistic comments preceding mine.
I must disagree with the emphasis on human cooperation. Not because cooperation does not produce good things, but because it also produces bad things. Therefore, although it may “facilitate human flourishing,” it can only do so if something else is present, something more fundamental than cooperation.
As you say, Hamas supporters march in solidarity with hate. That means they exemplify human cooperation, cooperation to perpetrate evil, but cooperation, nonetheless.
Tribal societies were cooperative societies. They had to be, for the survival of the individuals comprising them. As Hayek himself said “the savage is not solitary, and his instinct is collectivist,” and “an isolated man would soon have been a dead man” (The Fatal Conceit, page 12). It was not lack of cooperation which prevented tribal societies from prospering. It is more likely to have been lack of the political institutions which when properly organized provide protection for the individual from the tyranny of the collective mob.
“Without the miracles of human cooperation, America can become a dystopian hell,” you say, but with the “miracle” of human cooperation America also can also become a dystopian hell. As your Thomas Sowell quotation attests, throughout America today there are people who are cooperating to help to destroy America.
In my opinion, the fundamental element which must be present is not cooperation but the recognition of reason as the supreme value, which must be adhered to in every aspect of life. This is not a collective recognition. A group can’t think, only the individuals within the group. Individuals who put reason on a pinnacle, who also have freedom without which the ability to adhere to reason may be compromised or completely negatived, may in exercise of their reasoning faculty, cooperate with other individuals who also elevate that value. That's the sort of cooperation which may produce good outcomes.
Reason requires observation and recognition of facts, and the employment of logic to decide on the best way forward. The Hamas charter is the manifestation of religious ideology. It rejects reason in favour of mysticism and relies on the blind faith of its adherents to cooperate in murder and other forms of brutality.
My observation of America, from outside, is that throughout its history reason has generally been dominant. That’s why its achievements have been so great. There have been outbreaks of unreason but then reason has reasserted itself.
The events of October 7 were so shocking they might have been expected to be a salutary example of the results of unreason and to have produced a realization that mysticism and emotionalism are a form of self-indulgence which must be rejected. What has been truly shocking is the extent, not just in America but around the world, to which the reverse has occurred. The Thomas Sowell article to which you referred concludes:
“Our situation today reminds me of what Winston Churchill said to his bodyguard, after the king appointed Churchill prime minister in the darkest days during World War II: "All I hope is that it is not too late. I am very much afraid it is. We can only do our best." He had tears in his eyes.”
Sowell wrote that in 2015. It is much worse now.