One thing I did not expect to find in Susan Cain’s new book Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (2022) was a discussion of “winners and losers” (part two of the book). In fact, what has a book about the melancholic temperament to do with winners and losers? It’s an inborn longing for a just world, one in which there aren’t winners and losers. Ask any of us who they would rather side with: the winners or the losers, the poor and downtrodden. The answer can be found in Pink Floyd’s song “On the Turning Away”:
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others' suffering
Or you'll find that you're joining in
The turning away
We find it hard, in fact much harder than other people, to turn away from other people’s suffering. I am pretty sure that there is a high correlation between having a melancholic temperament and the chance of being called a do-gooder. Melancholy and “Weltschmerz”, cosmic sadness about a fundamentally inegalitarian world go together. Why?
The British think tank Cultural Dynamic has conducted studies of people’s social attitudes and divided them into three clusters: settlers, prospectors and pioneers. Settlers and prospectors were the ones who agreed most with the statement that the world is divided into two classes: winners and losers. The third cluster, pioneers, strongly disagreed with this statement. Where do those attitudes come from? Could it be that people are actually evolutionarily programmed to have these attitudes? I have hypothesised that they come from our ancestral modes of subsistence (farming, herding, and foraging respectively) and are indeed evolutionarily entrenched:
How did this kind of evolution work? In game theory two types of games are recognized: zero-sum games (my win - your loss) and non-zero-sum games (we can both win or lose). It looks like some of us humans were programmed to view life more like a competitive zero-sum game (especially the male herder and farmer profiles) and some more like a cooperative non-zero-sum game (the hunter-gatherer profiles, but women, in general, more than men).
In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999) Robert Wright explains how Non-Zero works, exactly by using hunter-gatherer subsistence as an example:
The tracking and killing of giraffes, and the retrieval of meat before scavengers get it, calls for cooperation. Perhaps more important, a giraffe is more than one family can eat before the meat spoils. So for giraffe hunters to live in family-sized groups would be to waste meat—and to waste a chance to collect the IOUs that come from sharing it. Such IOUs are a classic expression of non-zero-sumness. You give someone food when his cupboard is bare and yours is overflowing, he reciprocates down the road when your cupboard is bare, and you both profit, because food is more valuable when you’re hungry than when you’re full. Hunter-gatherers everywhere act in accordance with this logic. One chronicler of Eskimo life has observed, “the best place for [an Eskimo] to store his surplus is in someone else’s stomach.”
Hunter-gatherers have a very generalised reciprocity, and do not keep track of who they have food, they do have some rules for sharing but they give always to those in need and requests for food are generally not declined. Foragers have been described as the "original affluent society" as they rarely know hunger, and poverty isn't even a thing. Wright mentions status games as typical zero-sum games and notes that a dynamic between zero and non-zero games in our world:
There is an irony here. To compete for high-status positions is to play a zero-sum game, since they are by definition a scarce resource.Yet one way to compete successfully is to invent technologies that create new non-zero-sum games. This is one of various senses in which the impetus behind cultural evolution, behind social complexification, lies in a paradox of human nature: we are deeply gregarious, and deeply cooperative, yet deeply competitive.
There are hardly any status differences in most hunter-gatherer societies, status came with food-producing farmers and herders. Also, sharing became more restricted to the in-group, family, clan and tribe.
With food production sharing became a zero-sum game: everything you share outside your in-group (family, clan) is a loss for your own genetic potential. Every time I make a large donation to a charitable cause I become aware of this, it’s money that goes to someone I don’t rather than my own offspring.
Of course, it’s not hard to see the origin of left and right political views here and the origin of stratified societies ultimately in food-producing societies and a lot of related phenomena, like a Rousseauian or Hobbesian view of human nature.
A lot of people doubt the scenario I have presented here. One of the main objections: pretty most people alive had ancestors who were farmers. True enough, however, it makes a difference if your ancestors have been farmers for the past 10,000 years or if your ancestors were foragers as recently as 4,000 years or less (before the great genetic mixing of the Bronze Age). Some people in Russia, Finland or Canada whose ancestors were hunter-gatherers until very recently have written to me to tell me that they identify with the hunter or gatherer temperament.
The world as it is, especially our WEIRD (Joe Henrich) western world is a product of all four temperaments. Minds make societies. Each “tribe” likes to change the world in a way that suits their evolutionary programming. Robert Wright had a great insight here:
We instinctively play both non-zero-sum and zero-sum games. The interplay of these two dynamics throughout history is a story that takes some time to tell. For now, I’ll just say that, though they have been responsible for much suffering, the tension between them is, in the end, creative.
Cultural evolution has been driven by the dynamics between foragers and food producers. Foragers have made up the large bulk of the creative force in history, not least because foragers are more disadvantaged in a farmer world than vice versa. If we hadn’t been mixed during the Bronze Age, people would still be foragers, farmers and pastoralists nowadays.
When we vote for politicians we should remember that zero-sum games have always only made a few people rich, it’s non-zero that has always made everyone better off in history.
For more check out my books:
The hunter-gatherer neurotribe: gifted, geeks, aspies and other aliens in this world
The road to an affluent, peaceful and fair society
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