---K J Arrow
Living in the modern society like ours, we take for granted how our lives are utterly dependent on others. We trust that we won't be robbed while we walk past strangers. We don't stock six months of food and water, trusting that the water will always come out of the tap. We put our money in the bank, trusting that it will be there for us tomorrow. Trust is the foundation for social cooperation and fundamental to the working of modern societies, but it has not always been that way.
When we were hunter gatherers, we only trusted our small tribe. Strangers were viewed with suspicion. If you see a stranger in your hunting ground, your instinct is to kill him, because he competes with you for your food source. Nicholas Wade, in his book Before the Dawn, documented research findings that indicated hunter gatherer societies were significantly more violent compared to agricultural societies. Our skulls were thicker before farming and we went through Gracialization while forming our agrarian society. Indeed, the history of humanity has been a story of increasing cooperation involving ever larger number of us in one place. Ever increasing trust is required by each member of the society as we congregate in increasing numbers and specialize, making the society more productive and making us more dependent on others. Along the way, living with large group of humans in close proximity changes us. It changes our culture. It changes our personality make up, which has a strong basis in genetics. To go from a small tribe to a large empire, we got a jump start through agriculture, where a group composed of many unrelated families must live in close proximity and cooperate to have successful farming. The rest was accomplished mostly through conquest. The victors, which started out as a single group, had high social cohesion and trust. The losers were either vanquished completely, or assimilated into the group. This involved passing the genetics and the cultures of the victor group to the loser group and could take centuries as tribes turned into nation states.
It stands to reason that societies that had gone through long periods of urbanization will have members that are more suitable for dense living environment that requires high degree of cooperation. Societies with multi-ethnic groups where each group has similar powers fare worse than societies with a single dominant group. Societies that were still basically tribal until the British arbitrarily drew a line in the map and declared them as countries will have a harder time with social trust. This was made worse as the British drew their national borders to ensure internal strife. They ensure strife by ensuring that each nation contain several different religious or ethnic groups. It would be difficult for a country like, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, to pick themselves up and transform into a high trust society in the foreseeable future.
This foretells a dim future for many countries in the world with regard to their ability to modernize. Many will fail at this first step to modernity and it could take centuries, if ever, before they grow to become high trust societies.
The United States was a high trust society at the beginning, at least among the colonists. However, things had degraded over time. In the absence of an external threat like the Soviet Union, our internal fissures like race and gay rights, which first surfaced in the sixties, have grown more intractable and more strident. We balkanize into thousands of special interest groups that will sacrifice the interests of the nation for their own interest. In my neighborhood, one of the most desired place for a teacher to be working, the teachers have collectively bargained for ever more benefits and pay. Their salaries are already one of the highest in the state and maybe the country. The resulting compromise by the school board and the teachers resulted in a lot of days where the kids don't get to go to school. It was so called development days for the teachers, who only works nine months out of a year and have the entire summer to do their development. We are still a fairly coherent society, at least for a majority of us, but the trajectory is not headed in the right direction.
The Chinese has a pretty high societal trust among its citizens. Indeed, I think the biggest achievement of the Chinese civilization was to forge one of the largest group of people who identified themselves as Chinese, with similar language, genetics and culture. The Chinese have had a long history of urban civilization compared to most of the world. However, in the absence of external challenges, Chinese societal trust and cohesion had degraded. In 1900, an alliance of eight European nations invaded China. The Chinese lost. What is poignant is that if you look at many images of the period, you see the many Chinese working alongside the foreign invaders for pay. In many cases, with our European masters picking who should die, the Chinese were actually the executioners of our own people.
Seen in this light, the external forces so rudely awakened China from her slumber had helped us to re-define ourselves as Chinese again, this time in the context of other competitors stronger then ourselves. This process of re-discovering our societal cohesion takes many generations and sees many painful lows. For example, many from Hong Kong still don't see themselves as Chinese, but part of Britain.
Going forward, still facing competition and pressure from the outside, but economically ascendant, We can expect the Chinese social cohesion to strengthen. The high social trust and growing social cohesion of the Chinese is one of the bedrocks from which Chinese economic modernization is built.
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