The Hub’s resident book reviewer Patrick Luciani tackles Cooperation & Social Justice by Joseph Heath, published by The University of Toronto Press in 2022. Watch for Patrick’s book reviews every two weeks at thehub.ca.
An old Italian saying: Tra dire e fare, c’e il mare. (Between saying and doing lies the infinite sea.)
The late Canadian Marxist scholar G.A Cohen wrote a small book entitled Why Not Socialism? The book, published in 2009, has since become a classic. Cohen uses the allegory of a camping trip on how socialism could work on a grander scale. Without private owners of resources, canoes, fishing gear, and provisions, everyone shares and works so all can enjoy the pleasures of serving and being served. Each trip member has duties and responsibilities and enjoys an equal share of the rewards. Cohen imagines how this arrangement would collapse if free market principles were introduced, such as one camper, who may be a good canoeist, demanding more provisions for his skills, while another wants to sell the fresh berries she has accidentally found in the woods. It’s not hard to see how capitalism breaks down in small groups.
Still, a believer, even after the Soviet Union collapsed, Cohen blamed socialists for their ignorance of how to scale up from his camping trip analogy. He admits capitalism creates wealth by appealing to our baser instincts of greed and selfishness. Socialism now has to learn to create prosperity through a capacity for sharing and cooperation with millions. After all, and if surveys are to be believed, Canadians want more socialism, but not necessarily the aggressive version hard socialists have in mind. Cohen wants a justice system of common normative principles that go beyond our families and friends. Most arguments against socialism are that it can’t provide the incentives for innovation that create wealth and prosperity. Critics such as John Stuart Mill also argue that socialism overlooks our natural tendency to “indolence while letting our faculties rust.”
There’s another answer to why utopian political systems fail. It is found in a new book of essays by Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, entitled Cooperation & Social Justice, which was short-listed for the Donner Prize earlier this year. Occasionally, a book comes around that permanently changes how we see and understand the world. This is one of them.
Aside from the failures of a command economy, the foundational problem of cooperation is one of evolution. How often have we heard, “If only we put our heads together, we can solve this or that problem, along with the political will.” Here, we run into the problem Health calls “explanatory inversion.” We think cooperation is the more common feature of human interaction, even among large numbers. Professor Heath says, “It is not the failures of cooperation that need to be explained, but rather successful collective action.” Collective action is hard, and non-cooperation is easy. This is an example where common sense leads us astray.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in his book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, asked why there was so little cooperation in the Italian South compared to their fellow citizens in the North, which left Sicilians poorer than Venetians. There were historical and cultural differences, but the real mystery is why cooperation broke out in Northern Italy and not in the South. That phenomenon needs explanation, not the other way around. It’s not only the public that is fooled by explanatory inversion but also businesses. Fortunes have been lost by entrepreneurs who see economic winners everywhere, believing they can replicate the success of profitable companies. Many realize too late that winners are the exception while failure is the rule.
Professor Heath argues why the camping story fails to scale from a few people to millions. As we bring more people into an organization, marginal benefits grow rapidly but only to a point. Those marginal benefits start to fall as more members join. Costs rise because cheating and freeriding are more demanding and expensive to enforce. Small groups tend to tolerate low aggression or disruptive behaviour by their members, but our “human capacity for compassion isn’t a reflex triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing,” according to social psychologist Steven Pinker. People may not be as solitary as Thomas Hobbes envisaged, but we are “groupish” in social dispositions. We tend to save our compassion more intensely for family and close friends, which tends to maximize at around 150 individuals, before the needs for the discipline of markets.
Paradoxically, societies that show the strongest bonds of solidarity, including communist countries, are also those most likely to splinter. Even compassion has a breaking point. It is natural that a sense of fatigue quickly sets in when we constantly rely on the goodness and generosity of others to fulfill our needs. Markets do that promptly and efficiently without the intrusions of reciprocal moral obligations. There’s little doubt that when emergencies arise, people more than not show a high level of social solidarity, but as Heath says, we also know that the usual enmities quickly emerge. This partly explains that between 1929 and 1933, Soviet peasants, under forced collectivization by Stalin, slaughtered millions of their livestock rather than share them with their Soviet neighbours.
Cohen’s camping trip analogy argues against the “intrinsically repugnant” morality of the free market system, but it falters on the shoals of human nature and evolution. Unsurprisingly, some of the world’s most prosperous and happy nations are small, homogeneous, and capitalist without the illusion of creating a utopia. Heath’s book shows that capitalism may not be the best moral ideal, but it’s the best workaround given our natural but limited capacity for compassion and evolutionary instincts. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson every generation enamoured of socialism has to learn.
