PART 3
Calibrating cooperation
It is incredible that so many of us can anticipate, tell stories and cooperate enduringly over millennia, or fleetingly for mere days. To exercise this ability, we need identities, goals, and expectations of each other. We are so taken by them that we don't wonder: when are they too little? When too much?
Too little or too large a number
We started by cooperating as tribes. This was an increase from 50 in primates to about 150 humans. We’ve only grown larger and larger numbers since. We even cooperate with inorganic things now. More the inorganic than organic or other people!
Take the last 70,000 years for every geographical region in the world. Notice as years roll by, each region will have a native language, a native practice of food procurement that would inform its tools, a native use of symbols and writing, a native invention of numbers and mathematics, native clothing, and so on. Some technologies seem inevitable for civilisation.
Now notice a lack of continuity of native technologies in most regions since. Crafts and arts are frozen in time if not dying or already dead. Though we seem to have immense choice and opportunity now for more and more people, they are all mostly rooted in a handful of stories. What are the dangers of that? What should be the size of collectives for the stories we have?
Too little or too much flexibility
Earlier, our lifestyles, the tools, technologies and culture remained the same over generations. There would be no marked difference between how my great grandfather would live and how my great grandson would live. Now however, we are trying to find educational models that would enable us to reinvent ourselves every 5–10 years during the course of this century. We’re now a superconductor of information. Trust of a billion people is built and destroyed in a matter of months. Take the rise and fall of Facebook, uber, google, and more. Psychologically, how quickly can we switch stories?
Too narrow or too broad a definition of survival
Stories are the human response to survival. Identities are so many — myself, my corporation, my government, my lineage, my culture, my species, life as we know it, or the idea of life in any form. When taking life interplanetary, we think of survival of human life alone. The biggest challenge to space exploration is the vulnerability that we may no longer be ourselves. We underestimate our dependence on our planet. Considering our breadth of ambition and the depth of impact on this planet, what is an appropriate understanding of survival?
Each combination of answers is a unique story! Each a unique environment with surprising emergent behaviour — inclusivity, sectarianism, homogeneity, cultural cleansing, voter de-registrations, feminism, open-source, automobile, cell-phone, high-rises … some in harmony with life, some leading to catastrophic disruption.
Which are which? How do we shape our behaviour wisely? Cooperation of how many, how flexibly, for the survival of whom and how long, would it take? Besides, maybe stories are just another evolutionary step, and it would be well to look beyond. Where are stories headed?
What after stories?
