|
On his watch, Northern Rock recklessly demutualised and branched into sub prime mortgage lending leading to one of the more cataclysmic fall outs of the 2008 credit crunch. Far from being ripped apart by Hobbesian war of all, humans, if given space to run affairs according to their own devices will naturally tend to co-operate for mutual effect following laws such as Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. Yet this message might seem like so much blithely optimistic hogwash given recent events connected with Ridley's life. We can do this free from government interference if we allow tit for tat to flourish in post-industrial society.
As Richard Dawkins proclaims on the cover, this is a sort of successor book to The Selfish Gene, setting out how Dawkins' controversial theory relating to the innate proclivity of our genes to strive selfishly to perpetuate themselves applies to human behaviour. In the Origins of Virtue, his 1996 analysis of the City of Newcastle reads thus: 'In two centuries (Newcastle) has been transformed from a hive of enterprise.into the satrapy of an all powerful state', he goes on: 'The city is now notorious for shattered impersonal neighbourhoods where violence and robbery are so commonplace that enterprise is impossible.Hobbes lives.'Maybe so Matt, but Northern Rock had to be taken into state ownership, at great expense to the taxpayer, in 2008. As chairman of Newcastle building society turned bank Northern Rock, a post he inherited from his father along with a salary of £300,000 a year, Ridley can be easily guyed as one of those privileged aristocrats who can preach the gospel of free market liberalism knowing he is at the top of the money food chain. Humans naturally co-operate, says Ridley, in all sorts of ways for the very reason that it benefits us in the long run.
The good citizen always prevails in the long run, is Ridley's essential message. Be careful about biting the hand that feeds eh. Drawing on game theory he invokes the idea that tit for tat - reciprocate virtue if first shown it by others is an excellent model for describing so many mutually co-operative human institutions that have developed in all different locations and historical periods. This is an optimistic book, banking on the power of people to develop strong, healthy societies, and even resolving global warming by our own initiatives.
The ideas continue to build, each chapter expanding the discussion outward. The government is not a "someone" who reacts to incentives in the same way. Fascinating dicussion of reciprocal altruism which is illustrated with games like the Prisoner's Dilema.
The author perhaps doesn't develope this thesis well enough, although it made sense to me. The author concludes that Utopia is not really possible, but thinks that small groups of people stand the best chance of forming beneficial associations. The value of having an owner is that someone has incentives to manage the resource correctly.
The subject is cooperation and its evolutionary origins. Many readers apparently don't agree with his suggestion that public ownership via the government is inferior to ownership at a more local level. It's difficult for trust to develope in large groups.
He introduces the perhaps surprising idea that there are versions of the Prisoner's Dilema where slightly irrational nice people can do better than completely rational players. The final chapters dicuss such things as ecology, trade, property rights and religion.
Everything is a give and take. Don't pick up this book unless you want life-changing revelations about the way you view friends, family, and all other relationships.
Along the way you will be disabused of any notions that you may have of "noble savages" and of any idyllic images of the behavior of dolphins and chimpanzees.Unfortunately the author has a dislike of large scale government, which causes him to ignore investigating the benefits not only of government but of special purpose organizations at all levels from gardening clubs to Medieval guilds to large scale charitable organizations. Why are we moved by the suffering of others. The thesis of the book is that such behavior arises because it is in the mutual interest of individuals to exchange goods and services.
This is not something done by hunter-gatherers, because they do not have the required abstract concept of number, which is not something that we are born with.Despite its title the book does not really explain the origin of virtue as a concept. Why do so many people contribute to charitable organizations. He says that the ideal of self-less behavior is an illusion, yet even if this is the case it requires an explanation.
Why should people or animals be nice to one another. Also worthy of mention would be the comparatively modern concept of voting. Why do we have a concept of justice, leading to what the author calls the "irrational" attitude of revenge, which he notes is peculiar to our own species.The book provides a good starting point for a discussion of virtue, but, as I have indicated it is certainly not the final word on the subject.
The book does a good job of showing examples from animal and anthropological studies as well as providing theoretical arguments. There are, for example, things that governments do well that simply are not possible at the individual level, like organizing poice and armies and constructing highways.
But, according to some theorists, as long as individuals are willing to cooperate with one another, they will get cooperation in return.His conclusion is intriguing (page 264): "If we are to recover social harmony and virtue, if we are to build back into society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital that we reduce the power and scope of the state." He calls for (page 265) ".social and material exchange between equals for that is the raw material of trust, and trust is the basis for virtue."All in all, an intriguing and interesting volume. He notes that our primate relatives set the stage for understanding the evolution of human cooperation. Kropotkin, on an exploration of Siberia, observed what he saw was cooperation among multitudinous animal species. Not all, of course, will be convinced of the thesis. And this leads to Ridley's thesis in this well written volume (page 5): "Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. The book opens with a daring jail break.
However, it is not his philosophy so much as his work in natural history that drew Matt Ridley's attention. He notes the importance of a game, adopting game theory, developed by political scientist Robert Axelrod, in which humans will cooperate unless double crossed, at which point individuals will respond in negative kind. The story notes that the person escaping the grim Russian prison is, in fact, a member of the nobility, one of the Czar's favorites when the escapee was much younger. It is literally in our nature." He goes on to note that (page 5): "This is a book about human nature, and in particular the surprisingly social nature of the human animal."The volume proceeds by reviewing theories and research on cooperation, evolution, and so on, a wide ranging review of the human condition and of our evolutionary impulses. But it is a well written effort to integrate many different bodies of work to make his point. The person breaking out, of course, is Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince.
He drew from that the conclusion that Huxley, who had described nature as "red in tooth and claw," was missing an important part of the evolution picture--the evolution of cooperation.
|
