"Very good, Captain. There is hope for you. Perhaps in several thousand years, your people and mine shall meet to reach an agreement. You are still half savage, but there is hope. We will contact you when we are ready."
Star Trek, "Arena"
This sort of line was spoken in more than one Star Trek episode. The Enterprise encounters some powerful and super-evolved race who initially judge humans to be relative savages, but Kirk does something that shows that humans have some evolved attributes as well. The conversation ends with the aliens (rather condescendingly, in my view) letting Kirk know that while humans are not advanced enough for them to deal with, maybe in a few thousand years we will have evolved enough for them to deal with us. (Of course, truly advanced aliens would have simply ignored Kirk and his adversary rather than set up a single combat situation, but then there'd be no show.)
The storyline is on the silly side, but it does bring up a question that's worth considering: where will we be in a thousand years? The pessimist can point to a host of societal ills and say that we haven't made a great deal of progress. The optimist can point to the relative worldwide peace of the past sixty years, and (in the U.S.) the substantial progress made in terms of societal treatment of women, blacks, gays, and other disadvantaged groups.
As for me, in general I'm more of an optimist than a pessimist. (Easy for me, though; I'm a white male born into a non-dysfunctional middle-class family, and have faced few real challenges in my life.) But I do think there's cause for optimism. Of course, we still have many problems that won't go away anytime soon, but I find it difficult to look at too many aspects of the world situation and find things that aren't better than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Of course I don't mean material things, but rather bigotry, social consciousness, concern for the environment, and so on.
One thing that sadly has changed little is the fact that following one's self-interest is still the dominant social paradigm. Examples of this abound, and I'll probably be writing about them in the future, but the one that leaps to mind now is the drug problem. Everyone knows that Prohibition failed in the U.S. because too many Americans refused to give up drinking, and the money from alcohol sales went to organized crime. The repeal of Prohibition was a protective action, an attempt to slow down the mob's flow of money before they truly took over; America's freedom and democracy were in serious danger.
Five decades later, American consumption of cocaine reached levels at which many millions of dollars a year were being collected by the Colombian drug lords, and the situation in Colombia became desperate. Judges who sentenced drug cartel leaders were assassinated with regularity, the rule of law was seriously undermined, many police and others in law enforcement were on the mob's payroll. The cartel leaders ended up with enough resources to essentially build their own army, and a section of the country came under the de facto rule of the cartel. Did we end the prohibition of cocaine? No, because it wasn't our country that was being taken apart. Granted, cocaine is much more dangerous than alcohol, but I'm very sure that if our country was in such dire straits, it would have been seriously considered. Legalizing cocaine would cause relatively minor social problems in the U.S., and relieve huge ones in Colombia. But it isn't going to happen. Not in our self-interest.
A large part of this has to do with issues of nationalism, from which I believe no country is immune. To Americans, an American life is much more important than a Colombian one. Parity in this regard would be a huge step forward, but even I'm not optimistic that this will happen in the next few hundred years.
I tend to compare the history of humanity to the history of one person. We have childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and so on. Stages of life. We can also say that there are stages of civilization. Perhaps we could say that infancy ended with the emergence of homo sapiens, humans more or less as we are today. To have even reached that point, we had to fight our way up through evolution. Aggression and selfishness was rewarded; if you were passive or let the other guy eat first, you probably didn't live long enough for your genes to be passed on. But since civilization began, we've been (or should be) fighting the qualities that allowed us to survive in the first place. We haven't truly needed aggression and selfishness to survive for thousands of years, but we're stuck with them, at least for now. Will those genes slowly die out (now that passive and peaceful ones can also be passed on), allowing us to have something approaching a utopian society in a millennium, or two, or a dozen? I have no desire to live that long, even if I could, but I would be very interested to know.
Showing posts with label self-interest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-interest. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Self-interest
Everyone does what's in his or her own self-interest.
It seems to me that this is almost axiomatic and utterly uncontroversial. 'Duh, of course,' one might respond. But one thing I like to do is take an idea that seems like a given and try to unpack it. Why do we do that? Why do we take it as a given?
A more specific version of the above might be: it's perfectly acceptable to do what's in one's own self-interest as long as it causes no harm to others. I was prompted to consider this question about a year ago when I saw an article in the New York Times about Costco. The article said that Costco paid its workers a fair amount more than the industry average, and some investors were complaining about this. The gist of it was that if Costco paid the industry average, profits would increase, causing stock prices to increase, which would mean more money for the investors. Costco, they said, was not doing all it could to maximize profits, and the obligation of a publicly traded company was to do just that.
In this case, this blog entry's first sentence could be rephrased as: Everyone is perfectly entitled to do what is in his or her self interest even if it harms others, provided no law is broken. I believe that most traders would take this as a given. I would hope that most people in general would frown and consider the investors' attitude disgusting, but I'm not sure how public opinion would fall on this issue. After all, many people would probably do a similar thing in similar circumstances, or they would pay the going wage with no apology. It's just that in our daily lives, we don't get many opportunities to do what benefits us while seeing the harm it does to others. We can see the same thing in today's health-care debate. It's not hard to find Medicare recipients who are opposed to doing anything to change the current health-care system. Why? Because any change *might* change their current benefits, and they'd apparently rather that 45,000,000 people continued to go without health care than take the smallest chance that anything about their current system would change. Intelligent people say this publicly, names attached, apparently unashamed.
Of course, to an extent, acting on self-interest is natural; we wouldn't have risen up through evolution if we weren't programmed to do that. Millennia ago, being self-interested could mean the difference between life and death. Now, especially for those of us in Western societies who are middle-class or higher, we could easily afford to oppose our own self-interest for the common good, and many do. But there is still a culture in which it's perfectly fine to consider your own self-interest as more important than the common good, and politicians pander to those focused on their own self-interest rather than telling them to consider the needs of others.
My current feeling is that the things we got from evolution–aggression, competitiveness, self-centeredness–served us then and don't serve us now, but now that we're beyond the need for them, they're not that easy to get rid of. We might lose them if our civilization lasted thousands of years, as the lack of a survival-of-the-fittest mechanism helped breed not only the aggressive and self-interested, but I do wonder if we can make it that long. It seems to me that changing our culture is a lot like changing our character: something we do deliberately, that we consider important, and that we focus on strongly. If indulging in one's own self-interest when not absolutely necessary became a social evil rather than a cultural norm, petty indulgences in self-interest such as the Costco thing might go the way of racism: disappearing, though slowly. It takes time, and new generations. But first, we have to notice that something is wrong with it.
Costco apparently makes perfectly good profits while paying its workers enough to make a decent middle-class living. What's wrong with that? How did we get to a point in our society where this would be criticized? I wish the investors who complained would take a moment to think about that. I'm not holding my breath, though.
It seems to me that this is almost axiomatic and utterly uncontroversial. 'Duh, of course,' one might respond. But one thing I like to do is take an idea that seems like a given and try to unpack it. Why do we do that? Why do we take it as a given?
A more specific version of the above might be: it's perfectly acceptable to do what's in one's own self-interest as long as it causes no harm to others. I was prompted to consider this question about a year ago when I saw an article in the New York Times about Costco. The article said that Costco paid its workers a fair amount more than the industry average, and some investors were complaining about this. The gist of it was that if Costco paid the industry average, profits would increase, causing stock prices to increase, which would mean more money for the investors. Costco, they said, was not doing all it could to maximize profits, and the obligation of a publicly traded company was to do just that.
In this case, this blog entry's first sentence could be rephrased as: Everyone is perfectly entitled to do what is in his or her self interest even if it harms others, provided no law is broken. I believe that most traders would take this as a given. I would hope that most people in general would frown and consider the investors' attitude disgusting, but I'm not sure how public opinion would fall on this issue. After all, many people would probably do a similar thing in similar circumstances, or they would pay the going wage with no apology. It's just that in our daily lives, we don't get many opportunities to do what benefits us while seeing the harm it does to others. We can see the same thing in today's health-care debate. It's not hard to find Medicare recipients who are opposed to doing anything to change the current health-care system. Why? Because any change *might* change their current benefits, and they'd apparently rather that 45,000,000 people continued to go without health care than take the smallest chance that anything about their current system would change. Intelligent people say this publicly, names attached, apparently unashamed.
Of course, to an extent, acting on self-interest is natural; we wouldn't have risen up through evolution if we weren't programmed to do that. Millennia ago, being self-interested could mean the difference between life and death. Now, especially for those of us in Western societies who are middle-class or higher, we could easily afford to oppose our own self-interest for the common good, and many do. But there is still a culture in which it's perfectly fine to consider your own self-interest as more important than the common good, and politicians pander to those focused on their own self-interest rather than telling them to consider the needs of others.
My current feeling is that the things we got from evolution–aggression, competitiveness, self-centeredness–served us then and don't serve us now, but now that we're beyond the need for them, they're not that easy to get rid of. We might lose them if our civilization lasted thousands of years, as the lack of a survival-of-the-fittest mechanism helped breed not only the aggressive and self-interested, but I do wonder if we can make it that long. It seems to me that changing our culture is a lot like changing our character: something we do deliberately, that we consider important, and that we focus on strongly. If indulging in one's own self-interest when not absolutely necessary became a social evil rather than a cultural norm, petty indulgences in self-interest such as the Costco thing might go the way of racism: disappearing, though slowly. It takes time, and new generations. But first, we have to notice that something is wrong with it.
Costco apparently makes perfectly good profits while paying its workers enough to make a decent middle-class living. What's wrong with that? How did we get to a point in our society where this would be criticized? I wish the investors who complained would take a moment to think about that. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
