Find the Others
A Review of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff
Team Human has been added to the list of books that likely will have a formative influence on my philosophical outlook. The author, Douglas Rushkoff, is a wonderfully erratic thinker. He points out that we are faced with a monumental task—finding the others— in an operating system designed to keep us apart.
The central idea of this book is that not all ideas that are ancient, or come from cultures that are often regarded as primitive, should be rejected as illiberal or anathema to progress. Those who doubt this idea must recognized that the Native American’s observation that the European colonists suffered from a disease they called wetiko applies just as much to us in spite of our secular progress. Their diagnosis was that we suffered from the delusion belief that cannibalizing the life force is both a logical and morally upright way to live. Their only explanation was that they had lost their natural ability to see themselves as enmeshed in interdependent parts of the environment.
It is disturbing to the extent to which the same diagnosis can be reached for Trump and the financial titans terrified of an uncertain and possibly apocalyptic future, as reported in Rushkoff’s excellent Medium article. In his wonderfully provocative work on how humans are pulled in different directions opposed to their nature and they must be brought Down to Earth, Latour offers a similar diagnosis as the Native Americans who were so appalled by those who left human and natural destruction in their wake. Interestingly, both authors fixate on how the extraordinarily rich are trying to secede from the rest of us, both by promoting policies that create enclaves and prepping their doomsday bunkers.
The Down to Earth thesis endorsed by Rushkoff in mentioning the anecdote of Native Americans interpreting the conquests of European colonizers implies that human nature is fundamentally good, so long as we remove the barriers to our innate desire to find Reason, and inspire action to create better communities. Encouraging citizens to find their inner Reason—transcendental purpose— terrifies those that benefit from the current operating system to the extent that they would rather prepare for the end of the world than entertain it as a possibility, Rushkoff argues.
The trouble with double movements, which do not merely resist but oppose, is that they interfere with the ideological project of the self-regulating market, as Polonyi so prophetically identified during the last great transformation. The Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson is even more to the point—it is easier for existing elites to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and in doing so, admit to the limitations of an ideological vision that embarrassingly does not substantially differ from the myopic elites of the 19th century that Polanyi railed against.
But the elites are not the same as the people. In the few opportunities I got to explore President Carter’s personal philosophy, he always made clear that people are good and will behave in ways that advance themselves and the communities they belong if given the opportunity. The qualification here is doing a lot of work. The operating system must be structured in such a way so they can reconnect with their innate predilections, which means removing all barriers to social connection including the elite manipulative toolkit of extreme nationalism and ignorant populism.
Proposition #88 most accurately conveys this point. Humanity may be distorted by the rules of the game and programming elites establish, but that does not mean that we—Team Human—cannot create an alternate programming that revives the core humanity of even those most deeply under the spell of power brokers, exposing them to the essential truth. We in fact have an obligation to listen to those people we think are our strident enemies, and lose the reflexive shield of contempt we all too often fall back on.
Views that espouse civilizational Darwinian conflict are indeed reprehensible, but the people are not irredeemable. Even the most vociferous proponents of this view—Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller come to mind—have more in common with the European colonists who indiscriminately destroyed in their conquest for glory and wealth than liberals care to admit. That is to say, people like them are too fixated on a powerful but ultimately misguided view competition is the way the world works, and the world, by way of this competition, is an indescribably cruel place filled with enemies, traitors, and sociopaths. The anarchic vision where power is the only thing keeping citizens from Hobbesian chaos has powerful appeal to so many people because competitive pressures are so available in the social world. Indeed, they are made more available by the operating system that elevates competitive pressures more than is corroborated by objective truth, as Rushkoff’s schoolboy myth of trees growing over others in competition for sunlight reveals.
The reason why it is misguided is that the thing that makes humans truly special is that we are a cooperative species. It is the reason why we developed big brains packed with neurons that can store words, syntactically organize those words making communication possible, and keep track of a dizzying number of relationships enabling us to form cooperative tribes. Rushkoff levies the case for empathy for those with individualist/hierarchist worldviews:
Once we really see where they are coming from, we can empathize with their fear, follow them into that dark scary place, and then find a better way but with them.
Social science understands that the social construction we have of the world can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but we are not condemned so long as Team Human can alter that construction that the world is an unforgiving place where we should look at others with derision and distrust. Instead, we should find the others and take solace in the fact that together we can protect those vulnerable to evisceration.
Renaissance Now is a perfect roadmap in ensuring culture switching is not merely potential but actually realized, as well as an excellent addendum to Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. Enlightenment is about uncovering awesome human attributes that did not previously exist, but can be called upon if the will to do so is sufficient. On the other hand, Renaissance is about drawing from the ancient wisdom of our past and even from our state of nature, which differs from the Hobbesian conception in a few important ways.
Proposition #79 is a good description of the project to contemplate the nature of our existence and incorporating these considerations into modernity rather than insisting that modernity ought to lead us into a transhumanist and fundamentally dystopian anti-human world, “A renaissance is the retrieval of the old. A rebirth of old idea in a new context, offering a better way [than revolution] to advance our deepest human values.” The reactionary invective is therefore misplaced. On this note, he has nothing positive to say of the misanthropic environmental activists who insist that there no other way but to turn back the clock.
There are things that we can learn from the late medieval period. For example, in the centuries immediately following the Black Death, the depreciating value of money encouraged folks to spend rather than stockpile, a model of incipient capitalism geared toward the velocity of money rather than hoarding, drawing the ire of the aristocratic families who were completely lost and understandably anxious by the prospect that they might have to go out and participate in the real economy and produce value. That is, they sought to find a way to restructure the economy so as to assign value labor rather than determined spontaneously through economic exchange, which would preserve their privilege of unearned rental income from landed estates. By Rushkoff’s account, the chartered monopoly and the Bank of England both did the trick of staving off the Nouveau riche from challenging the status of the nobility.
Given that the operating system of central banking and the chartered monopoly is itself reactionary, the reactionary charge against the Renaissance project to remake American society loses its muster, Rushkoff implies. Team Human must then draw from peoples of different times and places and indeed occupy societies that are nothing like our own, but nonetheless better attuned to the social and creative essence that makes humans tick.
In the distinction between reason and Reason, Reason is more primed for comprehensibility because it is geared toward our ancient past and something that lies within us rather than wholly new. I could not help but think of the intriguing idea presented in Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China. In that book, he reaches a conclusion not too different from the Native American observing the colonists when they landed on the coast of New England. Reflecting on his year at Peking University in the early 1920’s, he concluded that Western societies were then more advanced in developing technologies that serve immediate material needs and culture, but the Chinese way of life was more attuned to the “the appropriate ends of life.” They are so content because they are an artist nation, focused on creation for creation’s sake, developing relations with others, and discovering the solidary beauty of nature. Orientalism aside, his observation is one that Rushkoff would have easily recognized—we possess reason, but the Chinese Russell observed possess Reason.
Russell’s greatest hope and worry for humanity was that it may be easier for the Chinese to develop reason attained in West through modern scientific endeavors and enterprise than it would be for the West to find the value other cultures ascribe to transcendental purpose. Asiatic cultures were simply viewed as “primitive”, which was then as it is now an inevitable way of ensuring that none of their cultural traits were candidates for learning or gradual adoption. The other worry is the same appetites that drove the European colonists and industrialists of the 16th and 19th centuries may envelope the Chinese as well. The logic of competition to societies that feel this threat is simply too irresistible.
In an interesting twist of events, the particular sickness that China would contract was not the one of endless growth losing sight of Reason and living one with nature, but instead the Leninist pathology of engineering the human soul through control that had the similar effect of introducing the linear conception of progress aimed at the country’s grand rejuvenation.
A consequence of this peculiar trajectory is that retrieving the virtues Russell observed may be easier. I harbor great hope that the artist sensibility may arise from the margins when Chinese society feels so inclined in a manner consistent with Laozi’s adage, “Production without possession, helping without self-assertion, and development without domination.” When we find the others, and work to remake society and economy that elevates Reason to the highest priority, Team Human should stop to ponder this wise sage’s words. Possession, self-assertion, and domination are nothing but futile attempts to fill the existential void within ourselves and our societies. Wander too far along this course and Team Human inevitably becomes afflicted with wetiko.
But it is not too late. Team Human can reprogram our operating system that sets the defaults toward production, helping others, and broadly shared development. That would be a revolution far more inspiring than a few tech bros remaking American capitalism to invade and occupy our attention with insatiable appetite. One might even call it a Renaissance, but unlike the first, this time the winds will blow from the Far East and from within ourselves.