JUNE 7, FRIDAY

COOPERATION

Harari argues that humans first lived as hunter gatherers in small groups in which everyone knew each other and depended upon each other. Hunter gatherers were animists with each group having their own world view. But with the shift to agriculture and the support of urban centers and then empires other ways of uniting large groups of humans who didn’t know each other, was through myths, shared value systems, cultures, that bound together large groups of people so that they cooperated with each other. He calls these myths because they were ways of cooperation imagined by humans upon which everyone agreed. They were products of faith rather than objective measurement like the physical world. Religions served this purpose, first with many gods and then with the insistence on one universal god. But other myths are the myth of kings and hierarchy as the natural way to be ruled, the myth of nationalism and the myth of faith in money as a medium of exchange and the myth of capitalism itself which is based on faith in a growing economy. In fact everything that humans value most highly and base their identity on are myths, imagined ways of behaving that we have faith in.

He argues that these myths allow large groups to unite and cooperate together. But I wonder if it is not just cooperation that unites large groups. It would seem to me that tribalism depends just as much on being part of a huge group, like fans at a baseball game wildly cheering for one team or the other. It just feels good to be connected to other humans in a family or in a much larger imagined grouping.