Together

1. Cooperation is a Learned Craft, Not Just an Innate Impulse

Cooperation is embedded in our genes, but cannot remain stuck in routine behaviour; it needs to be developed and deepened.

Beyond instinct. While mutual support is hardwired into all social animals, human cooperation is not merely an automatic genetic response. It's a sophisticated craft, requiring conscious development and refinement, especially when engaging with those unlike ourselves. This craft involves specific skills, often overlooked in modern society, that allow us to understand and respond to others effectively.

Infant rehearsals. The foundations of this craft are laid in early childhood. Infants, from their first months, actively "rehearse" cooperation, experimenting with cues, gestures, and vocalizations to interact with caregivers and peers. This process, akin to a rehearsal, helps activate neural pathways and fosters mental development, demonstrating that cooperation precedes individuation—we learn to be together before we learn to stand apart.

Skill development. This developmental journey involves two key skills: experiment and communication. Children learn to structure repetitive actions to improve, moving from simple obedience to negotiating rules for games. Early ambiguous communication evolves into the ability to resolve ambiguities, showing that the capacity for complex, skilled cooperation is a fundamental human endowment that risks being wasted by modern societal structures.

2. Dialogic Engagement: The Art of Responding to Difference

‘People who do not observe, cannot converse.’

Beyond assertion. Effective communication isn't just about making clear statements; it's profoundly about listening. Dialogic skills, encompassing attentive observation, interpretation of subtle cues (gestures, silences), and thoughtful response, are crucial for meaningful exchange. Unlike dialectic, which aims for synthesis and common ground, dialogic conversation thrives on knitted-together but divergent exchanges, enriching understanding without necessarily resolving differences.

Empathy over sympathy. Responding to others on their own terms requires empathy, a cooler, more demanding exercise than sympathy. While sympathy involves imaginative identification ("I feel your pain"), empathy focuses on understanding another's experience without making it one's own. This outward-focused curiosity allows for recognition of difference without judgment, fostering a deeper, more textured interaction.

The power of indirection. In challenging social situations, direct aggression or assertion can paralyze communication. The "subjunctive mood"—phrases like "perhaps" or "I would have thought"—creates an indeterminate mutual space, inviting others to engage without feeling cornered. This indirection, coupled with empathy, allows for sociable pleasure in being with others, learning about them, and sparking off one another, even when full agreement is elusive.

3. Solidarity's Enduring Dilemma: Unity Versus Inclusive Cooperation

‘A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence.’

The "Social Question". At the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, reformers grappled with "The Social Question": how to foster solidarity in complex, industrial societies. This led to a fundamental divide:

• Political Left: Advocated top-down solidarity, emphasizing unity, discipline, and large-scale organizations (e.g., German labor unions) to counter capitalist power.
• Social Left: Championed bottom-up solidarity, focusing on inclusion, local action, and face-to-face cooperation (e.g., settlement houses, Robert Owen's workshops) to heal social divisions.

Coalitions and their costs. Top-down political cooperation, while necessary for power, often creates a gap between leadership and its base. Coalitions, like those Bismarck forged with German socialists, risk co-optation and loss of identity for constituent groups. Back-room negotiations, though using face-saving rituals, are opaque to the public, leading to:

• Ressentiment: A feeling among ordinary people that elites are out of touch or betraying their interests.
• Bureaucracy: Large organizations erect barriers, diminishing face-to-face relations.
• Media symbiosis: Leaders speak to the public as insiders, rather than with them.

Community's promise and peril. Bottom-up approaches, exemplified by Jane Addams's Hull House or Saul Alinsky's community organizing, prioritize informal contact and direct engagement to build cohesion among diverse groups. They aim to convert passive awareness into active participation, often through everyday experiences like language classes or shared problem-solving. However, this approach risks:

• Disorganization: Informality can lack structure and long-term sustainability.
• Limited political force: Local bonds may not translate into broader systemic change.
• Paradox of the workshop: While fostering mutuality, institutions like Booker T. Washington's Institutes could still be governed by a top-down "omniarch."

4. Ritual: The Ancient Tool for Balancing Competition and Connection

‘The performance is . . . myself.’

Beyond the sacred. Ritual, often seen as static or purely religious, is a dynamic human practice that continually evolves. It serves as a powerful social tool for balancing cooperation and competition, from the coordinated dances of chimpanzees to the handshake after a competitive game. Rituals are not merely "found" but are actively "made" and adapted to new contexts, as seen in the Beckham family's invented christening or the handshakes in a London school.

Building blocks of ritual. Rituals derive their power from three key elements:

• Repetition: Not dull routine, but "investigative repetition" that ingrains habits, allows for conscious examination, and re-ingrains better habits, building fluency and security.
• Symbolism: Transforming objects, movements, or words into dense, guiding symbols (e.g., the Eucharist wafer, the chef d'œuvre).
• Dramatic expression: Rituals are enactments that transcend individual feelings, focusing participants on performing the rite correctly and collectively, creating a shared expressive domain.

Reformation's impact. The Reformation profoundly reshaped religious ritual, moving from elaborate, theatrical spectacles (like the medieval Mass) that separated clergy from congregants, to simpler, more participatory forms (Luther's hymns, adult baptism) emphasizing direct engagement. However, this shift also led to secular echoes of spectacle, as seen in Louis XIV's court ballets, where performance became a tool for asserting charismatic power and demanding submission, foreshadowing modern political theatrics.

5. Modern Capitalism De-skills Cooperation Through Inequality and Short-Termism

Short-term time is the solvent of civility.

Eroding social capital. Modern capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal forms, actively weakens the capacity for cooperation. The dramatic rise in internal inequality, especially in countries like the US and UK, creates social distance and erodes trust. This is evident in:

• Childhood: Unequal societies show more bullying and less cooperative study among children, who are increasingly susceptible to invidious comparisons based on consumption.
• Workplace: The "social triangle" of earned authority, leap-of-faith trust, and crisis cooperation, once present in stable industrial jobs, is dissolving.

The solvent of time. The shift from long-term careers to short-term, project-based labor is a primary culprit. "Impatient capital" demands quick returns, leading to:

• Chameleon institutions: Firms constantly reorganize, merge, and reconfigure, lacking coherent identity.
• Loss of contextual knowledge: Employees, constantly shifting roles or firms, cannot develop deep understanding of their organization or colleagues.
• Superficial relationships: "Teamwork" becomes "deep acting" or "feigned solidarity," lacking genuine engagement and collapsing under pressure.

Finance's incivility. The financial services industry exemplifies this de-skilling. Back-office workers, often more technically competent than their executives, experience a "bitter reversal" where trust in superiors erodes. Executives, detached by their "island mentality" and constant mobility, abdicate responsibility during crises, treating subordinates with indifference. This environment fosters a lightweight, unreliable social order, starkly contrasting with the durable, duty-bound bonds of Chinese guanxi.

6. The Uncooperative Self: A Retreat from Social Complexity

Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others.

Anxiety's transformation. C. Wright Mills argued that anxiety, as an "alertness to" and "judgment on" social roles, is character-forming. However, modern conditions can diminish character by transforming anxiety into a desire for withdrawal, leading to an "uncooperative self" that avoids demanding social engagement. This retreat is driven by two psychological ingredients:

• Narcissism: A "mirror state" where individuals see only themselves reflected in others, leading to a "grandiose self" that needs constant control and feels oppressed by others' needs. This can manifest as "cowboy warriors" in battle or finance, indifferent to collective welfare or consequences.
• Complacency: A state of expecting experience to conform to familiar patterns, a cousin to narcissism in its self-absorption. Tocqueville's concept of "individualism" describes this: a person withdrawn into a comfort-zone, indifferent to those unlike themselves, reducing anxiety by neutralizing stimulation through apathy or boredom.

The cost of withdrawal. This voluntary withdrawal, unlike the illuminating solitude of a Carthusian monk or Rousseau, produces a kind of blindness. It diminishes the capacity for empathy and complex cooperation, as individuals prioritize self-containment over engagement with difference. The "uncooperative self" lacks the ambivalence or inner unease that might prompt change, instead finding comfort in a homogenized, low-stimulation social environment.

7. Repairing Social Bonds: Lessons from Craft and Everyday Diplomacy

The less aggressive the effort, the more sensitivity.

Embodied social knowledge. Strengthening cooperation involves applying lessons from craftsmanship to social repair. Physical labor instills dialogical social behavior through "embodiment":

• Rhythm and Ritual: The rhythm of skill development (ingraining, questioning, re-ingraining habits) becomes ritualized, allowing for adaptation and improvement in social roles, as seen in the fluid rituals of a poor community.
• Informal Gestures: Non-verbal cues (movements, facial expressions, sounds) give sensate life to social relationships, fostering informal bonds and communication, as in the subtle interactions of luthiers in a workshop.
• Working with Resistance: The artisan's approach to physical resistance—using minimum force, probing tentatively, and learning from "knots"—translates into effective dialogical social behavior, fostering sensitivity and openness to difference.

Strategies for social repair. Just as there are different ways to fix a broken object, there are different strategies for repairing social bonds:

• Restoration: Making things "just like new," a self-effacing craft that aims to recover an original, often idealized, state.
• Remediation: Preserving an existing form while substituting old parts for new, improved ones, requiring inventory skills and a strategic judgment of resilience.
• Reconfiguration: The most radical repair, re-imagining an object's function and form through improvisation and incomplete specification, as exemplified by the Neues Museum's reconstruction, which narrates trauma while opening new possibilities.

Everyday diplomacy. This is the practical application of these repair skills to human conflict and difference. It involves:

• Indirect cooperation: Job counselors use lightness, humor, and subtle cues (sprezzatura) to help clients navigate difficult situations, fostering outward orientation rather than inward despair.
• Conflict management: Techniques like "re-pairing" (mis-hearing to introduce bridging elements) or strategic silence can manage adversarial exchanges, establishing boundaries and allowing for progress without full reconciliation.
• Liminal procedures: Diplomatic rituals like the bout de papier or démarche create ambiguous spaces for negotiation, allowing parties to test solutions or express strong positions without direct assertion, fostering "soft power" and productive engagement.

8. Community as a Vocation: Sustaining Commitment Amidst Adversity

‘Leben und Arbeiten’ (love and work).

Beyond survival. For survivors of adversity, like those from Chicago's Cabrini Green, community offers more than just refuge; it's a space to rebuild morale, test convictions, and practice cooperation. The challenge is to foster commitment in communities whose economic heart is weak, where external forces strip wealth and opportunities. This requires a shift from merely surviving to finding a "vocation" in community itself.

Three paths to communal vocation:

• Faith-based community: Exemplified by the Catholic Worker movement, driven by caritas (free gift of concern) and "personalism." It offers open, casual cooperation and a sense of purpose through faith, but can create a divide between believers and non-believers regarding the nature of commitment.
• The simple community: Inspired by A. D. Gordon's vision for the kibbutz, emphasizing physical labor and shared identity to restore self-respect and vitality (histpashtut). It aims to shed the "mask" of accommodating hostile society, but risks eluding communication with those who differ.
• The pleasures of community: Norman Thomas, the American socialist leader, embodied this by making informal sociability a radical means to foster commitment. He cultivated an ordinary, uncharismatic presence, using informal meetings and indirect provocations to accustom diverse people to being together, valuing connection for its own sake.

The unfinished business. While community cannot fill the whole of a life, it offers serious pleasures and a vital space for working out the value and limits of face-to-face relations. It counters the "brutal simplifiers" of modern society—us-against-them solidarity and you-are-on-your-own individualism—by nurturing human capabilities for deeper cooperation. Montaigne's enigmatic cat reminds us that understanding others is a lifelong quest, but one that should not deter us from the essential craft of living and working together.

Last updated: April 1, 2026