"Andrea Strimling" <[email protected]> wrote: To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 5:07 PM Subject: Re: Arguments against privileging the competition narrative
> > Hello all, > > This reminds me of Elise Boulding's work, especially her last book, > published at age 80, "Culture of Peace." She argues that history is > generally written as a sequences of wars, conflicts, invasions, > conquests, etc., but that history could just as easily be written as > the history of peaceful coexistence to nonviolent conflict resolution > to other related episodes in human history. Rather than refute the > prevailing approach, she focuses on creating an alternative that > illuminates cooperation. Elise is the wife of the late Kenneth > Boulding, and a highly-recognized scholar and peace activist - > nominated for Nobel some years ago. > > Andrea > Thanks for the tip, Andrea - I'll check it out. Another aproach to human history is the evolutionary approach by which it can be mapped, broadly, as the evolution of ever-larger scales of cooperative social units with competition actually driving the process. So, broadly, there's been an evolution from families to tribes to Middle Age small states to nation-states to, most recently, supra-national organisations such as the EU. And paradoxically the driver for these ever-larger social units was not cooperation but competition. Competition between families became so destructive that at a certain critical point it became in the common interest to become tribes. Competition between tribes in turn made it in the common interest to become small states and so on. Seen in this light, competition and cooperation perform a kind of interconnected dance with each playing the lead role at the appropriate time/circumstance. Obviously, this only makes any sense taking the broadest overview of history and there are doubtless many reversals or contradictions the closer in you look. But broadly, to me it makes a great deal of sense and offers a much more complete view which marginalises neither competition nor cooperation. It also allows us to make greater sense of globalisation, allowing us to view it - for all its goods and bads - as part of the natural evolutionary process I describe above. In other words globalisation - including climate change and the present economic crisis - are indicators that competition is reaching its melt-down point; i.e. the point at which global cooperation - i.e. some kind of global social cooperative unit - becomes in everyone's best interests. Would welcome any comments. best John --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CooperationCommons" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CooperationCommons?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
