Aristotle, it seems, got it right. Politics may have played a key role in human evolution as the classic primate pattern of male dominance hierarchies shifted to a pattern of consensual leadership for common goals and collective action.
Going forward, the “bioeconomy” must take precedence. (An outline for achieving what might be called “the next major transition” in evolution is provided in my forthcoming 2018 book Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind.) To borrow a punch-line from the great twentieth century biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “the future is not vouchsafed by any law of nature, but it may be striven for.”
Many Americans were outraged when the Wall Street banks paid out an estimated $18.4 billion in executive and staff bonuses in 2009, even while the economy was being cratered by the financial meltdown and the Great Recession.1 It seemed very unfair; the perpetrators were being rewarded while the victims were paying a terrible price.
One of the important findings of the emerging, multi-disciplinary science of human nature is that humans do, indeed, have an innate sense of fairness. We regularly display a concern for others’ interests as well as our own, and we even show a willingness to punish perceived acts of unfairness.
The United Nations now publishes an annual World Happiness Report, and it shows that the overall trend since the depths of the Great Recession, in 2008-2009, continues to improve. By the U.N.’s criteria, the world is getting happier. Likewise, the Gallup polling organization, which does an ambitious annual survey across some 140 countries of people’s subjective sense of well-being, reports that its metric is also rising.
It seems that happiness is busting out all over – like that famous lyric from the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma. True, happiness is not much in evidence in our economy, or in our shrill and rancorous politics. But never mind. An explosion of research and a bumper crop of writings about happiness can be found -- somewhat incongruously -- in various academic journals these days, as well as in the bookstalls. A dozen titles were counted in a local bookstore recently without breaking a sweat.
What do BP, Goldman Sachs, Enron, World Com, Bernie Madoff, and a long list of other “malefactors of great wealth” (to borrow a pejorative from President Theodore Roosevelt) all have in common?
It is somewhat amazing that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, is near the top of the current best-seller list. It has long enjoyed a cult following as a sort of CEO’s bible, inspiring each new generation of libertarian political conservatives. Now it seems that the gospel according to Ayn is spreading beyond the Tea Party to the parasitical “masses” that she denounces.
The Doctrine of Fairness: Where the Justices Meet Justice...For better and worse, our Supreme Court is a political institution and not, despite its trappings, a temple of Olympian detachment -- as the Roberts court has amply demonstrated. The justices play a deadly serious intellectual game in which they deploy arcane legal reasoning to justify imposing their sometimes highly partisan rulings on the rest of us.
The term “social contract” has a deep history in political theory. Today it generally refers to the implicit bargain that exists in any stable society over social rights and duties, and the division of economic benefits and costs. In the U.S., the social contract has become badly frayed over the past 30 years, as the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to Biblical proportions and an estimated one quarter of our population has sunk into more or less extreme poverty.